Well there is some stuff for sale below that is not for sale otherwise but I'm actually shortly going to transition all commerce links to This Page. Which, if it's before August 29, 2013 there's a sort of fundraising campaign going on. That I could sure use some help with. Anyway I'll fix all this mess after everything to do with that gets shook out.
Finally reorganized the shop. Check it out, anchor tags...
Graphic! Novel!
Digital Audio Data!
An Actual Shirt!
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Matthew 25:21
Is this thing going to become about the petty depredations I am subjecting myself to trying to keep the wheels on the wagon, clinging to our place among the ranks of the not yet foreclosed? I've been thinking contingencies so long I don't even know where it all really stands any more, which is a ridiculous thing to say considering the number of exhaustive spreadsheets I'm running on a regular basis. The dogs are in no wise at the door but the overhead is high and there are no reserves to speak of. So it is all speculative but at the end of the day money is money.
Well if I am so what. Who is it for besides me. It isn't read by my brother or my wife or my best friend (whoever that would be, I haven't a clue anymore, don't really have one). It isn't read by anyone, or if it is, well, you don't complain much, do you, Jack? You don't say anything.
The work, this extra work, this paperwork in the purest sense of the term, the thing is that there is enough of it it seems, for now, to fill any amount of time I should care to turn over to it, and I'm scared about the future, so I give it all that I can bear. The thing is that it leaves an awful lot of headspace open, once I get it rolling and the minimal allotment of grey matter necessary to the task has dug into its groove. I can do math in my head, calculate what the last 20 minutes of drudgery will net me and compare this truly paltry sum to, oh, any stupid thing I've wasted my money on, I won't dig to the bottom of that set any time soon.
Or I can just drift and listen to John Darnielle raise every hair on me singing Matthew 25:21 and try to figure out for the nth time - God knows how many - why he is so god damned much better than I am.
and I'm an 18-wheeler headed down the interstate - and my brakes are gonna give and I won't know till it's too late... tires screaming when I lose control - try not to hurt too many people when I roll...
He is four and a half years older than I am which doesn't really cut it at this point. I think of seeing him play at, what? Twenty four? Twenty five? How much older than me that seemed then. But I am not getting better that much faster, lately I don't feel like I am making any sort of progress at all, except perhaps in the reliability with which I slog along. Lately I find myself wondering if I am not regressing, or if the pendulum is winding down, coming to rest at some dismal steady state. On the other hand I know from experience that I can never judge what I'm going to end up liking while I'm writing it, I always think it's all awful and I always find a few gems after a few years have passed. On the other hand I've already got like five careers worth of material, it's not as if lack of material is my issue.
Well there is always writing, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
All work and no play, kids.
Well if I am so what. Who is it for besides me. It isn't read by my brother or my wife or my best friend (whoever that would be, I haven't a clue anymore, don't really have one). It isn't read by anyone, or if it is, well, you don't complain much, do you, Jack? You don't say anything.
The work, this extra work, this paperwork in the purest sense of the term, the thing is that there is enough of it it seems, for now, to fill any amount of time I should care to turn over to it, and I'm scared about the future, so I give it all that I can bear. The thing is that it leaves an awful lot of headspace open, once I get it rolling and the minimal allotment of grey matter necessary to the task has dug into its groove. I can do math in my head, calculate what the last 20 minutes of drudgery will net me and compare this truly paltry sum to, oh, any stupid thing I've wasted my money on, I won't dig to the bottom of that set any time soon.
Or I can just drift and listen to John Darnielle raise every hair on me singing Matthew 25:21 and try to figure out for the nth time - God knows how many - why he is so god damned much better than I am.
and I'm an 18-wheeler headed down the interstate - and my brakes are gonna give and I won't know till it's too late... tires screaming when I lose control - try not to hurt too many people when I roll...
He is four and a half years older than I am which doesn't really cut it at this point. I think of seeing him play at, what? Twenty four? Twenty five? How much older than me that seemed then. But I am not getting better that much faster, lately I don't feel like I am making any sort of progress at all, except perhaps in the reliability with which I slog along. Lately I find myself wondering if I am not regressing, or if the pendulum is winding down, coming to rest at some dismal steady state. On the other hand I know from experience that I can never judge what I'm going to end up liking while I'm writing it, I always think it's all awful and I always find a few gems after a few years have passed. On the other hand I've already got like five careers worth of material, it's not as if lack of material is my issue.
Well there is always writing, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
All work and no play, kids.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
pulling
Nobody is reading this, correct?
Correct?
I take extra work on the side, pulling staples out of human resources documents for $13 an hour, among other things. The "why" of this isn't relevant... suffice to say that in a particular context staples represent entropy, and I am eliminating this entropic potential.
On one hand I imagine there is a specific, significantly non-zero number of individuals in the world of now who would leap after this opportunity, as indeed I did. Hard times make this easy, from a variety of perspectives, money.
And then on the other hand there is the real of it... Fifteen minutes concentrated effort represent a kind of eternity of staples, page after page and folder after folder. The mind is already colonized by staples and the mechanics of their removal, and I look at the clock, at last, and think: three dollars, 25 cents. Not much, and the only way to make anything of it is to keep after it, and the hours add up to a whole other head space of specific but terribly similar events repeated, and repeated, and repeated.
With an iPod shuffle loaded with a curious assortment of odds and ends, mostly the product of a longish and recently terminated association with eMusic. New Orleans rap and Sufjan Stevens and what selections of compilations of chill-out music the random spits out. Backed by VHS tapes of Neon Genesis Evangelion on mute, mostly unwatched, flash of images, something to keep the eyes focused as fingers feel for elusive sneakers, hidden teeth, entropy's tiny army I am armed to fight with a set of metallic snake jaws. Not what I was looking for, I try to avoid thinking on it too much, not what I signed up for. But it is work, and it is work I'm wanting. And so it goes.
Correct?
I take extra work on the side, pulling staples out of human resources documents for $13 an hour, among other things. The "why" of this isn't relevant... suffice to say that in a particular context staples represent entropy, and I am eliminating this entropic potential.
On one hand I imagine there is a specific, significantly non-zero number of individuals in the world of now who would leap after this opportunity, as indeed I did. Hard times make this easy, from a variety of perspectives, money.
And then on the other hand there is the real of it... Fifteen minutes concentrated effort represent a kind of eternity of staples, page after page and folder after folder. The mind is already colonized by staples and the mechanics of their removal, and I look at the clock, at last, and think: three dollars, 25 cents. Not much, and the only way to make anything of it is to keep after it, and the hours add up to a whole other head space of specific but terribly similar events repeated, and repeated, and repeated.
With an iPod shuffle loaded with a curious assortment of odds and ends, mostly the product of a longish and recently terminated association with eMusic. New Orleans rap and Sufjan Stevens and what selections of compilations of chill-out music the random spits out. Backed by VHS tapes of Neon Genesis Evangelion on mute, mostly unwatched, flash of images, something to keep the eyes focused as fingers feel for elusive sneakers, hidden teeth, entropy's tiny army I am armed to fight with a set of metallic snake jaws. Not what I was looking for, I try to avoid thinking on it too much, not what I signed up for. But it is work, and it is work I'm wanting. And so it goes.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
feuilletons
We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seemed to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of "writer", but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.
Among the favourite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as "Friedrich Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870", or "The Composer Rossini's Favourite Dishes", or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans", and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as "The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries", or "Psycho-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather", and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to "service" this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, "service" was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.
In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Zigenhalss devotes a separate chapter to these. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and even drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. The reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives hundreds.
As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash of irony was mixed in with all this busy productivity; it may even have been a demonic irony, the irony of desperation - it is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.
Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. A long disquisition by Ziegenhalss on the curious subject of "Crossword Puzzles" describes the phenomenon. Thousands upon thousands of persons, the majority of whom did heavy work and led a hard life, spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phæacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles - for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defences, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.
For there was also a good deal of lecturing, and we must briefly discuss this somewhat more dignified variant of the feature article. Both specialists and intellectual privateers supplied the middle-class citizens of the age (who were still deeply attached to the notion of culture, although it had long since been robbed of its former meaning) with large numbers of lectures. Such talks were not only in the nature of festival orations for special occasions; there was a frantic trade in them, and they were given in almost incomprehensible quantities. In those days the citizen of a medium-sized town or his wife could at least once a week (in big cities pretty much every night) attend lectures offering theoretical instruction on some subject or other: on works of art, poets, scholars, researchers, world tours. The members of the audience at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was present. There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassbourg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords. People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning.
Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel 1943
It has been an embarrassingly long time since I read "real" literature (I will punt on providing a definition of such or what qualifies it's level of reality, I, ah, know it when I read it). The kind of book where it is a virtual guarantee that for every ten pages I read I will have to go back and reread at least three. The Glass Bead Game is reminding me why this is something I once voluntarily did for pleasure. Lately I have been feeling like my brain has been suffering from neglect. Getting softer. Time to get back into the jungle. Start talking about religion next.
Among the favourite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as "Friedrich Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870", or "The Composer Rossini's Favourite Dishes", or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans", and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as "The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries", or "Psycho-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather", and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to "service" this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, "service" was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.
In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Zigenhalss devotes a separate chapter to these. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and even drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. The reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives hundreds.
As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash of irony was mixed in with all this busy productivity; it may even have been a demonic irony, the irony of desperation - it is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.
Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. A long disquisition by Ziegenhalss on the curious subject of "Crossword Puzzles" describes the phenomenon. Thousands upon thousands of persons, the majority of whom did heavy work and led a hard life, spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phæacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles - for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defences, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.
For there was also a good deal of lecturing, and we must briefly discuss this somewhat more dignified variant of the feature article. Both specialists and intellectual privateers supplied the middle-class citizens of the age (who were still deeply attached to the notion of culture, although it had long since been robbed of its former meaning) with large numbers of lectures. Such talks were not only in the nature of festival orations for special occasions; there was a frantic trade in them, and they were given in almost incomprehensible quantities. In those days the citizen of a medium-sized town or his wife could at least once a week (in big cities pretty much every night) attend lectures offering theoretical instruction on some subject or other: on works of art, poets, scholars, researchers, world tours. The members of the audience at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was present. There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassbourg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords. People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning.
Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel 1943
It has been an embarrassingly long time since I read "real" literature (I will punt on providing a definition of such or what qualifies it's level of reality, I, ah, know it when I read it). The kind of book where it is a virtual guarantee that for every ten pages I read I will have to go back and reread at least three. The Glass Bead Game is reminding me why this is something I once voluntarily did for pleasure. Lately I have been feeling like my brain has been suffering from neglect. Getting softer. Time to get back into the jungle. Start talking about religion next.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Hasen
Another walk in the park, another year: my companion is smaller, and considerably less mobile and articulate. Up the hill where the railroad tracks run we encounter a rabbit, a normal occurrence, except that this rabbit is dying. As we walk past its hiding place it explodes out of the underbrush with the usual headlong pelt, but its running is a horrible, listing, splay-limbed parody of a healthy rabbit’s gallop. A dozen feet from us it loses it completely and wipes out in a rolling tangle, back feet still pumping uselessly, a jerky scrawl that suggests profound neurological decay.
Rabies? I hoist Jonah up on my shoulders, a frequent instinctive response to things that alarm me on his behalf, and go to squat down and take a closer look.
Whatever afflicts it, this creature will not be posing a threat to anything. I don’t know what last burst of organized energy impelled its flight from us, because it seems all but paralyzed now, nothing but palsied tremors. It is prone, its body half twisted. An eye rolls up, apparently regarding me. My instinct is to kill it, put it out of its misery, but I can’t make the logistics work, with Jonah along, and admittedly I don’t really want to. I’ve never killed a rabbit, least of all with my bare hands, although I am acquainted with the theory. I killed a mouse once, at a greenhouse where I worked. Its pelvis had been crushed in a spring trap and the inclination of my more squeamish coworkers who had found it was to get it out of earshot and forget about it. No one objected to me taking responsibility for its final disposition. It is a terrible thing how the smallest of beings will fight for life, when there is no hope at all.
But there’s no fight in this thing and for all I know it will be most merciful to simply allow it solitude and peace. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize these situations. It’s a moot point, anyway. I straighten up, adjust Jonah on my shoulders. And walk away, leaving the rabbit there, to die.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 20, 2008 11:47 AM... and here I will end the not quite complete reposting of the erstwhile Spirit of Salt blog. Pax vobiscum, babies
Rabies? I hoist Jonah up on my shoulders, a frequent instinctive response to things that alarm me on his behalf, and go to squat down and take a closer look.
Whatever afflicts it, this creature will not be posing a threat to anything. I don’t know what last burst of organized energy impelled its flight from us, because it seems all but paralyzed now, nothing but palsied tremors. It is prone, its body half twisted. An eye rolls up, apparently regarding me. My instinct is to kill it, put it out of its misery, but I can’t make the logistics work, with Jonah along, and admittedly I don’t really want to. I’ve never killed a rabbit, least of all with my bare hands, although I am acquainted with the theory. I killed a mouse once, at a greenhouse where I worked. Its pelvis had been crushed in a spring trap and the inclination of my more squeamish coworkers who had found it was to get it out of earshot and forget about it. No one objected to me taking responsibility for its final disposition. It is a terrible thing how the smallest of beings will fight for life, when there is no hope at all.
But there’s no fight in this thing and for all I know it will be most merciful to simply allow it solitude and peace. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize these situations. It’s a moot point, anyway. I straighten up, adjust Jonah on my shoulders. And walk away, leaving the rabbit there, to die.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 20, 2008 11:47 AM... and here I will end the not quite complete reposting of the erstwhile Spirit of Salt blog. Pax vobiscum, babies
end history
I will post one more from the archives of the Spirit of Salt blog, I think... I was going to put the whole archive on, but the essays seem progressively less relevant or interesting to me as they process into the further past. Or maybe I'm just sick of it or maybe those mean more or less the same thing. Having erected this site purely to host "the store" it seems to be exerting some inexplicable force on me to fill it with text, but that impulse is on the wane at least for the moment. If I'm feeling compelled to dump some by the by textualizing in public that does not fit over at Freelala I guess I'll leave it here. Hopefully I have now developed sufficient resources online to contain my wretched addiction to generating strings of written verbiage. Though I tell you, the way I feel right now, it may all (aside from the fairly secret songblog) mire in stasis in whatever state I leave it in today for a good long while. But of course I've felt done with it all many's the time past. I mean, why write this? Who gives a fuck? And yet here I am. Enough, anyway, for now.
With a gun
What I first take to be a squirt gun turns out to be a relatively complicated spring-action pistol of the type that fires those 6mm plastic pellets which frequently irritate me due to their ubiquity as outdoor litter.
A combination of multiple, overlapping head colds with unseasonably rotten weather (as much as rotten weather is ever unseasonable in Minnesota) has kept us out of the park for a long time. I spot the pistol, lying in the grass by the parking lot, while my three year old companion digs in the giant municipal woodchip piles with his little shovels and buckets, pretending to be some kind of construction equipment. The legally required blaze orange tip on the barrel reveals it as a toy, but it’s only when I pick it up I realize by the weight and mechanical detail that it is not merely a cheap molded plastic toy. Other than the tip it is remarkably realistic.
My intention is to grab and bin it to avoid my son seeing it, but I lose track of that for a moment while I examine its unexpected nature - long enough for him to take note.
“What is that, Daddy? Is it a train?”
I think I had an inkling, at least theoretically, of how precious the innocence of childhood was before I became a parent, but I didn’t guess how frequently sad it could be. Guns don’t yet exist in his world. The thing I’m holding is fascinating, and mechanical, so his first guess is the most fascinating, mechanical thing he knows.
“It’s not a train,” I say, stuffing it into my jacket pocket. “It’s nothing we want to play with.”
Like so many things, I know I’m standing on a line I’ll never hold. I played with gun toys as a child and I expect my son to in time. But then again, as I so often do, I tell myself, yes, yes… But he’s only three. And I want to hold on to his gun-free world, however unreal, for a while longer.
At home I look on the internet and determine it is a replica of a 9mm pistol manufactured by a company named Taurus. The fully deadly version costs around $500-700, depending on how you purchase it: new, the replica is worth $30 or 40.
Something held me back from chucking it in the trash. Native frugality, perhaps, the thing obviously has some value. Or perhaps a lingering remnant of my own days of playing with guns: at home I play with it a little, examining the drop-out magazine, testing the action, dry firing the spring catch. I’ve got no use for the thing, though. Maybe I’ll try selling it on eBay.*
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM
*It took almost three years but I did finally unload it on eBay for a pittance. Toy guns of course now occupy a firm position in the child's happy fantasy world.
A combination of multiple, overlapping head colds with unseasonably rotten weather (as much as rotten weather is ever unseasonable in Minnesota) has kept us out of the park for a long time. I spot the pistol, lying in the grass by the parking lot, while my three year old companion digs in the giant municipal woodchip piles with his little shovels and buckets, pretending to be some kind of construction equipment. The legally required blaze orange tip on the barrel reveals it as a toy, but it’s only when I pick it up I realize by the weight and mechanical detail that it is not merely a cheap molded plastic toy. Other than the tip it is remarkably realistic.
My intention is to grab and bin it to avoid my son seeing it, but I lose track of that for a moment while I examine its unexpected nature - long enough for him to take note.
“What is that, Daddy? Is it a train?”
I think I had an inkling, at least theoretically, of how precious the innocence of childhood was before I became a parent, but I didn’t guess how frequently sad it could be. Guns don’t yet exist in his world. The thing I’m holding is fascinating, and mechanical, so his first guess is the most fascinating, mechanical thing he knows.
“It’s not a train,” I say, stuffing it into my jacket pocket. “It’s nothing we want to play with.”
Like so many things, I know I’m standing on a line I’ll never hold. I played with gun toys as a child and I expect my son to in time. But then again, as I so often do, I tell myself, yes, yes… But he’s only three. And I want to hold on to his gun-free world, however unreal, for a while longer.
At home I look on the internet and determine it is a replica of a 9mm pistol manufactured by a company named Taurus. The fully deadly version costs around $500-700, depending on how you purchase it: new, the replica is worth $30 or 40.
Something held me back from chucking it in the trash. Native frugality, perhaps, the thing obviously has some value. Or perhaps a lingering remnant of my own days of playing with guns: at home I play with it a little, examining the drop-out magazine, testing the action, dry firing the spring catch. I’ve got no use for the thing, though. Maybe I’ll try selling it on eBay.*
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM
*It took almost three years but I did finally unload it on eBay for a pittance. Toy guns of course now occupy a firm position in the child's happy fantasy world.
Sentiment
Heaven-and-Earth is not sentimental;
It treats all things as straw-dogs.
The sage is not sentimental;
He treats all his people as straw-dogs.
Between Heaven and Earth,
There seems to be a Bellows:
It is empty, and yet is is inexhaustible;
The more it works, the more comes out of it.
No amount of words can fathom it:
Better look for it within you.
Tao Teh Ching (J.C.H. Wu Translation)
I go to sleep in the daytime, muddle my mind with a fast procession of confused dreams. In the last of these I am doing something in the garage when I see a light out the side window. I go out and see a man I don’t recognize shining a flashlight through the window from over the chain fence between our lot and the neighbors’. I walk over to him through the snow on the hillside, asking if he is who I think he is. He smiles strangely but doesn’t say anything. I reach out and grasp his lapel lightly, asking who he is, what he is doing. But as soon as I touch him my vision is gone, and his jacket is like snow sifting through my fingers. I hear his breath, slightly labored, hissing in and out. But it is not his breath, it is mine, and my eyes fly open, awake all at once.
I don’t expect this to go anywhere or make that much sense. I’ve considered before that I may be semi-intentionally hobbling myself with low expectations. But I don’t know. I let the regular impulses to stray into my thoughts on things metaphysical go unanswered a long time. And this is the reason: I know I don’t have the time to organize any of it to a coherent system. Even if I did I’m not at all sure I have the aptitude or the inclination to do so in any manner of lasting value.
But where was I. The spirit. The breath. It’s an interesting metaphor, breath, the little wind that inhabits us. And when it’s gone, we’re gone. Only the shell left behind, uninhabited. That’s a common enough sentiment but there’s actually a lot of metaphysical assumption in it.
I’ll tell you how I got started thinking about the idea of the spiritual. I was rereading Bertrand Russell’s seminal atheist essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” again recently. As a Christian I obviously disagree with Russell’s conclusion and many of his premises. But it is a good essay, and an important one, and I feel like anyone who accepts the name Christian would do well to explore it and come to some conclusions regarding how they feel about what it says. Perhaps I’ll get into my reactions to it some day, but in any event, I was particularly thinking about one of Russell’s assertions. He writes:
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
I think I agree with this sentiment to some degree. I don’t think many people come to religious beliefs or faith by way of exploring the logical mechanics of it (though such explorations are a significant part of the process for some). I think people whose convictions are more than simply ingrained and unexamined indoctrination adopt religious beliefs because of experiences that I would characterize as spiritual.
And that’s where the question occurred to my mind: in the conception of materialism, do spiritual and emotional mean the same thing? Does the concept of the spiritual have any significance outside of a supernatural interpretation?
I have issues with the idea of the supernatural. It is a tricky, muddy concept. In one sense it seems intrinsically oxymoronic. If you are considering the totality of existence, is there anything that is not natural? But I’m not sure that isn’t just a rhetorical dodge. Certainly in the everyday context I recognize an everyday definition of the natural, and I do not seek (and in fact repudiate) “supernatural” explanations of things: psychic surgery, mediums, commonplace superstitions.
So I could be accused of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in defending the integrity of my “spiritual” convictions. I consider their basis to be different, but I can’t offer any proof of the difference: I recognize this as a matter of my personal, subjective experience. The opponents of faith sometimes call this sort of basis for belief an “argument from religious experience” and reject it on the basis that experiences are not facts, which I agree with - but of course, I am not really trying to make an argument. I’m just trying to understand, and perhaps find some common language that does a better job of explaining than conflating the merely emotional with the spiritual.
The temporary conclusion I came to, considering all this, was that I could accept Russell’s description of my state of faith or belief as an “emotional” one, at least for the sake of discussion, and that I would be prepared to justify participation in religion on that basis alone, at least until I make more progress on working out some thoughts about what exactly I think it is that characterizes the spiritual in language, something that I have been chewing on off an on.
So maybe I’ll talk about that later, possibly I will branch into a sort of essay I’ve been rolling around with the incredibly provocative title “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” Or maybe I will talk about my cats, since every time I wander into this sort of territory I feel completely out of my depth after about 3 sentences.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 4, 2009 at 10:05 PM
It treats all things as straw-dogs.
The sage is not sentimental;
He treats all his people as straw-dogs.
Between Heaven and Earth,
There seems to be a Bellows:
It is empty, and yet is is inexhaustible;
The more it works, the more comes out of it.
No amount of words can fathom it:
Better look for it within you.
Tao Teh Ching (J.C.H. Wu Translation)
I go to sleep in the daytime, muddle my mind with a fast procession of confused dreams. In the last of these I am doing something in the garage when I see a light out the side window. I go out and see a man I don’t recognize shining a flashlight through the window from over the chain fence between our lot and the neighbors’. I walk over to him through the snow on the hillside, asking if he is who I think he is. He smiles strangely but doesn’t say anything. I reach out and grasp his lapel lightly, asking who he is, what he is doing. But as soon as I touch him my vision is gone, and his jacket is like snow sifting through my fingers. I hear his breath, slightly labored, hissing in and out. But it is not his breath, it is mine, and my eyes fly open, awake all at once.
I don’t expect this to go anywhere or make that much sense. I’ve considered before that I may be semi-intentionally hobbling myself with low expectations. But I don’t know. I let the regular impulses to stray into my thoughts on things metaphysical go unanswered a long time. And this is the reason: I know I don’t have the time to organize any of it to a coherent system. Even if I did I’m not at all sure I have the aptitude or the inclination to do so in any manner of lasting value.
But where was I. The spirit. The breath. It’s an interesting metaphor, breath, the little wind that inhabits us. And when it’s gone, we’re gone. Only the shell left behind, uninhabited. That’s a common enough sentiment but there’s actually a lot of metaphysical assumption in it.
I’ll tell you how I got started thinking about the idea of the spiritual. I was rereading Bertrand Russell’s seminal atheist essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” again recently. As a Christian I obviously disagree with Russell’s conclusion and many of his premises. But it is a good essay, and an important one, and I feel like anyone who accepts the name Christian would do well to explore it and come to some conclusions regarding how they feel about what it says. Perhaps I’ll get into my reactions to it some day, but in any event, I was particularly thinking about one of Russell’s assertions. He writes:
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
I think I agree with this sentiment to some degree. I don’t think many people come to religious beliefs or faith by way of exploring the logical mechanics of it (though such explorations are a significant part of the process for some). I think people whose convictions are more than simply ingrained and unexamined indoctrination adopt religious beliefs because of experiences that I would characterize as spiritual.
And that’s where the question occurred to my mind: in the conception of materialism, do spiritual and emotional mean the same thing? Does the concept of the spiritual have any significance outside of a supernatural interpretation?
I have issues with the idea of the supernatural. It is a tricky, muddy concept. In one sense it seems intrinsically oxymoronic. If you are considering the totality of existence, is there anything that is not natural? But I’m not sure that isn’t just a rhetorical dodge. Certainly in the everyday context I recognize an everyday definition of the natural, and I do not seek (and in fact repudiate) “supernatural” explanations of things: psychic surgery, mediums, commonplace superstitions.
So I could be accused of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in defending the integrity of my “spiritual” convictions. I consider their basis to be different, but I can’t offer any proof of the difference: I recognize this as a matter of my personal, subjective experience. The opponents of faith sometimes call this sort of basis for belief an “argument from religious experience” and reject it on the basis that experiences are not facts, which I agree with - but of course, I am not really trying to make an argument. I’m just trying to understand, and perhaps find some common language that does a better job of explaining than conflating the merely emotional with the spiritual.
The temporary conclusion I came to, considering all this, was that I could accept Russell’s description of my state of faith or belief as an “emotional” one, at least for the sake of discussion, and that I would be prepared to justify participation in religion on that basis alone, at least until I make more progress on working out some thoughts about what exactly I think it is that characterizes the spiritual in language, something that I have been chewing on off an on.
So maybe I’ll talk about that later, possibly I will branch into a sort of essay I’ve been rolling around with the incredibly provocative title “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” Or maybe I will talk about my cats, since every time I wander into this sort of territory I feel completely out of my depth after about 3 sentences.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 4, 2009 at 10:05 PM
Monday, February 7, 2011
stop kidding myself, wasting my time
A depression in three parts.
I.
A comment on the last one sent me off on the research spiral, thirty, fifty, a hundred minutes seep into the background radiation as I let nested references do as they will in the age of the hyperlink. Let my brain steep in it, without really getting to any depth. And to think, people used to have to keep track of all this by keeping notes and stuff! In the final analysis it kind of bums me out: I was never, truth be told, a particularly gifted academic, and the internet has, if anything, further softened my discipline. It’s way too easy to fake it. In college I was prone to surprising flashes of synthetic intuition and a sort of intensely voluble verbal acumen that tended to get superlatives attached to my intellect. What I remember is a comment a professor who wrote tests too difficult to be graded by a teaching assistant left on one of my Physical Chemistry tests: “you got the hard ones but gave back points on the easy ones.”
The primary conclusion my meandering aside of research left me with was that I should probably stop messing around and try to slog through Arthur Koestler again (the two books I attempted and failed in my teens, The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine, seeming apropos). The internet, doing it’s thing again, also lets me know without my having asked that Koestler was likely a violent, misogynistic serial rapist, so I set out to write a little maudlin, fragmentary memoir instead. Res ipsa loquitur. All that from half a paragraph of John Crowley!
II.
I probably would never have come across Crowley on my own, tending towards the scientific than the fantastic end of the speculative spectrum (not that it’s fair to consign Crowley to such a genre restriction, or that such dichotomies are really meaningful, still, they put a little sticker on the spine, and it’s either a spaceship or a unicorn, you know, and since high school at least I mainly stuck with the spaceships). A girl introduced me to him, a woman I should say, and (somewhat alarmingly) I find I can’t recall with certainty which of two particular women it was. In my defense both of them gave me a certain amount of trouble within a pretty narrow time frame, but still. The list of women who have given me trouble is not a long one, and these two were not really alike at all. I try to imagine the remembered conversation about the book in question, Little, Big - either of their faces seem perfectly natural attached to it. Not that any of this is either here or there.
Little, Big is the sort of book that strikes a discomfiting chord in me, full of muscular philosophical forays wrapped in a lot of intricately woven prose, alternately lyrical and mundane and enigmatic. It had the contradictory effect that I ended not wholly satisfied with the product (or perhaps my success at reading it) and yet wanting or wishing to create something like it, not to do it better, maybe just to be able to understand it, for once. I can scent all the connections teeming under the surface, that world I dream about but never really see. But I don’t quite make it. I recall having this impulse at least once before, reading Mark Helprin’s (who actually seems like kind of a dick, thanks again, internet) Winter’s Tale. Which inspired me, as I recall, to write a poor short story, though I couldn’t provide any details since I sent that to the fire, along with very many personal things, in a particular mood, over a series of days, in the summer of 1994.
Despite being Crowley’s most popular book, Little, Big is only intermittently in print, and Crowley relates glumly in a recent entry on his weblog that his “books don’t sell very well.” Ain’t that just the way.
III.
I pose myself this hypothetical: if you could choose only one, would you create the important work of art that deeply affected people’s lives, but which failed commercially, or would you produce something superficial, but which would in its success give you financial freedom?
In the darkness of my heart I suspect I would opt for the latter. I sometimes question (heresy of heresies) the true value of great works of art. Despite the fact that I am deeply drawn to them, but so what? What good do they really do? Everyday crap at least relieves the unrelenting monotony of the teeming masses. I’ve been thinking about it lately while listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. We finally moved the stereo out of the basement the other day which triggered an interest in the boy to actually play music on the thing, as opposed to just playing with it and making Daddy nervous. He particularly likes the old 8-Track that a dead-technology-loving friend gave me as a gift a few years back: the tapes are big and easy to handle, Daddy doesn’t get uptight about him handling them the way he does with the CDs; it makes noises like CHUNK and CLACK while it’s working. He started playing Glass Houses, which I probably had not listened to in something approaching 20 years, but when we were kids brother, sister and I had it on LP and we played that thing to death. As soon as it started I realized I still basically knew it note for note, pretty much all the words.
We’d all like to think we’d opt for the higher choice, that we would take the principled stand if we had the misfortune to land in Dr. Milgram’s experimental box, that we would refuse to press the button when the screaming started, no matter how the men in white coats told us we had no choice in the realm where white coats ruled the day. But the statistics don’t lie and the statistics aren’t encouraging. I guess in that context making an inoffensive pop album is a minor crime. Of course the hypothetical question of great art versus commercial success is moot: I’m quite sure I lack the capacity to do either.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 7, 2009 at 1:26 AM
I.
A comment on the last one sent me off on the research spiral, thirty, fifty, a hundred minutes seep into the background radiation as I let nested references do as they will in the age of the hyperlink. Let my brain steep in it, without really getting to any depth. And to think, people used to have to keep track of all this by keeping notes and stuff! In the final analysis it kind of bums me out: I was never, truth be told, a particularly gifted academic, and the internet has, if anything, further softened my discipline. It’s way too easy to fake it. In college I was prone to surprising flashes of synthetic intuition and a sort of intensely voluble verbal acumen that tended to get superlatives attached to my intellect. What I remember is a comment a professor who wrote tests too difficult to be graded by a teaching assistant left on one of my Physical Chemistry tests: “you got the hard ones but gave back points on the easy ones.”
The primary conclusion my meandering aside of research left me with was that I should probably stop messing around and try to slog through Arthur Koestler again (the two books I attempted and failed in my teens, The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine, seeming apropos). The internet, doing it’s thing again, also lets me know without my having asked that Koestler was likely a violent, misogynistic serial rapist, so I set out to write a little maudlin, fragmentary memoir instead. Res ipsa loquitur. All that from half a paragraph of John Crowley!
II.
I probably would never have come across Crowley on my own, tending towards the scientific than the fantastic end of the speculative spectrum (not that it’s fair to consign Crowley to such a genre restriction, or that such dichotomies are really meaningful, still, they put a little sticker on the spine, and it’s either a spaceship or a unicorn, you know, and since high school at least I mainly stuck with the spaceships). A girl introduced me to him, a woman I should say, and (somewhat alarmingly) I find I can’t recall with certainty which of two particular women it was. In my defense both of them gave me a certain amount of trouble within a pretty narrow time frame, but still. The list of women who have given me trouble is not a long one, and these two were not really alike at all. I try to imagine the remembered conversation about the book in question, Little, Big - either of their faces seem perfectly natural attached to it. Not that any of this is either here or there.
Little, Big is the sort of book that strikes a discomfiting chord in me, full of muscular philosophical forays wrapped in a lot of intricately woven prose, alternately lyrical and mundane and enigmatic. It had the contradictory effect that I ended not wholly satisfied with the product (or perhaps my success at reading it) and yet wanting or wishing to create something like it, not to do it better, maybe just to be able to understand it, for once. I can scent all the connections teeming under the surface, that world I dream about but never really see. But I don’t quite make it. I recall having this impulse at least once before, reading Mark Helprin’s (who actually seems like kind of a dick, thanks again, internet) Winter’s Tale. Which inspired me, as I recall, to write a poor short story, though I couldn’t provide any details since I sent that to the fire, along with very many personal things, in a particular mood, over a series of days, in the summer of 1994.
Despite being Crowley’s most popular book, Little, Big is only intermittently in print, and Crowley relates glumly in a recent entry on his weblog that his “books don’t sell very well.” Ain’t that just the way.
III.
I pose myself this hypothetical: if you could choose only one, would you create the important work of art that deeply affected people’s lives, but which failed commercially, or would you produce something superficial, but which would in its success give you financial freedom?
In the darkness of my heart I suspect I would opt for the latter. I sometimes question (heresy of heresies) the true value of great works of art. Despite the fact that I am deeply drawn to them, but so what? What good do they really do? Everyday crap at least relieves the unrelenting monotony of the teeming masses. I’ve been thinking about it lately while listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. We finally moved the stereo out of the basement the other day which triggered an interest in the boy to actually play music on the thing, as opposed to just playing with it and making Daddy nervous. He particularly likes the old 8-Track that a dead-technology-loving friend gave me as a gift a few years back: the tapes are big and easy to handle, Daddy doesn’t get uptight about him handling them the way he does with the CDs; it makes noises like CHUNK and CLACK while it’s working. He started playing Glass Houses, which I probably had not listened to in something approaching 20 years, but when we were kids brother, sister and I had it on LP and we played that thing to death. As soon as it started I realized I still basically knew it note for note, pretty much all the words.
We’d all like to think we’d opt for the higher choice, that we would take the principled stand if we had the misfortune to land in Dr. Milgram’s experimental box, that we would refuse to press the button when the screaming started, no matter how the men in white coats told us we had no choice in the realm where white coats ruled the day. But the statistics don’t lie and the statistics aren’t encouraging. I guess in that context making an inoffensive pop album is a minor crime. Of course the hypothetical question of great art versus commercial success is moot: I’m quite sure I lack the capacity to do either.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 7, 2009 at 1:26 AM
Is there such a thing as an Atheist?
I decided to soften the title down from my original concept, “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” It’s not my intention to be polemical, or I should perhaps say it is my intention to not be polemical.
When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8, I said “perhaps” and one of my classmates asked me what that meant. I said “maybe.”
Anyway.
Here is the essay then: it depends on what you mean by God.
This is actually going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 8, 2009 1:01 AM
When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8, I said “perhaps” and one of my classmates asked me what that meant. I said “maybe.”
Anyway.
Here is the essay then: it depends on what you mean by God.
This is actually going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 8, 2009 1:01 AM
forking paths
Shortly after I start crying on my keyboard over Oscar Grant, to my great surprise, I decide that I will in fact have one small whiskey. I’ve had no taste for the poison since New Year’s Eve. The project leaves me with some time to kill and so here I am.
I don’t cry very often and I’m bad at it. In fact I went six or seven years at one point without crying once, although it was pretty clear that this was a condition of pathology. Some time not too long after that particular dam broke I got some help, as they say, and these days I cry over normal and even mundane things like the death of a favorite cat. But it also pops up in strange, unexpected contexts from time to time, always associated with a reaction of empathy rather than sadness over my own life. Which latter thing definitely exists, but makes me depressed rather than weepy. Since I became a father I am particularly unable to tolerate the suffering of children, and in fact it was thinking about Oscar Grant’s four year old daughter that set me off. I wrote, somewhere out there in one of the online text-holes I haunt:
Oh I am tired of this place.
Earlier I was fighting ideations, not bad ones, exactly, but unwanted. Daydreams, I suppose, except it’s hard to call this daytime, but what do you call it when you are dreaming at night but not asleep? In any event I got sick of watching my brain spin out yarns, scenarios with no touchstone in reality, and lashed out at them with a little directed visualization, a technique I picked up from a somewhat lurid sci-fi novel by Philip José Farmer, which nevertheless works sometimes. Nothing like a placebo to cure something that’s all in your head. I project my mind’s eyes into my hands and fling them, double fisted, into coruscating fragments; let them glitter and disperse. Because I have not been so diligent about being compassionate towards myself a certain self-reproach lingers even while the thoughts themselves recede. So easily bored, so starved for novelty, I castigate my mind. Weak, indolent. Deprive you of a couple meals and you’d stop all the restless questing past the mundane quick enough, wouldn’t you?
No sense to that either, good money after bad. What it gets me started on again is wondering, what in the world is this I and what does it think it is dressing down? The can and a half of dog food in the bone box? Some Freudian construct, the ever popular id perhaps, or maybe an Archetype? Are any of the other questions about the set-up down here even meaningful with that one hanging out there, coiled in the nest of its own constructs?
It’s relevant, it’s still going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 9, 2009 at 1:31 AM
I don’t cry very often and I’m bad at it. In fact I went six or seven years at one point without crying once, although it was pretty clear that this was a condition of pathology. Some time not too long after that particular dam broke I got some help, as they say, and these days I cry over normal and even mundane things like the death of a favorite cat. But it also pops up in strange, unexpected contexts from time to time, always associated with a reaction of empathy rather than sadness over my own life. Which latter thing definitely exists, but makes me depressed rather than weepy. Since I became a father I am particularly unable to tolerate the suffering of children, and in fact it was thinking about Oscar Grant’s four year old daughter that set me off. I wrote, somewhere out there in one of the online text-holes I haunt:
Oh I am tired of this place.
Earlier I was fighting ideations, not bad ones, exactly, but unwanted. Daydreams, I suppose, except it’s hard to call this daytime, but what do you call it when you are dreaming at night but not asleep? In any event I got sick of watching my brain spin out yarns, scenarios with no touchstone in reality, and lashed out at them with a little directed visualization, a technique I picked up from a somewhat lurid sci-fi novel by Philip José Farmer, which nevertheless works sometimes. Nothing like a placebo to cure something that’s all in your head. I project my mind’s eyes into my hands and fling them, double fisted, into coruscating fragments; let them glitter and disperse. Because I have not been so diligent about being compassionate towards myself a certain self-reproach lingers even while the thoughts themselves recede. So easily bored, so starved for novelty, I castigate my mind. Weak, indolent. Deprive you of a couple meals and you’d stop all the restless questing past the mundane quick enough, wouldn’t you?
No sense to that either, good money after bad. What it gets me started on again is wondering, what in the world is this I and what does it think it is dressing down? The can and a half of dog food in the bone box? Some Freudian construct, the ever popular id perhaps, or maybe an Archetype? Are any of the other questions about the set-up down here even meaningful with that one hanging out there, coiled in the nest of its own constructs?
It’s relevant, it’s still going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 9, 2009 at 1:31 AM
Have You Ever Been In Communicado
My computer is acting “funny” which isn’t very shocking since it is over seven years old - a veritable antique. I have been cheating the grim gods of obsolescence a couple years now, but I think my time might be at hand. If so my communications via computer may be very sketchy for a period of time - including email, blogging, and the various networks and social time sinks. You can leave a comment or send me an email about what you think about this but, you know, there’s a pretty good chance I won’t see it. Listen to a little light music while enjoying a brief vacation from my output. I can’t work without a computer so it won’t last long.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 11, 2009 at 2:40 AM
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 11, 2009 at 2:40 AM
Threading a needle with a needle
I probably use the word rhetoric wrong, at least when I am railing against it, and then again it is one of those words that I waver between thinking I’m secretly dumb or at least unsophisticated because I don’t really understand what it means or else that it actually doesn’t mean anything very clear, even more so than other words. Metaphysical and postmodern are other examples. Pop Quiz! If you are a strict naturalist are the words metaphysical and supernatural equivalent?
What I find objectionable is the preponderance of what I might characterize as “adversarial discourse” out there in the so-called public dialog. Specifically, discussion whose sole intent seems to be to attack a point of view and replace it with a supposedly superior one. Virtually all political punditry, a great deal of proselytizing religious and anti-religious discussion, far too much of all public writing and talking in general are of this character. It is an objection I feel pretty strongly but whenever I try to work out an alternative things quickly get very, very muddy: am I engaging in exactly what I’m protesting? You’re doing it wrong, you should do it like this instead. Or am I advocating a stance that disallows your being against anything? And can you really be for anything without being implicitly against whatever it is opposed to?
-=-
Is it merely a semantic point to ask whether there is such a thing as an atheist? If you take the term God as a mere abstraction meaning something like that which is the highest order above all other things, is the God of the strict naturalist physics? I’m not really charting new territory there, name-brand atheists like Dawkins tend to set out ground rules exempting these sorts of abstract conceptions of God from their philosophies. What’s my point, then?
-=-
My point is something hazy, and indistinct, that I circle and circle like a bird of appetite, and if that is the case am I destined to miss it, is it simply not my kind of prey? Should I return instead to the role of the adversary, stake out the errant and set forth to correct them? I can’t shake the conviction that the topic I am so muddling nevertheless has a path to it somewhere through intelligible exposition (as opposed to, say, koans, or whatever this fumble I just coughed up is…)
It is a clumsy bridge, but I still think it is going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 19, 2009 at 12:33 AM
What I find objectionable is the preponderance of what I might characterize as “adversarial discourse” out there in the so-called public dialog. Specifically, discussion whose sole intent seems to be to attack a point of view and replace it with a supposedly superior one. Virtually all political punditry, a great deal of proselytizing religious and anti-religious discussion, far too much of all public writing and talking in general are of this character. It is an objection I feel pretty strongly but whenever I try to work out an alternative things quickly get very, very muddy: am I engaging in exactly what I’m protesting? You’re doing it wrong, you should do it like this instead. Or am I advocating a stance that disallows your being against anything? And can you really be for anything without being implicitly against whatever it is opposed to?
-=-
Is it merely a semantic point to ask whether there is such a thing as an atheist? If you take the term God as a mere abstraction meaning something like that which is the highest order above all other things, is the God of the strict naturalist physics? I’m not really charting new territory there, name-brand atheists like Dawkins tend to set out ground rules exempting these sorts of abstract conceptions of God from their philosophies. What’s my point, then?
-=-
My point is something hazy, and indistinct, that I circle and circle like a bird of appetite, and if that is the case am I destined to miss it, is it simply not my kind of prey? Should I return instead to the role of the adversary, stake out the errant and set forth to correct them? I can’t shake the conviction that the topic I am so muddling nevertheless has a path to it somewhere through intelligible exposition (as opposed to, say, koans, or whatever this fumble I just coughed up is…)
It is a clumsy bridge, but I still think it is going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 19, 2009 at 12:33 AM
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Like a dumb man who has had a dream
Joshu’s Dog
A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: `Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?’ Joshu answered: `Mu.’ [Mu is the negative symbol in Chinese, meaning `No-thing’ or `Nay’]
Mumon’s comments: To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriarchs. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the patriarchs or if your thinking road is not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a patriarch? This one word, Mu, is it.
This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it you will see Joshu face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of patriarchs. Is this not a pleasant thing to do?
If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through every pore in your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night. Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence. If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.
Then your previous lesser knowledge disappears. As a fruit ripening in season, your subjectivity and objectivity naturally become one. It is like a dumb man who has had a dream. He knows about it but cannot tell it.
-=-
I. The Voice
My child irritates me beyond endurance while we are out and about, as his resistance to doing what I wish him to do becomes more frequent and obstinate on a schedule that would probably plot nicely on a graph, until I am pulling out the big guns in the car, like being put straight to bed when we get home, culminating in a protest, delivered from his booster seat in an angry imperious whine, that he just wants to have everything his own way.
The irony of course is that this is a phrase he unquestionably learned from me in a purely negative presentation: he has identified the condition but rejected my thesis on its impossibility. And without consideration or intent (in the worst possible state to conduct parenting, in other words) I am delivering a lecture to this four year old. I have slapped the stereo into silence and left the car in Park and I am holding forth, my voice descending almost immediately into a tone a long-ago ex-girlfriend used to call “The Voice,” half an octave lower than my conversational tone, dry and hectoring and professorial and vibrating with poorly suppressed anger. The topic of today’s lecture is the importance of learning, in this life, that you can’t always have things the way you want them to be, as exquisitely demonstrated by Daddy’s own life, illustrated with numerous, vivid examples. I wield this lash as the pressure mounts in my skull, until my child is cowed and dejected, responding in monosyllable, agreeing glumly to whatever rhetorical question I put to him. And I master myself, and force some sunshine that I do not feel at all into my voice, to indicate that this unfortunate lapse of several minutes is over, and we are going to move past it, start over, try again.
II. Permanent Vacation
I get hung up on weird ideas sometimes. After reading an absurd, pot-boiling political thriller (in which I discover a seemingly original plot I had independently conceived half a dozen years after the book in question was published had long ago become the basis of an international bestseller, not to mention a massive videogame franchise), I find myself dwelling unprofitably on the fictional cliché of a suitcase full of cash. You know what would solve a lot of my problems? I ask myself. A suitcase full of cash.
It is an image that acquires a particular bitter barb as I read about vast amounts of physical American currency (representing Iraqi funds from various sources) - primarily $100 bills - flown into Iraq to grease the wheels of regime change - large volumes of which vanished untraceably in a vacuum of accountability, oversight or control. It is stupid - and greedy, and fundamentally contrary to my supposed Christian faith - but I find myself in odd moments dwelling on that lost Iraqi cash. A stack of one hundred bills, a little under half an inch tall, two side by side accounting no more space than one of my slender golden age science fiction paperbacks, $20,000.
I run my fingers along spines on the bookshelf, looking for something that isn’t there, mentally calculating, there is the end of consumer debt, there is the house paid for, there is a brand new house and a year’s vacation, there is the end of work for pay, vacation forever more. I lecture myself that this is greed, venality, that I’m perfectly aware that money doesn’t really solve problems or make you happy. Yes, yes, I answer glumly. I know.
III. Hot Iron Ball
The last dream that I remember that involved the literal presence of God happened 14 years ago now. I did not see God but I heard His voice. I was arguing, contending with him, as He told me that His cup was not for me. And it was no metaphor, this cup, no abstraction: it hung in the air before my eyes, a gorgeous golden chalice. I argued and fought and insisted until finally it tipped towards me and spilled its contents into my mouth.
And I knew instantly that I had made a terrible mistake, as molten chaos blazed a column straight through the center of me, as the torrent flowed and flowed, and I understood that the cup was boundless, unending.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 20, 2009 at 2:40 PM
A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: `Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?’ Joshu answered: `Mu.’ [Mu is the negative symbol in Chinese, meaning `No-thing’ or `Nay’]
Mumon’s comments: To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriarchs. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the patriarchs or if your thinking road is not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a patriarch? This one word, Mu, is it.
This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it you will see Joshu face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of patriarchs. Is this not a pleasant thing to do?
If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through every pore in your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night. Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence. If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.
Then your previous lesser knowledge disappears. As a fruit ripening in season, your subjectivity and objectivity naturally become one. It is like a dumb man who has had a dream. He knows about it but cannot tell it.
-=-
I. The Voice
My child irritates me beyond endurance while we are out and about, as his resistance to doing what I wish him to do becomes more frequent and obstinate on a schedule that would probably plot nicely on a graph, until I am pulling out the big guns in the car, like being put straight to bed when we get home, culminating in a protest, delivered from his booster seat in an angry imperious whine, that he just wants to have everything his own way.
The irony of course is that this is a phrase he unquestionably learned from me in a purely negative presentation: he has identified the condition but rejected my thesis on its impossibility. And without consideration or intent (in the worst possible state to conduct parenting, in other words) I am delivering a lecture to this four year old. I have slapped the stereo into silence and left the car in Park and I am holding forth, my voice descending almost immediately into a tone a long-ago ex-girlfriend used to call “The Voice,” half an octave lower than my conversational tone, dry and hectoring and professorial and vibrating with poorly suppressed anger. The topic of today’s lecture is the importance of learning, in this life, that you can’t always have things the way you want them to be, as exquisitely demonstrated by Daddy’s own life, illustrated with numerous, vivid examples. I wield this lash as the pressure mounts in my skull, until my child is cowed and dejected, responding in monosyllable, agreeing glumly to whatever rhetorical question I put to him. And I master myself, and force some sunshine that I do not feel at all into my voice, to indicate that this unfortunate lapse of several minutes is over, and we are going to move past it, start over, try again.
II. Permanent Vacation
I get hung up on weird ideas sometimes. After reading an absurd, pot-boiling political thriller (in which I discover a seemingly original plot I had independently conceived half a dozen years after the book in question was published had long ago become the basis of an international bestseller, not to mention a massive videogame franchise), I find myself dwelling unprofitably on the fictional cliché of a suitcase full of cash. You know what would solve a lot of my problems? I ask myself. A suitcase full of cash.
It is an image that acquires a particular bitter barb as I read about vast amounts of physical American currency (representing Iraqi funds from various sources) - primarily $100 bills - flown into Iraq to grease the wheels of regime change - large volumes of which vanished untraceably in a vacuum of accountability, oversight or control. It is stupid - and greedy, and fundamentally contrary to my supposed Christian faith - but I find myself in odd moments dwelling on that lost Iraqi cash. A stack of one hundred bills, a little under half an inch tall, two side by side accounting no more space than one of my slender golden age science fiction paperbacks, $20,000.
I run my fingers along spines on the bookshelf, looking for something that isn’t there, mentally calculating, there is the end of consumer debt, there is the house paid for, there is a brand new house and a year’s vacation, there is the end of work for pay, vacation forever more. I lecture myself that this is greed, venality, that I’m perfectly aware that money doesn’t really solve problems or make you happy. Yes, yes, I answer glumly. I know.
III. Hot Iron Ball
The last dream that I remember that involved the literal presence of God happened 14 years ago now. I did not see God but I heard His voice. I was arguing, contending with him, as He told me that His cup was not for me. And it was no metaphor, this cup, no abstraction: it hung in the air before my eyes, a gorgeous golden chalice. I argued and fought and insisted until finally it tipped towards me and spilled its contents into my mouth.
And I knew instantly that I had made a terrible mistake, as molten chaos blazed a column straight through the center of me, as the torrent flowed and flowed, and I understood that the cup was boundless, unending.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 20, 2009 at 2:40 PM
Imagine there’s no Earth
And so I think I am just about done with preamble. This might be the point to note that, while I am happy to (for example) exploit the literature of Zen Buddhism or Taoism in the service of some particular narrative goal, I do not practice these systems of belief, nor do I claim any particular insight into them.
That being said, here are a few more stories.
I.
Many years ago, when I was in college, I took a walk with a young woman of my acquaintance, whom I met through a Lutheran students association I served a leadership position with during my Senior year. Although I’m not sure how much relevance it has, I was taken with her, though I was in a serious relationship then and so this wasn’t an issue at the time of this story. Much later I would write her a letter that would make me feel foolish, but only a little. We are still friends.
I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but she asked me, essentially, if I really believed in this bible stuff. Again, I don’t recall the specifics too well, but I reckon we are talking, you know, virgin birth, walking on the water, raised from the dead. I said something to the effect that I didn’t know whether that was really important. She said she thought that was a cop out.
I don’t think the answer I gave was, actually, a cop out. I just didn’t know how to explain what were at the time still nebulous directions my practice of faith was leading me to. I’m not sure I do today. But I mean to find out.
II.
One of my friends is an atheist - a lot of my friends are atheists, actually, but this particular one occasionally tosses a pointed question on the topic of my faith my way. He asked me one day what I really thought about the Bible, and I told him that I believed the Bible was a collection of stories. To which he responded, “so, you see it as something like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” I answered “inasmuch as Grimm’s Fairy Tales is a collection of stories.”
I see my first answer as fair and accurate, as far as it goes, which is not very far. My second response, it has to be said, was a bit of a cop out.
III.
As my son Jonah’s inputs become more diverse he has begun to spring questions that I’m not expecting, or at least, not yet. A few mornings ago he asked me whether superheroes were real. I suppose I could have given him a “yes Virginia” sort of answer but I just gave him a flat no. There are no superheroes, just people.
Later the same day he asked me whether God was a real person, to which I gave him a much more complicated answer - complicated beyond his scope, I suspect. But I tried, very hard, for it not to be a cop out. I could have given a simple yes on that one, I suppose, and it would have been, from my perspective, an honest answer, but also somewhat misleading of my beliefs, and equivocating like that is not really how I’m operating with him. Or trying, anyway. But he gave me that look which suggested he suspected I was handing him some grown-up runaround B.S. I find myself wondering how long it will be before this sort of upbringing gets him into trouble in Sunday School, which is doubtless where the seed of the question of God’s real personhood was planted.
In the course of my discussion I touched on God as the origin of all created things.
Jonah said “I don’t really think God made everything.” I was struck by how decisively he stated this so I asked him to elaborate. “Well,” he replied, “I think that buildings were made by workmen!”
Hmm.
I’ll lay this out straight: to some people, Jonah’s two questions are essentially the same. They aren’t to me, which is why I gave him different answers. I believe in God, and not in the sense that God is math, or trees. But would I describe God as a “real person”? That’s a good question, a real poser. Answering that one is going to be complicated.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 26, 2009 at 1:27 AM
That being said, here are a few more stories.
I.
Many years ago, when I was in college, I took a walk with a young woman of my acquaintance, whom I met through a Lutheran students association I served a leadership position with during my Senior year. Although I’m not sure how much relevance it has, I was taken with her, though I was in a serious relationship then and so this wasn’t an issue at the time of this story. Much later I would write her a letter that would make me feel foolish, but only a little. We are still friends.
I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but she asked me, essentially, if I really believed in this bible stuff. Again, I don’t recall the specifics too well, but I reckon we are talking, you know, virgin birth, walking on the water, raised from the dead. I said something to the effect that I didn’t know whether that was really important. She said she thought that was a cop out.
I don’t think the answer I gave was, actually, a cop out. I just didn’t know how to explain what were at the time still nebulous directions my practice of faith was leading me to. I’m not sure I do today. But I mean to find out.
II.
One of my friends is an atheist - a lot of my friends are atheists, actually, but this particular one occasionally tosses a pointed question on the topic of my faith my way. He asked me one day what I really thought about the Bible, and I told him that I believed the Bible was a collection of stories. To which he responded, “so, you see it as something like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” I answered “inasmuch as Grimm’s Fairy Tales is a collection of stories.”
I see my first answer as fair and accurate, as far as it goes, which is not very far. My second response, it has to be said, was a bit of a cop out.
III.
As my son Jonah’s inputs become more diverse he has begun to spring questions that I’m not expecting, or at least, not yet. A few mornings ago he asked me whether superheroes were real. I suppose I could have given him a “yes Virginia” sort of answer but I just gave him a flat no. There are no superheroes, just people.
Later the same day he asked me whether God was a real person, to which I gave him a much more complicated answer - complicated beyond his scope, I suspect. But I tried, very hard, for it not to be a cop out. I could have given a simple yes on that one, I suppose, and it would have been, from my perspective, an honest answer, but also somewhat misleading of my beliefs, and equivocating like that is not really how I’m operating with him. Or trying, anyway. But he gave me that look which suggested he suspected I was handing him some grown-up runaround B.S. I find myself wondering how long it will be before this sort of upbringing gets him into trouble in Sunday School, which is doubtless where the seed of the question of God’s real personhood was planted.
In the course of my discussion I touched on God as the origin of all created things.
Jonah said “I don’t really think God made everything.” I was struck by how decisively he stated this so I asked him to elaborate. “Well,” he replied, “I think that buildings were made by workmen!”
Hmm.
I’ll lay this out straight: to some people, Jonah’s two questions are essentially the same. They aren’t to me, which is why I gave him different answers. I believe in God, and not in the sense that God is math, or trees. But would I describe God as a “real person”? That’s a good question, a real poser. Answering that one is going to be complicated.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 26, 2009 at 1:27 AM
Reductio Ad
17 “And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues;
18 “they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Mark 16:17-18
That is very near the end and the final words attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Mark, the shortest of the four canonical Gospels.
And hoo boy, it packs in the crazy: you’ve got seeds of Pentecostal serpent handling, Charismatic glossolalia, Roman Catholic Exorcism, televangelist faith healers and more all rolled up in about fifty words. Words, again, within the context of the verse, delivered by the resurrected Son of God: the very incarnation of God among men, the Word by Whom all things were created, and Who, immediately after speaking them, is received up into heaven to take His seat at the right hand of God.
There is a pretty fair chance you could, as I do, regularly attend a mainstream Protestant church all your life and never hear a substantive discussion of this passage, Christ’s final injunctions to his believers before ascending into heaven (as reported by Mark), and it’s commendation of the serpent-handling, poison-drinking, tongues-speaking, demon-exorcising, faith-healing ministry of Christ’s disciples, these signs, these proofs of faith.
Dig around a little and you will find it plenty discussed, though: discussed by the proselytizing atheists, the opponents of faith, further evidence of the inanity of scripture and the hypocrisy of believers. I’d certainly grant that they’ve got Occam’s Razor on their side. How to sort out these kinds of problematic (for polite, reasonable, church-going Lutherans and the like) prescriptions in scripture? It’s all bunk: doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Actually, simply ignoring it isn’t such a bad option. God is, after all, unsearchable, His paths beyond tracing out, that great inexhaustible Get Out of Jail Free card for every apparent irrationality of practicing a poly-millennial faith tradition in the 21st Century.
But as I keep stumbling over, the impulse among Christians to invoke mundane evidence in support of things spiritual remains strong. Just today I listened to a pastor of my church go off on a tangent about the scientific research of intercessory prayer and its effects on healing, not an uncommon claim. I am not a theologian and never will be. Inasmuch as I am anything, in terms of organized epistemologies of knowledge, I am a scientist. It is grating and intolerable to listen to science invoked in ignorance, presented as a sort of bland evidence of the miraculous, and of course not a word will be spoken about the broad and well traversed controversies surrounding these studies, or the counter-studies and meta-analysis which roundly denied that results of any significance had come out of them. The bean counters of faith, the God in the gappers, will continue to selectively pull out these worldly endorsements of the orthodoxy, and package them for people like my minister to read in some venue far and gone from the practices of science, a nice sermon illustration to remind us that it isn’t so crazy to believe.
When I say intolerable, I mean just that: I cannot knowingly tolerate the presence of this sort of psuedo-rationality in my conceptions of my beliefs any longer. There’s no room for me between the stark schism of scripture, taken as a literal narrative of history, from discernable reality of the here and now, and the watered-down sham artifice of modern orthodoxy, with its God of the iffy statistical bump in the double blind trial. If scripture is somehow going to keep working for me it is going to have to be in a pattern quite separate and radical. But there’s plenty more to say about the way these things generally seem to be seen these days first, so I’ll keep digging into that for a while, yet.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 8, 2009 at 11:38 PM
18 “they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Mark 16:17-18
That is very near the end and the final words attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Mark, the shortest of the four canonical Gospels.
And hoo boy, it packs in the crazy: you’ve got seeds of Pentecostal serpent handling, Charismatic glossolalia, Roman Catholic Exorcism, televangelist faith healers and more all rolled up in about fifty words. Words, again, within the context of the verse, delivered by the resurrected Son of God: the very incarnation of God among men, the Word by Whom all things were created, and Who, immediately after speaking them, is received up into heaven to take His seat at the right hand of God.
There is a pretty fair chance you could, as I do, regularly attend a mainstream Protestant church all your life and never hear a substantive discussion of this passage, Christ’s final injunctions to his believers before ascending into heaven (as reported by Mark), and it’s commendation of the serpent-handling, poison-drinking, tongues-speaking, demon-exorcising, faith-healing ministry of Christ’s disciples, these signs, these proofs of faith.
Dig around a little and you will find it plenty discussed, though: discussed by the proselytizing atheists, the opponents of faith, further evidence of the inanity of scripture and the hypocrisy of believers. I’d certainly grant that they’ve got Occam’s Razor on their side. How to sort out these kinds of problematic (for polite, reasonable, church-going Lutherans and the like) prescriptions in scripture? It’s all bunk: doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Actually, simply ignoring it isn’t such a bad option. God is, after all, unsearchable, His paths beyond tracing out, that great inexhaustible Get Out of Jail Free card for every apparent irrationality of practicing a poly-millennial faith tradition in the 21st Century.
But as I keep stumbling over, the impulse among Christians to invoke mundane evidence in support of things spiritual remains strong. Just today I listened to a pastor of my church go off on a tangent about the scientific research of intercessory prayer and its effects on healing, not an uncommon claim. I am not a theologian and never will be. Inasmuch as I am anything, in terms of organized epistemologies of knowledge, I am a scientist. It is grating and intolerable to listen to science invoked in ignorance, presented as a sort of bland evidence of the miraculous, and of course not a word will be spoken about the broad and well traversed controversies surrounding these studies, or the counter-studies and meta-analysis which roundly denied that results of any significance had come out of them. The bean counters of faith, the God in the gappers, will continue to selectively pull out these worldly endorsements of the orthodoxy, and package them for people like my minister to read in some venue far and gone from the practices of science, a nice sermon illustration to remind us that it isn’t so crazy to believe.
When I say intolerable, I mean just that: I cannot knowingly tolerate the presence of this sort of psuedo-rationality in my conceptions of my beliefs any longer. There’s no room for me between the stark schism of scripture, taken as a literal narrative of history, from discernable reality of the here and now, and the watered-down sham artifice of modern orthodoxy, with its God of the iffy statistical bump in the double blind trial. If scripture is somehow going to keep working for me it is going to have to be in a pattern quite separate and radical. But there’s plenty more to say about the way these things generally seem to be seen these days first, so I’ll keep digging into that for a while, yet.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 8, 2009 at 11:38 PM
Heretic or Apostate
It started as something of a joke, but the question of whether I am an apostate or merely a heretic becomes an increasingly more pointed one in my mind. Just a few short years ago I might still have entertained the possibility that I was merely a schismatic but I really don’t know if that one will fly, anymore. I no longer have any definite opinion on whether Jesus Christ literally existed as a human entity in history, let alone any issues of virgin birth or resurrection. Certainly I don’t particularly believe in the veracity of any of the histories of the Old Testament, the literal existence of the Patriarchs, ancient miracles, and so forth. It appears to me that, despite vast expanses of uncharted territories, the whole of existence presents a seamless naturalistic face, that all phenomena will reduce to consistent complexes of material events that require no spiritual, metaphysical, or supernatural component to be included in their explanation.
This is not the same as saying I do not believe in the spiritual, the metaphysical, or the supernatural. But it’s hell and gone from orthodox Christianity.
It raises the question of what I’m really about, for example, when I’m reciting the Apostles Creed in church. I think of a story related by Dave Sim, perennially controversial self-published comics pioneer, regarding his attempts to attend a conventional Christian church, before he fully developed his peculiar personal theology based on taking Judaism, Christianity and Islam seriously simultaneously and fundamentally became a church unto himself. But before all this, he describes trying to adhere to the principles of biblical truth as he saw them, while simultaneously participating in worship in good faith: he describes reciting the Nicene Creed. “Always scanning ahead a couple of lines: I allow myself to recite this next part. The two lines after that I won’t allow myself to say….”
I really don’t want to go down that kind of road (needless to say the road I’m going down is utterly divergent from Sim’s in almost every respect aside from the fact that it seems increasingly divergent with orthodox Christianity). I really don’t want to end up with my own singular synthesized theology in a church of one. But I can’t deny that the sorts of feints I sometimes make in my mind at justifying my participation in mainstream Christian worship with the way I see things frequently smack of rank sophistry to me.
It’s not that I’m on my way to becoming an atheist, or even an agnostic (although a certain degree of agnosticism seems to me to be inherent in merely considering oneself to be infinitely limited in comparison to God). I guess you never really know your future but it seems to me that I’ve gone about as far down the path of skepticism as there is to go: my spiritual experiences remain, they remain what they are, and I have yet to come upon any rational justification for not taking them seriously. But beyond that, religion, scripture for that matter, all seem very constructed to me. Or perhaps, rather, it seems impossible to prise out just exactly what it is in the Scriptures and in religious tradition and practice that actually resonates (and seems inextricably bound up with) my personal spiritual experiences - from what is constructed of the usual human toolbox of language, tradition, tribalism, confusion, greed, lust, power-huger, reason, conservatism, imagination and poetry…
Whatever else, the two things - religion and my spirituality, and not just religion but specifically Christianity - are inextricably bound for me. Beyond that native connection, no particular orthodoxy holds sway. Leaving me with the question of what I am to make of that connection - and how I am supposed to deal with the many aspects of the Christian religious hegemony that I just can’t uphold…
Which was what I intended to be talking about this installment. I also intended to wrap this up at leas an hour ago. Good intentions.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 10, 2009 at 1:20 AM
This is not the same as saying I do not believe in the spiritual, the metaphysical, or the supernatural. But it’s hell and gone from orthodox Christianity.
It raises the question of what I’m really about, for example, when I’m reciting the Apostles Creed in church. I think of a story related by Dave Sim, perennially controversial self-published comics pioneer, regarding his attempts to attend a conventional Christian church, before he fully developed his peculiar personal theology based on taking Judaism, Christianity and Islam seriously simultaneously and fundamentally became a church unto himself. But before all this, he describes trying to adhere to the principles of biblical truth as he saw them, while simultaneously participating in worship in good faith: he describes reciting the Nicene Creed. “Always scanning ahead a couple of lines: I allow myself to recite this next part. The two lines after that I won’t allow myself to say….”
I really don’t want to go down that kind of road (needless to say the road I’m going down is utterly divergent from Sim’s in almost every respect aside from the fact that it seems increasingly divergent with orthodox Christianity). I really don’t want to end up with my own singular synthesized theology in a church of one. But I can’t deny that the sorts of feints I sometimes make in my mind at justifying my participation in mainstream Christian worship with the way I see things frequently smack of rank sophistry to me.
It’s not that I’m on my way to becoming an atheist, or even an agnostic (although a certain degree of agnosticism seems to me to be inherent in merely considering oneself to be infinitely limited in comparison to God). I guess you never really know your future but it seems to me that I’ve gone about as far down the path of skepticism as there is to go: my spiritual experiences remain, they remain what they are, and I have yet to come upon any rational justification for not taking them seriously. But beyond that, religion, scripture for that matter, all seem very constructed to me. Or perhaps, rather, it seems impossible to prise out just exactly what it is in the Scriptures and in religious tradition and practice that actually resonates (and seems inextricably bound up with) my personal spiritual experiences - from what is constructed of the usual human toolbox of language, tradition, tribalism, confusion, greed, lust, power-huger, reason, conservatism, imagination and poetry…
Whatever else, the two things - religion and my spirituality, and not just religion but specifically Christianity - are inextricably bound for me. Beyond that native connection, no particular orthodoxy holds sway. Leaving me with the question of what I am to make of that connection - and how I am supposed to deal with the many aspects of the Christian religious hegemony that I just can’t uphold…
Which was what I intended to be talking about this installment. I also intended to wrap this up at leas an hour ago. Good intentions.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 10, 2009 at 1:20 AM
Monday, January 31, 2011
Childhood’s end
Mid morning and I’m trying to remember what it was that had me pining for the graveyard of my childhood. That is not a metaphorical statement, I’m talking about a literal graveyard. I know what reminded me of early morning’s reminiscences: I was rereading an article about Fred Rogers that says at one point that Mr. Rogers loved graveyards (Tom Junod’s 1998 profile in Esquire). But what had got me dreaming about the cemetery at St. John’s LCMS early this morning?
I don’t think about my home town that often. I haven’t been back since my father retired from the ministry (an act which, typically, has had little impact on how much he actually engages in the duties of a pastor) and my parents moved to a different rural town far enough away to make a day trip a reasonable imposition. We have a hard enough time getting visits to the grandparents accomplished. Beyond that, at last review (and this is a good few years ago, now) I had one real friend left in that town, and the state of my relationship with him is that he told me he would call me right back, four or five years ago. I feel a little bad about never seeing the members of the churches my father served or the teachers from high school and grade school days (almost none of whom are still teaching at those schools - it has been, after all, twenty years). They did a pretty good job of being my community growing up, and I’d like them to meet my kid. But so it goes.
The parsonage, the church-owned house provided as a form of compensation for ministers, is becoming a thing of the past. I learned this as an elder at a former church of mine, going through a difficult process of calling a new minister. Nobody wanted the parsonage, they wanted their own house. When my father retired the house I spent most of my childhood in stopped being in any sense mine. I suppose that this is not a strange occurrence but it seemed to me of a different character from a house merely being sold and a different family moving in. That house, I came to realize, had always had a separate identity, it was a property of the church, and had in some respects never been ours. It remained an element of that community, the temporary home for a new pastor’s family. If I went back, I’m sure there would be no objection to my rambling the surroundings, the little tangled grove, the orderly shelterbelt that are engraved indelibly in my brain (not the least of which as the scene of thousands of surreptitious cigarettes). But I think I would feel like an interloper there, now.
I think I could feel at ease in the cemetery, though. I’m sure it is technically the property of the church, but whatever the legality a cemetery is in my mind part of the Commons. I surely know that graveyard as well as I know the fields and hills around my former house: I must have pushed a heavy lawnmower around each of its stones a hundred times. And I went there in the night sometimes, while my parents slept, an anxious, restless, depressed kid, and found a peace of sorts among the dead. Of course, what I knew then would only be a part now: who knows how many stones have been added to its field in the 20 years since I left home?
I’ll probably never see it again.*
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 11, 2009 11:21 AM
*An assertion of more style than substance as it turns out. I was there quite recently, in fact, for a special event observing the church's 125 year anniversary, where my father was invited as a guest pastor (the first time I have seen him preach in quite a long while). Will I be back again? Who knows.
Further update, May 31 2012... forgotten this writing though not the sentiment. It says something about the true obliviousness possible on one's solipsistic internal experience that it literally never occurred to me that my father would have chosen this very field as his final resting place. We did not expect him to be gone so soon, but go he did, the day before Thanksgiving, 2011. And it turned out to come as no surprise at all that he had chosen this place where he spent more than a third of his life and most of his calling as the resting place (as they say) of his earthly remains. So I was indeed back again, sooner rather than later, and will be there again, I imagine, many times.
I don’t think about my home town that often. I haven’t been back since my father retired from the ministry (an act which, typically, has had little impact on how much he actually engages in the duties of a pastor) and my parents moved to a different rural town far enough away to make a day trip a reasonable imposition. We have a hard enough time getting visits to the grandparents accomplished. Beyond that, at last review (and this is a good few years ago, now) I had one real friend left in that town, and the state of my relationship with him is that he told me he would call me right back, four or five years ago. I feel a little bad about never seeing the members of the churches my father served or the teachers from high school and grade school days (almost none of whom are still teaching at those schools - it has been, after all, twenty years). They did a pretty good job of being my community growing up, and I’d like them to meet my kid. But so it goes.
The parsonage, the church-owned house provided as a form of compensation for ministers, is becoming a thing of the past. I learned this as an elder at a former church of mine, going through a difficult process of calling a new minister. Nobody wanted the parsonage, they wanted their own house. When my father retired the house I spent most of my childhood in stopped being in any sense mine. I suppose that this is not a strange occurrence but it seemed to me of a different character from a house merely being sold and a different family moving in. That house, I came to realize, had always had a separate identity, it was a property of the church, and had in some respects never been ours. It remained an element of that community, the temporary home for a new pastor’s family. If I went back, I’m sure there would be no objection to my rambling the surroundings, the little tangled grove, the orderly shelterbelt that are engraved indelibly in my brain (not the least of which as the scene of thousands of surreptitious cigarettes). But I think I would feel like an interloper there, now.
I think I could feel at ease in the cemetery, though. I’m sure it is technically the property of the church, but whatever the legality a cemetery is in my mind part of the Commons. I surely know that graveyard as well as I know the fields and hills around my former house: I must have pushed a heavy lawnmower around each of its stones a hundred times. And I went there in the night sometimes, while my parents slept, an anxious, restless, depressed kid, and found a peace of sorts among the dead. Of course, what I knew then would only be a part now: who knows how many stones have been added to its field in the 20 years since I left home?
I’ll probably never see it again.*
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 11, 2009 11:21 AM
*An assertion of more style than substance as it turns out. I was there quite recently, in fact, for a special event observing the church's 125 year anniversary, where my father was invited as a guest pastor (the first time I have seen him preach in quite a long while). Will I be back again? Who knows.
Further update, May 31 2012... forgotten this writing though not the sentiment. It says something about the true obliviousness possible on one's solipsistic internal experience that it literally never occurred to me that my father would have chosen this very field as his final resting place. We did not expect him to be gone so soon, but go he did, the day before Thanksgiving, 2011. And it turned out to come as no surprise at all that he had chosen this place where he spent more than a third of his life and most of his calling as the resting place (as they say) of his earthly remains. So I was indeed back again, sooner rather than later, and will be there again, I imagine, many times.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Don’t you wish your husband was a wife like me
There is a “Valentine’s Day Sucks” thread at my favorite forum-discussion type website, causing me to realize that I’m mildly annoyed by people who scorn the Greeting Industry holiday. Hey, I used to be against the gift of cut flowers. Personally I am tearing it up in the Valentine’s department, arranging Saturday night babysitting and Serious Grownup dinner reservations; I send pale roses and calla lilies to Jennie’s work (she’ll end up bringing them straight home but inspiring feelings of inadequacy in the men at her office and envy in the women is part of the fun). A few hours after I ordered the bouquet I got an email informing me that my order is unavailable in my area and cannot be fulfilled. I am invited to either call someone (please, what is this, the Twentieth Century?) or meander through some kind of online menu hell at the end of which I, uncharacteristically and without any clearly defined intent, request that my order be replaced with… exactly the same product I’d ordered in the first place.
The next day I get a confirmation assuring me that my order will be sent in a timely fashion. Good heavens, is this secret that I’ve been missing out on my whole life? Just ignore whatever is said to you and blithely insist that you dictate to the conditions of reality and not vice versa? Clearly my life has been missing a rapacious if childishly innocent sense of entitlement.
Having scored my points today with the delivery of the unavailable, I peel garlic and ginger, seed a serrano pepper and turn it all into aromatic confetti, pan fry salt and pepper chicken lightly dusted with flour, roast hot madras curry powder in the oily pan, and stew it all together in yogurt curry with diced tomatoes and thin strips of bell pepper. And everything seems all right with the universe, for a while, for a change.
Happy Valentine’s Day, kids. I’m taking the rest of the weekend off.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 14, 2009 at 12:17 AM
The next day I get a confirmation assuring me that my order will be sent in a timely fashion. Good heavens, is this secret that I’ve been missing out on my whole life? Just ignore whatever is said to you and blithely insist that you dictate to the conditions of reality and not vice versa? Clearly my life has been missing a rapacious if childishly innocent sense of entitlement.
Having scored my points today with the delivery of the unavailable, I peel garlic and ginger, seed a serrano pepper and turn it all into aromatic confetti, pan fry salt and pepper chicken lightly dusted with flour, roast hot madras curry powder in the oily pan, and stew it all together in yogurt curry with diced tomatoes and thin strips of bell pepper. And everything seems all right with the universe, for a while, for a change.
Happy Valentine’s Day, kids. I’m taking the rest of the weekend off.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 14, 2009 at 12:17 AM
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Rejectivism
Baring my teeth a little at midnight, once again, a station of the clock that has been tending to tumble heedlessly into the two-ish, ante meridiem, territory. No good. So why write? To turn the page, mainly, I’m sick of looking at my little ray of sun (the blog is my browser’s home page). Valentine’s Day is over, time for all us box-dwellers to get back on our heads. It’s that time of things, the new year is starting to get stale, and it’s time for taxes, flexible health care spending account remittance, and similar delights of the grown-up world. I’ve been slogging the finances for three hours and love is not in the air.
Actually I’ve been itching all day to scratch at my favorite topic, which might be called something like “I used to be really certain I was going to come upon a clear purpose for my life eventually”. Itching and letting that itch fester: I don’t want to talk about it any more. I used to be certain about a lot of things, big deal. Yesterday I wrote a song that about filled an 8.5 by 11″ notebook page and consisted almost entirely of just seven words, repeated. You can get away with this kind of shit when you’re forcing yourself to “come up with something” every day, nevertheless, somewhere in the midst of it I definitely had an “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” moment. I’ve been tending to short, pessimistic lyrics about general discontent.
Over
Nothing’s really ever over
so it appears
Not a dozen not a hundred
not a thousand years
not ends of days
of city states
no end of deadlines
or apocalypse dates
Though it all be drawn
into the swollen sun
yet still it will not yet be done.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 17, 2009 at 12:39 AM
Actually I’ve been itching all day to scratch at my favorite topic, which might be called something like “I used to be really certain I was going to come upon a clear purpose for my life eventually”. Itching and letting that itch fester: I don’t want to talk about it any more. I used to be certain about a lot of things, big deal. Yesterday I wrote a song that about filled an 8.5 by 11″ notebook page and consisted almost entirely of just seven words, repeated. You can get away with this kind of shit when you’re forcing yourself to “come up with something” every day, nevertheless, somewhere in the midst of it I definitely had an “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” moment. I’ve been tending to short, pessimistic lyrics about general discontent.
Over
Nothing’s really ever over
so it appears
Not a dozen not a hundred
not a thousand years
not ends of days
of city states
no end of deadlines
or apocalypse dates
Though it all be drawn
into the swollen sun
yet still it will not yet be done.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 17, 2009 at 12:39 AM
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
chain
I catch myself putting off reading the last of the unpublished poems in Bill Holm's posthumously released The Chain Letter of the Soul. And so sigh, and finish them. Maybe there will be more, later, poems or essays, squirreled away and brought to light, brushed up by his widow or a long-time editor. Or maybe not, this world being what it is, will maybe not find the money to put together more than one goodbye. Forcibly restrain myself from railing at the universe for its many specific examples of individuals I feel I could do very well without go on living into their late sixties and seventies and eighties while one man I very much would have preferred to still be here with us goes down at sixty-five. Pining for the deaths of others, however odious I might find them, just isn't on.
There's nothing for this. I decide that I will pick up another semi-secret project that went by the wayside during this king hell tornado of a year that's gone me by since Bill Holm died last February and try again to get inside of it, get myself mired in the center where there's no choice but to work my way out.
For it is life we want. We want the world, the whole beautiful world, alive—and we alive in it. That is the actual god we long for and seek, yet we have already found it, if we open our senses, our whole bodies, thus our souls. That is why I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.
—Bill Holm
There's nothing for this. I decide that I will pick up another semi-secret project that went by the wayside during this king hell tornado of a year that's gone me by since Bill Holm died last February and try again to get inside of it, get myself mired in the center where there's no choice but to work my way out.
For it is life we want. We want the world, the whole beautiful world, alive—and we alive in it. That is the actual god we long for and seek, yet we have already found it, if we open our senses, our whole bodies, thus our souls. That is why I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.
—Bill Holm
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The Music of Failure
My brother informed me this evening that my friend, the Minnesota poet and essayist Bill Holm, died yesterday. For those not acquainted, the post I left about it over at one of my virtual haunts is a fair enough introduction.
I met Bill for the first time through my father, who loved getting to know local writers and took me to see him at a reading in some quirky rural rural town venue, some oddball town hall or rustic church. I remember he came in the back door and kind of wandered over to a corner where an upright piano stood, and started picking out a tune by way of introducing himself. I heard him read again later at a presentation of several Minnesota authors my father organized at one of his churches, but I didn’t get to know him until he came to give a reading at my college. I hung out with him a little while afterward, smoking cigarettes and talking about literature and the (first) war in Iraq. I saw him a few other times and exchanged the occasional letter.
Our correspondence (like so many others) had dropped off since I became a father. Perhaps a year ago I’d come across his address at Southwest State University and tried an email which bounced back to me. It was probably a misbegotten effort anyway, as he was an unrepentant Luddite who claimed to own neither computer nor television, and who I don’t doubt had little time for the internet. I’d been meaning to write him a letter for a while; I wanted to thank him for his last* book, The Windows of Brimnes, that I’d read much of in various hospital chairs during a family medical emergency, and to tell him about the idea I’d had to get to know classical music better by looking for the many works mentioned in his essays and poems among the offerings of the digital music service I have a subscription to (perhaps I’ll finally get to this project now). The letter never got written, never got sent, put off like so many things these days.
Don’t put off writing that letter any longer. It may be later than you think.
I can thank Bill Holm that I’m not wholly ignorant of classical music, and for the fact that I have more than a cursory knowledge of Walt Whitman: I still think the essay The Music of Failure is one of the best things that has been written about America. Tonight I opened Leaves of Grass for the first time in a long while.
Joy, shipmate, joy!
(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)
Our life is closed, our life begins,
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore,
Joy, shipmate, joy
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 27, 2009 at 1:08 AM
*last book published in his lifetime, as it turns out - Bill Holm's last writings and a retrospective of his life's work were posthumously published in The Chain Letter of the Soul.
I met Bill for the first time through my father, who loved getting to know local writers and took me to see him at a reading in some quirky rural rural town venue, some oddball town hall or rustic church. I remember he came in the back door and kind of wandered over to a corner where an upright piano stood, and started picking out a tune by way of introducing himself. I heard him read again later at a presentation of several Minnesota authors my father organized at one of his churches, but I didn’t get to know him until he came to give a reading at my college. I hung out with him a little while afterward, smoking cigarettes and talking about literature and the (first) war in Iraq. I saw him a few other times and exchanged the occasional letter.
Our correspondence (like so many others) had dropped off since I became a father. Perhaps a year ago I’d come across his address at Southwest State University and tried an email which bounced back to me. It was probably a misbegotten effort anyway, as he was an unrepentant Luddite who claimed to own neither computer nor television, and who I don’t doubt had little time for the internet. I’d been meaning to write him a letter for a while; I wanted to thank him for his last* book, The Windows of Brimnes, that I’d read much of in various hospital chairs during a family medical emergency, and to tell him about the idea I’d had to get to know classical music better by looking for the many works mentioned in his essays and poems among the offerings of the digital music service I have a subscription to (perhaps I’ll finally get to this project now). The letter never got written, never got sent, put off like so many things these days.
Don’t put off writing that letter any longer. It may be later than you think.
I can thank Bill Holm that I’m not wholly ignorant of classical music, and for the fact that I have more than a cursory knowledge of Walt Whitman: I still think the essay The Music of Failure is one of the best things that has been written about America. Tonight I opened Leaves of Grass for the first time in a long while.
Joy, shipmate, joy!
(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)
Our life is closed, our life begins,
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore,
Joy, shipmate, joy
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 27, 2009 at 1:08 AM
*last book published in his lifetime, as it turns out - Bill Holm's last writings and a retrospective of his life's work were posthumously published in The Chain Letter of the Soul.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Interruptus
I don’t know where I’m going next with this. I’ve been fighting later than late nights for weeks now, you’d think somewhere in the midst of these dozens of single digit ante meridiem hours I would find a few words to say but I’ve been plowing more futile fields than that. Chasing I know not what, I know not why.
I listen to my music collection online, sorting songs from shortest to longest. For a period I collected a lot of strange ephemera online, I have an inordinate number of songs that are less than a minute long. They’re up to 33 seconds and I’ve been at this for a while, now.
I’m sick of this world of late nights online. Pressing the id of the “civilized” world against my eyeballs, putting off tomorrow. How many nights, how much of my life have I spent creeping in the silent hours in houses full of early risers? When I was a youth I wrote thousands of pages in journals during these hours, self-involved, intellectual. They lie in quiescent stacks on a shelf in some closet, my impossible printed hand nearly unreadable to anyone but (more or less) myself. I have no desire to revisit any of these thoughts.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 21, 2009 at 5:26 AM
I listen to my music collection online, sorting songs from shortest to longest. For a period I collected a lot of strange ephemera online, I have an inordinate number of songs that are less than a minute long. They’re up to 33 seconds and I’ve been at this for a while, now.
I’m sick of this world of late nights online. Pressing the id of the “civilized” world against my eyeballs, putting off tomorrow. How many nights, how much of my life have I spent creeping in the silent hours in houses full of early risers? When I was a youth I wrote thousands of pages in journals during these hours, self-involved, intellectual. They lie in quiescent stacks on a shelf in some closet, my impossible printed hand nearly unreadable to anyone but (more or less) myself. I have no desire to revisit any of these thoughts.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 21, 2009 at 5:26 AM
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Transition Porotocol
Everything in the world tells me to wait wait wait. A biting wind blows us back in from a short, unsatisfying excursion out of doors, the pale dusting of snow infuriates me, but not so much as the fact that I have yet again fallen for the false promise of calendar spring in Minnesota. I prickle at everything, the surfeit of opinions everywhere, every know-nothing is an expert on economics, politics, environmental science, I judge it all false bravado incantations against a bank of fog rolling over an inexorable night. On a question and answer forum I sometimes haunt someone actually asks whether the global ecology is finally fucked enough that they can stop caring. The sign of the times is that the question is actually allowed to stand. The questioner eventually marks the best response to someone who replied: You can stop caring about the environment when you start shitting in the middle of your living room. This is about as good an answer as such a question can get and far more clever than I could come up with, but the writing on the wall that everyone would rather pretend not to notice seems to me to be that clever isn’t going to talk our asses out of this one, and we’ve more or less forgotten how to be pleasant.
And this thing, another rootless, ill-defined project existing for no good reason I can see, is a tectonic plate, constantly shifting, how would you even notice or mark a transition, if one occurred?
No Tomorrow
There is no tomorrow for
the one you failed to say goodbye to
here I am struggling to finish
something I said I wouldn’t
even try to
Another poet struck down
more sweet words are lost
Sometimes I wonder if
even God pauses to count the cost
There’s no tomorrow I’ve
been waiting 37 years
and every greater ecstasy
came with its batch of bitter tears
And if we had a thousand years
we still couldn’t say enough
I hope at some strange angle
I’ll be called upon to call that bluff
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 25, 2009 at 1:10 PM
And this thing, another rootless, ill-defined project existing for no good reason I can see, is a tectonic plate, constantly shifting, how would you even notice or mark a transition, if one occurred?
No Tomorrow
There is no tomorrow for
the one you failed to say goodbye to
here I am struggling to finish
something I said I wouldn’t
even try to
Another poet struck down
more sweet words are lost
Sometimes I wonder if
even God pauses to count the cost
There’s no tomorrow I’ve
been waiting 37 years
and every greater ecstasy
came with its batch of bitter tears
And if we had a thousand years
we still couldn’t say enough
I hope at some strange angle
I’ll be called upon to call that bluff
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 25, 2009 at 1:10 PM
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Core Theory
…there are so many kinds of failure.
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
I have virtually no formal training in music, and it shows, although I can nominally sight read music to sing - a skill acquired almost purely through practice, with the barest bones grasp of musical notation underneath. I don’t really get keys or scales, I am a mediocre guitar player and play no other instrument even passably. I played the clarinet for a few years in junior high school and muddled through with my substandard grasp of musical notation, falling steadily down the seating until I came to rest as the second of two bass clarinets, otherwise known as the worst clarinet player in the band. I think I was a disappointment to my band teacher, whose name now escapes me: boys didn’t play the flute or clarinet in the provincial town I grew up in (and I received merciless shit for years for my choice of instrument), and I suspect he had high hopes for me. I had good aptitude: I just didn’t practice. Towards the end I actually made a tape of myself playing and ran it in my room to fool my parents while I lay in my bed and read crap science fiction and fantasy paperbacks.
The guitar was a bribe and supposed aid to quitting smoking I gave myself in college: it didn’t work. I stuck with the guitar gamely for a good few years though, and played it intermittently thereafter: these days I almost never pick it up. I change the strings from time to time, let another set corrode on the stand in slightly damp basement air, not a nice way to treat a guitar, but then it’s not that nice a guitar. Singing is something I do every day without real thought or effort, though I haven’t really worked on my voice in a long time. My singing is okay, it is nothing really special.
