For the Bear

Over the last few years, I had someone lovely and unexpected come into my life — I nicknamed him ‘the Bear’.  There have been several rough patches during these years and always the Bear was there for me.  At my lowest moments, he would come and sit silently with me… just letting me know I was loved.  When I broke my ankle, he would help me to and from the bathroom.  When I was returning from a long and stressful day at work, he would often meet me afterwards with joy and affection.  When my wife was away visiting family, he always helped me pass the time.
I told him everything; we played, we fought, we laughed, we cried.  Through it all, all he ever asked was to love and to be loved.
Then about two weeks ago, the Bear started getting sick.  He got worse and worse, and late one night last week, I had to rush him to the emergency hospital because he was in a lot of pain.  I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I knew I wanted to be there for him… after everything he had helped me through, I was going to make sure that I was there for him to help him through.
But I couldn’t be there for him… and my friend died that night.  Before he passed away, I held him in my arms and cried so hard that no sound could come out.  I said goodbye, I said I loved him, I said I was sorry… and then he was gone.  I think the last pieces holding together my slowly breaking heart gave out that night.
So long, Bear, you were beautiful and full of love.  I’ll miss you buddy.  Life won’t be the same without you.

The Bear

That's Life (and death)

All of us are thrown into the world — into our own historical moments and our own specific locations — through no choice of our own.  We do not arrive equipped to deal with this coming-into-being.  We simply were not, and then we were.
Then, before we have a chance to be anything different, we are broken.  Each of us in our own way — some through illness, some through abuse, some through being lied to and misled, some through abandonment, some through random chance and accident — but each and every one of us is broken.
So, first we come to be, then we come to be broken and — if we survive this breaking — we learn how to be in this experience of non-being.  We continue to live, but we now live life as those forever scarred by Death.  Sometimes, if we have the energy for it, we marvel at this.  How can so many with such deep scars continue to awaken every morning?  Is that a blessing or a curse?  Or are all of our blessings also curses?
Because the fact of the matter is that the world we live in is a giant bloody clusterfuck.  Nobody asked for this, and nobody asked to be here, but here we are and we’re all trying to find our way.  Nobody came equipped with a map or a code of conduct, so we all flail and grope and love and fuck each other over.  We give life to one another and we take it from one another, and half the time we’re not sure which it is we’re doing.
This is why we can never condemn others, no matter what they do.  For example, my experiences of this world (of this giant bloody clusterfuck) may have taught me to try and live peaceably, but the experiences of another may have taught that person to live violently.  Each of us in our own ways would then be doing our damnedest to live honestly in light of what we have known (and in light of the shitstorm into which we have been thrown).  So, while we can certainly respond more or less positively to the actions taken by other people, we are never in a place to judge a person as a person.  The truth is that nobody — not a single one of us — ever had a chance.  We’re all surviving and while I may think one person’s mode of survival is more admirable than another person’s mode, this does not mean I can condemn that other person for surviving in a different way.
All I can do is ask that we try to live honestly in light of this. Because that’s life, baby.  That’s life.

October Books

Well, I’ve had a couple weightier tomes on the go for awhile now, but I wasn’t able to finish them last month… so just fiction and lit. on the list.
1. The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner.
This is the second novel I’ve read by Stegner and I think he is growing on me.  His writing reminds me of Steinbeck and Hardy… but not quite as good.  Of course, Steinbeck and Hardy set the bar impossibly high, so don’t be put off — this is still a very enjoyable book.
In it, Stegner tells us the story of Elsa and Bo Mason — from their youth on through to their old age, which also takes us through from the childhood to mid-life of their sons, Chester and Bruce.  The story is set in North America in the early twentieth-century and it speaks of the struggle to survive, the challenge of conflicting desires, accepting the consequences of one’s choices, and living in light of that which is beyond one’s control.  Recommended reading.
2. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
Well, I continue to chip away at McCarthy but I think that this is my least favourite of the books I have read by him.  Perhaps it was because I had already seen the movie and so the plot did not pull me in as much, as I knew what to expect (speaking of the movie, after reading the novel, I think they did an excellent job casting the central characters).  Of course, all this is not to suggest that this was a crummy novel.  It’s a good book.  The characters are very well crafted, the various narrative voices are well employed, and the ongoing action or tension causes the reader to press on.
(I’m not actually mentioning the plot because I’m assuming most people are familiar with it from the movie.)
3. Blindness by José Saramago.
Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book about an epidemic of (white) blindness that suddenly descends upon an unnamed town (and presumably spreads to the rest of the world).  What then results — first the quarantine imposed upon the blind (as they are isolated within an old insane asylum) and what happens there, and then the general collapse of society as everyone is stricken blind — is probably a fairly honest portrayal of how humans tend to react to crises.  Some band together to try and care for each other, some band together to exploit others, everyone’s hands get dirty and, at the end of the day, most everybody is just trying to stay alive (no matter what that might end up costing others… including loved ones).
Saramago also has an interesting writing style.  He never uses proper names for characters (but calls them “The Doctor’s Wife”, “The Girl with Dark Glasses” and so on), he writes massive run-on sentences (using commas as periods) and often doesn’t distinguish in-text dialog from commentary (ensuring that the reader must pay attention to who might be talking and when).  Generally I’m not a fan of this style of writing but I found that it worked for me in Blindness and drew me into the story.
4. Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke.
As I’ve been more and more impressed with Rilke (see item #5), I was happy to find a great German/English copy of the Duino Elegies (which some people have called the greatest piece of poetry written in the twentieth-century) and The Sonnets to Orpheus.  The Sonnets didn’t do much for me, but certain passages from the Elegies rate amongst the best writing I’ve read.  Ever.  This is what poetry should be like — it should knock the wind out of you and leave you full of wonder and longing, sorrow and gratitude.  For example, read the opening lines of the first elegy:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence.  For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us.  Every angel is terrifying.
Or look at this from the conclusion of the fourth elegy:
But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.
There is so much more I could quote, but I’ll just go with one more, from the ninth elegy:
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us.  Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing.  Just once; no more.  And we too,
just once. and never again.  But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
My God.  My God.
5. The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya.
Well, I’m not sure if this really counts as “reading” but, um, I did read the two page intro (and all the picture captions!) so, what the hell, I’ll add it to my list.  Basically, this book presents the reader with a series of prints Goya made based upon the Spanish insurrection (against the French) that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth-century.  The pictures are stark, brutal and devastating — portraying everything from the mutilation of corpses to (what is about to become) gang rape — and act as a condemnation of war and the violence that people practice against other people.
I originally picked up this book, because I was doing some research for a piece of art I’m getting done.  The Disasters of War is certainly a powerful series but, in terms of my own interests, I find myself even more strongly attracted to the work of Käthe Kollwitz.  Sometimes I wonder why I’m so strongly drawn to such stark portrayals of death in art…

There are no 'good' or 'bad' People

In the work that I have done over the years, and in the lifestyle I have tried to live, people sometimes ask me why I desire to spend my time with others who have done ‘such bad things’.  When I am asked this question, I often find myself thinking:

Hey, where are all the ‘good things’ that everybody else is supposedly doing?  If these are the ‘bad people’ what makes you so good?

Because I think most people are restricting their sense of goodness to the things they do not do — or at least the things they do not do explicitly.  Truth is, when you dig down a little, all of us are child abusers, murderers, and thieves.  All of us are walking around with the blood of others in our clothes, in our food, and in our hair.  So, as far as I can tell, it’s never been a question of hanging around with ‘bad people’ or ‘good people’.  That’s not the issue here.  There are no ‘good’ people and there are no ‘bad’ people… there are only people.  Beautiful but broken.  Longing for life and in bondage to death.  Every one of us a bastard, and every one of us beloved.  That’s all.

September Books

Well, my wife and son were away visiting family for most of this month so I was able to catch up on a bit of pleasure reading (not to mention thesis writing!).  Here are the latest:
1. The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes.
There is always something interesting about reading so-called ