Shared Practice II -- after Hoagland

TSA

after Tony Hoagland's Argentina

Though at first

my country viewed your country with suspicion,

given some of the external similarities

you have with other terrorist nations,

After these many months of unbroken peace,

and as our Intelligence has acquired

a more accurate understanding of your country's political history,

cultural norms, the infrastructure that supports you,

your resources, the character of your executive head,

You were finally removed from our terrorist watch-list

and travel between our two lands was made possible.

When it was found that both of our nations

could benefit from each-other's resources,

trade began, and on its heels a booming hospitality industry.

But – you know you can never be too careful –

We still screened all passengers coming too and fro

Sure, it inhibited travel a teensy bit, and the travelers grumbled,

but, our nation's history shows us

that you should never let your guard down entirely.

But then one day, all of a sudden, all of our TSA agents left.

It's not clear whether they were fired en masse,

or left of their own accord in a union exodus,

but whatever their cause, on July 14^th, they put down their bomb-wands

took off their blue plastic gloves, shut down their scanners,

left their badges at the door, and walked out.

At first the travelers – who by this time were all

going to your nation, since it was found

that there really was no better place to be, were dismayed!

Was it still safe to travel? What ever shall be done?!

For an hour or two they just milled about, lost.

But then they started talking with one another,

and those who had been to your nation told those who had never

about what joy was to be found there, and they decided to take their flights all the same.

In no time at all, the exchange between us picked-up,

and not only that, the flights soon doubled in number.

People had forgotten how wonderful traveling could be!

and, unsullied by pat-downs and baggage-checks,

They arrived on each of our soils happier than ever –

many, in fact, chose to turn their vacation into a permanent move,

a turn of events that has benefited both of our economies tremendously:

Since they both produce for the one, and send profit back to the other.

A happy exchange indeed,

and all because of that one, mysterious day,

when the TSA decided it would be its last.

And if you've done any therapy at all,

I think you'll see the analogy. :)

Shared Practice I -- after Millay

Ok, so, Gabo (Gabriel Garza) had/has this art-project idea of collaborating with famous artists by imitating their style, subjects, and framing, but "re-mixing" it somehow so as to offer expansion or critique of the artists' original idea. He put it more elaborately than that. Anyways, I realized I liked the same concept in poetry, and so have been doing some "Shared Practice" poems of my own. Here it is, and, following it, in separate posts, some more. These have been done over the last 9 months.

So, here is Bluebeard

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

THIS door you might not open, and you did;

So enter now, and see for what slight thing

You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,

No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring

The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain

For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,

But only what you see…. Look yet again—

An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.

Yet this alone out of my life I kept

Unto myself, lest any know me quite ;

And you did so profane me when you crept

Unto the threshold of this room to-night

That I must never more behold your face.

This now is yours. I seek another place.

and here is mine:

When 'Alone' means 'Together'

after Millay's Bluebeard

You must get over yourself, sad Bluebeard!

What, what was so precious in that cold room

That you must now get up and act so weird?

Why choose the morsel when there is a boon?

For Love can't stand a secret, hiding out

Because love is light; it must rout darkness

So don't be so stunned that she went about

And found your silly nook sans your largess.

Turn back! Go back into your worthless home,

Give her the blue-prints, the keys to the door

Invite a re-model; give up your tomb

Into her hands to be made new: un-poor

It's not too late to change reclusive ways;

Homes built together are the ones that stay.

Pete

Pete Seeger was a goddamn mensch who chopped his own firewood into his nineties, who pled the First Amendment in front of HUAC, who inscribed "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" on his banjo, who quit his band when they wanted to record a cigarette jingle...in 1958.  This much you can read on any news site this week.  And while I'm in awe of the man on a political and historical level (How many of that steely-eyed Old Left are still with us? How many still living worked with Woody Guthrie in his prime?), I am most grateful for Pete the musician.  

These days we like our folk music rough-hewn, we like Dylan and John Fahey and Joanna Newsom, grainy 78s--music with nettles to ward off the would-be convert.  Not so with Pete.  His interpretations have a polished, crystalline quality.  Their beauty is wide open to the listener, any fool can hear it.  Listen to his version of "Dink's Song." Listen to it a few times, it's short:  

He was a hell of a banjo player, but here he does the absolute simplest thing, just brushing his fingers across the strings in an arpeggio, up, then down, then up again.  It's something you'd do idly, waiting for a bus at a dusty crossroads.

But his voice.  The melody is a slip of a thing, and it's just repeated over and over, but listen to how he gently nudges it from verse to verse, so that there is a progression and emotion.  Listen to him sing "you'll call my name / and I'll be gone."  He phrases it like Miles Davis might play it, shadowboxing the meter, or plain ignores it like old folkies do. Listen to how he kneads a little microcosm of emotions into each syllable.  I love the way his voice cracks ever so slightly around 1:50.  This kind of casual virtuosity is what I love about Pete.  "It's the singer, not the song," is what they say in jazz, and it's even truer in folk, but Pete seemed totally uninterested in showing off his own chops. I'd imagine he'd prefer to see his performances as an unsmudged window through which the listener might see the songs themselves, as if such a thing existed.  Now there's idealism for you.

(Readers--for I'm told there are a few--if you haven't met Pete than run, don't walk, to the two-disc reissue of We Shall Overcome: Live at Carnegie Hall, a recording of a 1963 concert that shows what he could do all alone on stage.)

Re Adventures in the Bible

Wow!

I am thrilled that this here blog has been re-vitalised! Thanks, Mark!
Also - despite a nearly two year hiatus, we still have a readership! Hodgen texted me today about it!

Ok, so, to this last post of yours:

No, your observations/connections are definitely not Seminary 101! More like 601, at least.
I just love how your brain is ticking in this regard -- I hadn't considered either of the symmetries you mentioned; both are brilliant.
This sort of mode of reading the Scriptures is akin to how the Fathers read the Scriptures, i.e. intertextually -- making the connection between different parts of the whole thing. However, the fathers usually work within more of a type/antitype parallel, ('a' -> 'A') rather than narrative inversions, ironies, etc. I.e. the Fathers are more prone to see Noah's ark as an embodied figure (a 'type') for the Church (the antitype -- the real thing to which the historical antecedent was a gesture towards) -- saving the faithful from judgment. That sort of thing. Your observations are more large scale, and work on a principle of inversion/mirroring: ("you men shall become gods" :: "God became man"), which is very awesome.

Two places come to mind where I have encountered something similar to this specific hermeneutical sub-species of yours:
1) Orthodox hymnography, where the ironic turns, the paradoxes, etc. within the Scriptures are sometimes brought out similarly.
I have only had minimal exposure to this: all I can think of are some specific Marian hymns with lines like, "you contained the uncontainable", and stuff like that. Or symmetries like: "As Eve was brought forth from the side of Adam, so the Church was brought forth, by water (baptism) and blood (Eucharist) from the side of the second Adam." and stuff like that. Perhaps Hodgen might have some more leads? One of the crown princes of hymnography was Ephraim the Syrian, which you might enjoy perusing.

& 2) St. Paul often makes similar kind of moves, though on a slightly smaller scale: "He who knew no sin, became sin" (2Cor 5:21), "through the trespass of the Jews, salvation has come to the gentiles" (Rom 11:11), "my strength is made perfect in weakness" (2Cor 12:9), "Just as sin came through one man, so righteousness has come through one man." Stuff like that.

To your question of "can we draw theological notions?" from this way of reading, the answer is "yes", as long as the symmetry/parallel is within the Rule of Faith. What I mean is: the Scriptures are multivalent enough, by their nature (in defense of this, check out S. Thomas' "I answer that" to I.I. Q1.10) that the Church is always exploring new depths of meaning and inter-connection within them. Our modern, human-author-centric view cramps our style in this regard, the Fathers were not so bound. When the Fathers read Scripture, they weren't inventing fanciful reflections, they were really exegeting the text. BUT -- they were reading the Scriptures through the lens of the person of Christ, which drastically re-casts all of it. (see Luk 24:44 also, in this vein, and very on topic for a 'Bible as Literature' thread, you might really dig this piece. It changed my reading of Scripture, and my appreciation for the Fathers greatly). In so doing, in some sense they knew what they were looking for (Christ) in any passage (Eden, Flood, etc) before they found it.

The ESSENTIAL bound to this modus lectionis is that all readings be tested, proved by the Rule of Faith -- i.e. the Catholic faith (of which something like the Nicene Creed is a good quick-reference rule). Early gnostics (Valentinians, Saturninians, etc) would, using a similar hermeneutical approach, but construct crazy alternate stories. E.g. "well, the Tree of Knowledge prefigures the wood of the Cross, and since Satan tempted toward the first tree, God actually wants us to resist the 'temptation' to follow Christ" or blasphemous drivel like this. What makes this "read" wrong is not the method per se, but the fact that they were using this method to their own inventive ends, rather than as servants to reveal the mystery of the Catholic faith once deposited to the Church. No novelty! And this is "what we can draw" (as you have done in your post! thank you!) from such typological or inversive recognitions within the canon of Scripture: deeper illumination of the unplumbable wonder of the Gospel of Jesus, which (hopefully, and often) has on its heels the inculcation of awe and worship in the heart of those who would contemplate such things (hello, readers!)

I.e. Nice work!

P.s. Re the Poetry posts, Readers -- I responded to the first in a private letter, not knowing that any of you still saw this. Mark, maybe you could scan the relevant section and put it up?
To the second, I shall respond sometime when I'm not planning a wedding and approaching finals week in Grad School...

Adventures in "the Bible as literature"

There's maybe one more thing I have to say about poetry and grief, but I am going to take a break from that to throw out two little symmetries in the Bible that I've been thinking about:

• The Incarnation as an ironic fulfillment of the serpent's false promise: not that we shall become like God, but that God will become man! This is laid out right there in the text, of course, in the "he shall bruise your head / and you shall bruise his heel" bit.  But thinking about it in light of the serpent's own words makes him (the serpent) a bit a Greek tragic hero, in the sense that his hubristic words outline his own downfall.
• Calvary as an inversion of the Flood.  Flood: everyone is sinning, kill them all except this one righteous man.  Calvary: everyone is sinning, kill the one righteous man.

So tell me, Ben, are these parallels Seminary 101? I won't lie, I was a little proud of intuiting them, but surely others have pointed them out before.  I think these things are neat, but can we draw any theological notions from them? Let's converse!

Poetry and grief, pt 2: what we talk about when we talk at funerals

A curious side phenomenon of death in the family: for a while there I was surrounded by three distinct vocabularies.  There was the sterile, intensely neutral language of the medical world—stiff latinate ways to describe terrible things (hemiparesis, glioblastoma multiforme, cerebral edema) or else ultramodern made-up words for treatments that sort of help (dexamethasone, gamma knife, Keppra).  This is a form of comfort.  What is being experienced has a name, it is documented, it can be spoken of as an abstraction that exists outside your own story.  Ultimately you play a passive role.  This tumor behaves this way because tumors always do so.  The medicine will relieve these symptoms because its chemistry is designed that way.  The impression is of impersonal forces struggling somewhere only vaguely connected with the sterile room you're in. This vocabulary mitigates anger, makes it understandable when the impersonal struggle concludes with the familiar TV doctor's line: We did everything we could.

Contrast that with vocabulary #2, the clanging triumphalist imagery the evangelical church uses to speak of death.  Where medical jargon uses the passive voice, this is intensely active.  Illness is rewritten as battle, death as reward, the departed inevitably 'brave,' whether or not the speaker has any idea how they faced their suffering.  Because the personal narrative—I once was lost but now am found—is the driving force of evangelicalism, there's an intense pressure to put positive closure on tragedy, quickly.  We forget the pains Paul takes to remind us that death is the last enemy to be destroyed.  Hence the martial metaphors, mentions of glorified bodies and reunions in the afterlife, and ceaseless references to God's plan.¹  All of this encourages the crafting of a sentence whose fulcrum is the word 'but'.  Its crudest form goes something like, "life is hard, but God is good."  That little conjunction becomes a lifeline.  It marks the difference between sympathy and reassurance.  In nearly every conversation I had with someone from my parents' church, I felt a expectation to produce some variation on this sentiment, to add that 'but' clause.  And when I did, I imagined I could see my interlocutor's relief.  It was like resolving a dissonant chord.

These vocabularies are not, of course, universal, but there are always layers of language around death.  The actual raw data of the event is discussed (maybe) by the eceased's inner circle and by those outside it—"What happened?" "Really? Shit."— but never between the two.  Every other conversation is buffered, filtered through some narrative: the story the bereaved tell others, the story those others tell the bereaved, the story packaged for all involved by disinterested outsiders.  This last varies.  It could be and has been communal myths, rituals, orders, and liturgies.  Yet in America one type of external narrative is encountered by everyone but everyone, regardless of nation, color, or creed, in the third vocabulary, the flourescent pastoralism of the sympathy industry.  To interact with undertakers is to fall through the lookingglass into a place where everything looks like a (respectfully muted) Thomas Kincaid painting .  "Respect" is a big word in this world, as are "dignity," "fullness," "honor," "legacy," and so on.  Like the triumphal language of Evangelicals, this cant owes something to the military, or even better, to politics.  These are big words, they belong to a very public type of rhetoric, and as such they have been ballooned out to cover whole generations, people groups, and nations.  It is very hard to get them to shrink down again to the size of a single person.  They have lost whatever elasticity they might have once had.  They might work in a funeral oration in Shakespeare, but when a business applies them across the board² to people who by the nature of the enterprise could not have been known to them, well, it's like listening to a lush orchestration of "Chopsticks."  All of this is made more disconcerting by the constant back-of-the-mind fact that someone's making money from this.  The prayer card, for example, is obviously mass-produced.  You leaf through a book with about 200 options, each painting more saccharine than the last, the possible texts nauseating and false.³  You can see the focus group coordinator in her purple knit sweater: What words do you think of when I say 'memory'? How about 'compassion'? Can you arrange these pictures in order of most to least comforting? (We chose a simple picture of praying hands b/w Psalm 24.  They messed up and we got Psalm 23 instead.)  The really wild thing about this is that there are no other options.  Rules of supply and demand indicate that Kincaidiana is what I want, is the language I wish to speak in time of sorrow.

I'm unclear what was worse, the thick ironies that seemed to keep me from actually feeling anything during this time, or the fact that so many people around me seemed to feel this olla podrida of sentiments is totally normal.  Or the deep and gnawing intimation that I am somehow self-narcotizing, that I am truly missing something, not 'in touch with my feelings,' as the grief booklets say.  It is a source of tremendous comfort that Dickinson went down this road long before me.  But so at the time my mom died, those three vocabularies were clonking around attempting to lay claim to various pieces of my heart, and the whole thing started to feel like a bad postmodern dream, the ridiculous dining out on the sublime and vice versa.  That is to say, exactly like an Ashbery poem.⁴

[Footnotes after the jump, I'm experimenting with HTML.]

Where Mark's brain has been, pt 1: The mooring of starting out

Jacobs has talked about the blog form as an opportunity for writing essays in installments.  I want to try something along those lines:

---

When my mom died, around a year and a half ago, I started reading a lot of poetry.  I hadn't done much of that for some time.  But I expected poetry to be a source of solace, and it was, and still is.  Maybe, initially, it had something to do with the fact that many poems are short, and thus look suspiciously like Easy Answers.  But the exact source of solace I ended up locating, or at least a home for the confusion and anxiety of grief, was a surprise: I started reading a lot of what you’d maybe call difficult poetry.  By which I mean poems of seeming anti-meaning that don’t yield their secrets easily if at all.  Not the bleeding experimental edge, mind you.  No, the stuff I'm dipping into is relatively tame; stuff that's always threatening to coalesce into meaning or melody—Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham, Kenneth Koch, and most of all John Ashbery.

One would expect the mourner to look for poems rife with clear Truths, gentle cycle-of-life meditations about the Body Of The World and the Overwhelming Splendor Of It All.  Poems of comfort.  Things like this, or this, or this (all picked, I swear, at random from last few months of WA archives¹).  So much of the language my family heard from friends and cards seems to hustle us in that direction, to offer alchemical formulae to transmute loss into meaning, and pronto.  But the poems I read and listened to (courtesy of the magnificent Penn Sound Archives) don’t seem particularly interested in catharsis, or even legibility—they don’t give a fig about my personal grief.  Their starting point here is—well, I don't know.  Sounds, yes; arresting juxtapositions in the surrealist tradition, sure; certain ideas about the act of artistic creation, probably.  But there's no embarking from any spontaneous overflows of powerful emotion, and if something is being recollected, it is difficult to discern whether from a state of tranquility or what. Still, like the creation myth where the world is made of scraps idly swept from the gods' table, these guys write such dense stuff that certain lines and half-lines can't help but cloak my own rejected thoughts in alienated majesty.

For example, take the delightful moment in Ashbery's very, very long poem "The Skaters" where he announces, "It is time now for a general understanding  / of the meaning of all this."  In a 1964 recording of the poem, this line is received with laughter.  It is hilariously straightforward, but perhaps the laughter contains a little relief as well—if he's making a joke about meaning, he must know that this poem is difficult.  Up to this point, we were worried that maybe, just maybe, we were missing some point that was obvious to everyone else.²    Of course what follows is only an explanation of why he won't explain anything, and it's not easy even to get that out of it.  But then there's a startling sort of aside:

...Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.
Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves.

I do not believe Ashbery intended to evoke the feeling of grief's tapering off, the guilt at sliding back into normal life.  Nor was he trying to describe the anxiety that I'd forget my mom's face and voice.  But when I hear these lines, I can't not feel those things, rendered as crisp and perfect as if Raymond Carver had done it.

Which sounds a lot like I've snuck the sympathy cards’ grubby scramble for Meaning into the avant garde, doesn't it? What a hermeneutical faux pas, especially in a poem that, if it's about anything, is about 'skating' blithely across the surface of meaning.  Hypocrite lecteur! Surely this is a shallow and limited way to read a poem, just naked projection, right?

If there's a defense of this method, it's that the fractured and dense nature of the poems I'm talking about keep these moments from coming too easy or too often.  Any measure of comfort is found, paradoxically, because the poet isn't generally offering any comfort.  There's some scrounging on my part to find it, there's no takeaway in big pastel script.  And in that it seems so much more like messy real life than any tidy, epiphany-driven 'grief' poem.  What I wanted in the months after mom died wasn't kindly sages to illuminate my path—that feels (to me, which may reveal more about my attitudes that the poets') patronizing and facile.  Instead I found myself looking for fellow-travelers, other voices in the dark to articulate and give texture to its darkness, as Brecht describes:

In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times. 

¹While the Keilloriana of Good Poems has been kind of a drag, some of the hoariest bits of the canon have come crawling out of high school anthologies to make new sense: Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins; even musty old "Dover Beach" and its midnight anti-epiphany turned out to be kind of profoundly moving when I read it after mom's funeral while my wife slept beside me.
²If we do miss the point, we're in good company: Auden awarded Ashbery the Yale Younger Poet's Prize, then later claimed not to have understood a word of the manuscript.

Built Me A Pub...

What do you do if you can't afford beer at the Local, and long to live in a world where there is a charming, homey Pub just down the road (cf. 19th c. Britain)? Build your own!

http://blog.nashotah.edu/blog/2011/11/10/the-cellar-nashotah-houses-very-own-pub/

You're welcome, Nashotah House :)

Turning the tables...again.

So, I remember being rebuffed in theology classes at Wheaton for "allowing anthropology to inform my theology." That is - ascribing to God characteristics that are characteristically human. Bad, young theologian! We got it the wrong way around - what we need is a theological anthropology!

I took the rebuff and have since tried to avoid this error of humanifying the Godhead.

BUT - I just realized the other day as I was reading Ireneaus' robust account of humans-as-Image-bearers (in 'On The Apostolic Preaching') that this table turns on itself. I mean - if we fully allow our understanding of what a human is to be primarily informed by theology - then we claim that we humans bear the very image of what is true about God. That is, something about how we function and what we're made of (e.g. the fact that we have a body and a spirit, etc), is like how God is in godself.†

So - if this is a given (a dogmatic presupposition, of course, but that is the realm of the presenting rebuff i recevied, so, not inappropriate), then we actually can learn what God is like by looking at what is human. In more boring language: if our anthropology is theological, then our theology can be anthropological! So - maybe when the first person of the Godhead is referred to as 'Father', this is not just some metaphoric (or even analogic?, any readers know how S.Thomas parses this one?) ascription of a human concept on to an ineffable 'God-concept', but rather - God made humans in such a way—by having us be born from eachother, to have fathers, each of us, etc.—that it shows us a living example of how the Unseen functions. So when we profess - 'Eternally begotten of the Father' in the creed - it is like, literally, how we know Fathers to relate to Sons - that sons come from fathers, etc. likewise, The Son comes from The Father.

Boom! take that, Wheaton prof's! I intend on reflecting on this idea further - I have a feeling some gems might come of it.

I also like it as a sort of rationale for the lines I find myself thinking along, especially on this here blog.

†Furthermore - when the second person of the trinity assumed humanity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth - even fallen humanity became once and for all brought up into the God-head, and as we are being re-made into the image of righteousness by the Holy Spirit within us, we (who are, at the first and as a base-line, already image-bearers), are being made into the very likeness (a category higher than 'image', as developed by several church fathers, i think Didymus the Blind chiefly among them) of Christ - the second person of the Godhead. That is - we are even closer to looking like God now, thanks to the work of the 2nd and 3rd members of the trinity.

Bright and Vivid

I have seen a handful of YouTube videos in recent months that I realize, upon reflection, are actually visions of the Kingdom. That is - of how life can be now, and how it will be in the Age to Come. So here they are, i don't mean them (the content of the videos) literally per se, only that they are sort of living-parables of that ineffable joy and overflowing goodness that I believe is to be found only in YHWH; brief but vivid glimpses into what we hope for:

- So there's this,

- this (minus the sappy soundtrack. Ok, maybe with the sappy soundtrack :))

- and lastly, an oldie (in internet-time) but a goodie. I know you've seen it before, but watch it again, at least until the weeping-breakdown at 1:05. Gets me everytime.

I heard the phrase "an embarrasment of riches" today - a phrase I had forgotten till I heard it oncemore - and I just love it (the phrase). And i feel like it sums up something of these videos, too.

Uh oh - crazy thought (that also ties several other blog-thoughts together, too)

So, I just picked up this book of sayings of the desert fathers. You know - figured I'd take a gander - see what they have to offer. And - it's CRAZY. These dudes were so severe, and it's all demons and devils and what not. I am tempted to dismiss it out of hand as just the "hallucinations" resulting from weeks with no food and little water and an incessant desert sun. And then somewhere between these thoughts I realized its not really ok for me to think along such lines (of dismissal based on the interpretation of 'hallucinations'). I keep using quote marks around 'hallucinations' because that is just what we neuro-scientists categorize them as, when, on the contrary, the phenomenon presents itself as: In order to be able to see the spiritual realm, you need to fast. Clear and simple with no neuro-schmeuro nonsense. This surface (yet deepest [eidos]) interpretation is also far more compatible with the world the New Testament speaks of. So - all of the sudden I am left dumb-founded that maybe it's all real: all the monks' stories, all the crazy demons and what not. And if this is the case - then I need to re-adjust my life accordingly! For starters - maybe giving fasting a try. (So bloody difficult!) Also - reading classic Christian texts with much more credulity than my skeptical modern eyes usually afford them. But most of all - clinging ever tighter to the Christ who is my savior!

I have now lived 25 years on this earth

And how happy I am for all these years of life. Vis-a-vis this blog - how happy I am to have had these several years of dialogue and friendship with you, Mark, and all ye readers with whom I have likewise enjoyed the rich pleasure of armchair philosophizing.

Also - in recognition of this quarter century, and because of the hundreds of COPD patients I have seen at the medical hospital - I quit smoking! About 36 hrs ago. Didn't sleep a wink this night, but am over the moon about my new status as a non-smoker.

Remember those nights where we would get a bit tipsy, and then in the middle of the night I would stumble awake and throw away our cigarettes? Well I am finally honoring that uninhibited impulse once and for all. :)

I changed my profile pic in recognition of this.

Also, as eager as I am to put this in writing to seal the deal, this shall also be the last you will ever hear of it from me. Nothing more annoying than that guy who always talks about how long he's gone without, etc. How he "used to be one of those" etc. Yuck.

Also, to any of ye readers ever looking to do the same, I highly recommend this book (hat tip: my dear friend Tony Kaehny). Takes all of 20 minutes to read, but is an amazing tool which I am leaning on in these first couple weeks while the physical withdrawals subside.

Psychoanalytic findings as myth-making

On a couple occasions lately I have been speaking with someone who (over)shared some snippet of their past as it relates to their future. Y'all know of what I speak - like, when someone says, "well, I have deep trust issues because when I was 8 my Dad forgot to pick me up from soccer practice". Ok, that's a rather demure example, but that sort of statement. Anyway - while I have no doubt that our current ways of thinking and acting are formed by our experiences in the developmental years, when people pin it down to specific incidents, or specific people that 'wounded' them, I have this gut-sense that the thing they are labeling as the offender and the cause of their problems isn't really the cause of the problem. Rather - the things we latch on to that we use to explain current psychological problems actually are just the myths that we create for ourselves in order to comprehend our own story. That is - in the same way the greek myths help to explain things - even if only in a sort of chthonic, vague way - like, Cupid (romantic attraction) is the child of Eros and Psyche, etc. likewise - identifying and creating a narrative of our own childhood hurts, help us to conceive of our real, deeper hurt. I need to clarify a little: not that the pain-stories we tell (or discover when psychoanalysed) are made-up (although - I reckon they can be, and can still be useful), indeed they can be very real instances of abuse, neglect or false-standards, but when we label these things as the cause, we miss the mark a little. I think these things are not the real root of our pain; but rather - our specific painful memories allow us to point to and to access a deeper, more original pain (original sin?) that we all really do have. That is - there is some deep hole or scar or something in all of us, which we are doomed to live out of regardless of how our childhoods were. The myths we tell then, do allow us to describe the specific form our original-pain has taken as it has unfolded in our lives, but we err if we label the myth itself as the thing.

Secondarily to this - we all know some people who are just totally stuck on the painful elements in their past. Now, if their childhood was one full of trauma - this is entirely understandable, however, I think the problem here is that they have chosen their pain-myths as the most foundational narratives to their identity. This is problematic. Let there be no mistake - it is absolutely necessary to process past trauma, if there is some, with a therapist, and this can of course take years to fully work out, but if - even through the course of therapy (and this is the problem with the pop-version of psychoanalysis that is wide-spread) - these pain-stories are allowed first place in the category of 'stories that define our lives', then we will inevitably be stuck in our pain (and also think that the myths are the real source of it all - rather than something more original, that I was arguing earlier). I think this is where the Christian story has something very real and practical to help we, the hurting (that is - all of us): God has revealed that what is most true about us is that we are made by God, and that we bear God's image, and that this has been restored to us in Christ. That the truest thing about us is the glory we bear. C.S. Lewis comes to this a lot (Weight of Glory, the lessons in the Narnia stories), and he is right. Our pain - the primal, original kind; that is, the ache in all of us, and the specific pains we experienced and that effected our development are a secondary element to our identity.

Anyways, you buy it?

cosmic curiosity

I just don't know what it says about God that in creation we find inter-filament (a filament is a collection of super-clusters of galaxies) voids that are areas of space with NOTHING in them for spans of 500 million light-years! in case you forgot your math - that's 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, WITH NOTHING - NOT EVEN DUST - IN IT!
That's just crazy amounts of space. And for some reason it freaks me out. Such large quantities of absence just don't fit with the character of YHWH as he has revealed himself in specific revelation, no?
Anyways - it troubles me.

Brain-Chemistry is Lame, pt II - an anecdote

As an example of how much better it is to not have the language of brain-chemistry littered in our conversation or understanding, compare this Orwell passage on a cup of tea (1946), with how people these days brashly talk about "caffeine":

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.

(Taken from this excellent essay)