I made one genuine attempt to mount the hill of my formal musical ignorance. In college I signed up for a beginning music theory class. If memory serves (and it well may not) the name of the class was Core Theory I. It started to worry me pretty shortly after registration. Potential students were advised that they should be reasonably conversant with reading music, and I had momentarily talked myself into the position that my years behind the clarinet would do. I had, after all, sat there many hours, with sheets of music on the stand before me, toodling out more or less the correct notes. I might not have been particularly good at it, but I had certainly read music. The closer the start of class came the more absurd this seemed, that my billet as second bass clarinet in the eighth grade remotely qualified as the ability to read music. The whole scenario was uncharacteristic for me: I wasn’t academically brave about my choices in college, and I rarely took a class primarily based on my belief that it would edify me (my decisions were more predominantly driven by, in rough order, fulfilling the requirements of my major, fulfilling the fairly complex liberal arts requirements of my college to graduate in four years, avoiding excessive difficulty in my non major classes - in my defense, almost all of my major coursework in chemistry was excessively difficult, at least for me - and maintaining an easier time schedule). I was a little over midway through my sojourn in the ivory tower, though, growing discontent with my chosen field of study, and thinking maybe there was something in my initial experiments in songwriting and performance. Temper the uncertainties of a career in science by establishing a foundation as a rock and roll singer to fall back on. Or something; I’m inferring, I don’t really remember my reasoning in taking the class very well, just that I was worrying I would not be able to hack it. But I stuck to it, deciding I think that I would try to get a fix on the territory, maybe ask the professor for his perspective.
The first day of class the professor announced that while the course was open to all students and he could not give preference to music majors, there were in fact an insufficient number of seats for the number of music majors needing to take the course and that delaying it would for these students involve interference with the pursuit of their major program of studies. And SO, if any non-majors might find it in their hearts to elect to drop the course, etc.
I didn’t pay particularly close attention to the rest of the class, and when it was done proceeded directly to the front with this big, ready made and irrepproachable cop out. And that was that, I had a little bit of a credit gap, I believe it was on this occasion that a friend talked me into joining her in square dancing, which it turned out posed no sort of challenge whatsoever (it was pass/fail based solely on attendance. I actually remember square dancing pretty well. There was also a line dancing section).
How do you feel about a right decision made for perhaps the wrong reasons? From the outside it looked like the choice was altruistic: from within I know that it was fundamentally cowardly, while potentially objectively reasonable as well. This isn’t a piece of history I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on, right, I don’t wake up grasping for it in the dark reaches of night. I can’t say it would have probably made a whole lot of difference in my life if I’d kept with it, whether I succeeded or failed. But it stands as a moment, ambiguous, unsatisfying, part of some larger design of what is ill fitting, incomplete still in my life. I bring it up only as preamble, a little context for a new series of essays I’m about to launch (the subject of religion remains on the table, and will return in time). More to come.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com April 1, 2009 at 1:26 AM
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
I have virtually no formal training in music, and it shows, although I can nominally sight read music to sing - a skill acquired almost purely through practice, with the barest bones grasp of musical notation underneath. I don’t really get keys or scales, I am a mediocre guitar player and play no other instrument even passably. I played the clarinet for a few years in junior high school and muddled through with my substandard grasp of musical notation, falling steadily down the seating until I came to rest as the second of two bass clarinets, otherwise known as the worst clarinet player in the band. I think I was a disappointment to my band teacher, whose name now escapes me: boys didn’t play the flute or clarinet in the provincial town I grew up in (and I received merciless shit for years for my choice of instrument), and I suspect he had high hopes for me. I had good aptitude: I just didn’t practice. Towards the end I actually made a tape of myself playing and ran it in my room to fool my parents while I lay in my bed and read crap science fiction and fantasy paperbacks.
The guitar was a bribe and supposed aid to quitting smoking I gave myself in college: it didn’t work. I stuck with the guitar gamely for a good few years though, and played it intermittently thereafter: these days I almost never pick it up. I change the strings from time to time, let another set corrode on the stand in slightly damp basement air, not a nice way to treat a guitar, but then it’s not that nice a guitar. Singing is something I do every day without real thought or effort, though I haven’t really worked on my voice in a long time. My singing is okay, it is nothing really special.
I made one genuine attempt to mount the hill of my formal musical ignorance. In college I signed up for a beginning music theory class. If memory serves (and it well may not) the name of the class was Core Theory I. It started to worry me pretty shortly after registration. Potential students were advised that they should be reasonably conversant with reading music, and I had momentarily talked myself into the position that my years behind the clarinet would do. I had, after all, sat there many hours, with sheets of music on the stand before me, toodling out more or less the correct notes. I might not have been particularly good at it, but I had certainly read music. The closer the start of class came the more absurd this seemed, that my billet as second bass clarinet in the eighth grade remotely qualified as the ability to read music. The whole scenario was uncharacteristic for me: I wasn’t academically brave about my choices in college, and I rarely took a class primarily based on my belief that it would edify me (my decisions were more predominantly driven by, in rough order, fulfilling the requirements of my major, fulfilling the fairly complex liberal arts requirements of my college to graduate in four years, avoiding excessive difficulty in my non major classes - in my defense, almost all of my major coursework in chemistry was excessively difficult, at least for me - and maintaining an easier time schedule). I was a little over midway through my sojourn in the ivory tower, though, growing discontent with my chosen field of study, and thinking maybe there was something in my initial experiments in songwriting and performance. Temper the uncertainties of a career in science by establishing a foundation as a rock and roll singer to fall back on. Or something; I’m inferring, I don’t really remember my reasoning in taking the class very well, just that I was worrying I would not be able to hack it. But I stuck to it, deciding I think that I would try to get a fix on the territory, maybe ask the professor for his perspective.
The first day of class the professor announced that while the course was open to all students and he could not give preference to music majors, there were in fact an insufficient number of seats for the number of music majors needing to take the course and that delaying it would for these students involve interference with the pursuit of their major program of studies. And SO, if any non-majors might find it in their hearts to elect to drop the course, etc.
I didn’t pay particularly close attention to the rest of the class, and when it was done proceeded directly to the front with this big, ready made and irrepproachable cop out. And that was that, I had a little bit of a credit gap, I believe it was on this occasion that a friend talked me into joining her in square dancing, which it turned out posed no sort of challenge whatsoever (it was pass/fail based solely on attendance. I actually remember square dancing pretty well. There was also a line dancing section).
How do you feel about a right decision made for perhaps the wrong reasons? From the outside it looked like the choice was altruistic: from within I know that it was fundamentally cowardly, while potentially objectively reasonable as well. This isn’t a piece of history I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on, right, I don’t wake up grasping for it in the dark reaches of night. I can’t say it would have probably made a whole lot of difference in my life if I’d kept with it, whether I succeeded or failed. But it stands as a moment, ambiguous, unsatisfying, part of some larger design of what is ill fitting, incomplete still in my life. I bring it up only as preamble, a little context for a new series of essays I’m about to launch (the subject of religion remains on the table, and will return in time). More to come.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com April 1, 2009 at 1:26 AM
Monday, January 10, 2011
self reproach
You will never be an artist, a musician, a writer: by all means go ahead and tell yourself you are these things even though you will never make a living at it. Tell yourself you are a dentist while you floss your teeth while you’re at it. Tell yourself whatever the hell you want to, telling yourself things is free. Then get back to work, the work that pays. It is pleasant sometimes to think of what Benjamin Franklin called “foolish projects of growing suddenly rich.” In reality there are only two working varieties of such a strategy: the first is a confidence job, the second is a meaningless accident of fate. You’re better off wandering around outside looking for winning lottery tickets on the ground. At least you’ll get a walk out of it. Looked at objectively the overwhelming likelihood is that the majority of people do not and will not ever have anything like a calling, a vocation, a life’s work. While sad, this is necessary: somebody has to clean all the toilets.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 4, 2009 3:32 PM
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 4, 2009 3:32 PM
Friday, January 7, 2011
material
So why keep churning out the lyrics, though, that is an enigma. Is it anything more than that old devil Sunken Cost? Almost four years in, what does it mean if I stop now? Failing inspiration there is nothing but persistence… I’m behind at the moment, a few songs backed up. At this point it is basically a matter of catching up or it starts to get into feedback territory. Why bother writing two songs if you’re still going to be two behind? Worse, five? Ten? A couple or a few years ago when I was on jury duty I got in something like a month or more backlogged, climbing out of that hole in a sense confirmed, for some time, my commitment to the project, but lately it hasn’t been a matter of falling behind, much. It’s something else…
I had a motivation when it all started in the first place, which was the band, such as it was… But whatever that might have been it is about as done as a thing can get. I really can’t remember what got me started again. I remember it swimming into my head, and a sense of urgency and rightness about it, but any specifics of motivation are long gone. I’ve never felt less engaged in any intentional pursuit to make actual music (as opposed to merely generating piles of small, cryptic (or merely dull and pedestrian) lyrics); the main lesson of the most recent endeavor has been that in recording music at home there is a gulf of work between pushing out the kind of thing I push out in a day or less and ascending to the next level of polish and confidence and it just isn’t worth it, not for this hobbyist stuff. And professional grade is high above that, lurking in some orbital system forever beyond my reach. Hardbound books of lined paper and ballpoint pens remain easy to come by, and it seems I can persist in this level of production indefinitely (I took a break in the midst of writing this and knocked out that backlog of lyrics, caught up with today, again.
I don’t even know why I’m talking about it. Not ready to talk about anything else, I guess. However, as Stephen Crane put it, the Swede found a saloon. What can I say: for now, it goes on, again.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 11, 2009 at 12:24 AM
I had a motivation when it all started in the first place, which was the band, such as it was… But whatever that might have been it is about as done as a thing can get. I really can’t remember what got me started again. I remember it swimming into my head, and a sense of urgency and rightness about it, but any specifics of motivation are long gone. I’ve never felt less engaged in any intentional pursuit to make actual music (as opposed to merely generating piles of small, cryptic (or merely dull and pedestrian) lyrics); the main lesson of the most recent endeavor has been that in recording music at home there is a gulf of work between pushing out the kind of thing I push out in a day or less and ascending to the next level of polish and confidence and it just isn’t worth it, not for this hobbyist stuff. And professional grade is high above that, lurking in some orbital system forever beyond my reach. Hardbound books of lined paper and ballpoint pens remain easy to come by, and it seems I can persist in this level of production indefinitely (I took a break in the midst of writing this and knocked out that backlog of lyrics, caught up with today, again.
I don’t even know why I’m talking about it. Not ready to talk about anything else, I guess. However, as Stephen Crane put it, the Swede found a saloon. What can I say: for now, it goes on, again.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 11, 2009 at 12:24 AM
why persist?
Anyway, enough whining. Nobody else is to blame for my pernicious generation of verse and if I don’t like it I can, of course, quit: that cup, in any event, I can relinquish if that’s what I really want. I’m thinking to get on to the point that the music theory class essay was meant to frame, which is to introduce the classical music listening essay project… but not tonight. I am beat, done over by Holy Week, still at the taxes, and fearing I’m about to come down with whatever crud my child is working on getting over. Sha la la, man, as the man said, why’n't you just slipaway? (Good heavens, Street Hassle with full audio preview at Rhapsody… I would spend millions of dollars in this strange new world of music, at last for sale, all of it, all the time, instantly… if someone would just give me millions of dollars).
Real content soon.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 12, 2009 at 11:41 PM
Real content soon.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 12, 2009 at 11:41 PM
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
all I need
I have to confess I am digging this new Kanye West. And seriously considering getting myself a "Pussy and Religion is All I Need" t-shirt made...
Sunday, January 2, 2011
The beginning of the intermittent new shit
Unexpected anger as I slap down a book I'd rather be retreating into, all the more firmly and obliviously ensconced in the linear labyrinth of text. Not knowing what to do with it, the anger, purse my lips and try to let it hover, around me, without feeling the need to put in anywhere. Most particularly not on the kid, as always, kids being kids and therefor in a near permanent state of doing something that might be construed as deserving of anger. But then again, it occurs to me, seeing immediately where the trend of this line of thought tends to skew, better to not let it land on myself either, not the least of it because it amounts to nearly the same thing (the kid, being a kid and therefor sensitive, acutely aware of whatever lash I might lay out against my own back). But mainly, realizing it does not have to be particularly complicated or philosophical, not wanting it on either of us, the same reason for both, because we do not deserve, and it does us some little harm and absolutely no good.
And with a heavy sigh, the thing making a familiar shift into deep and deeply held sadness, I think, five fucking years on the therapists couch, refusing the whole time to ever go prone on the thing, rather always sitting upright. And that better than five years ago, and still I am having to drag up these utterly obvious realizations, the fact that it hurts when I do this is a sufficient justification to stop doing it.
Thus with the beginning of the intermittent new shit, I guess, while I continue to reconstruct the archives of the defunct Spirit of Salt weblog in this all but untrafficked, hastily erected temple of badly managed commerce. Thinking, I deliberately elected to skive yesterday's song of the day to avoid starting a new year writing this kind of shit, this personal depression existential psychology shit, but there it is.
And with a heavy sigh, the thing making a familiar shift into deep and deeply held sadness, I think, five fucking years on the therapists couch, refusing the whole time to ever go prone on the thing, rather always sitting upright. And that better than five years ago, and still I am having to drag up these utterly obvious realizations, the fact that it hurts when I do this is a sufficient justification to stop doing it.
Thus with the beginning of the intermittent new shit, I guess, while I continue to reconstruct the archives of the defunct Spirit of Salt weblog in this all but untrafficked, hastily erected temple of badly managed commerce. Thinking, I deliberately elected to skive yesterday's song of the day to avoid starting a new year writing this kind of shit, this personal depression existential psychology shit, but there it is.
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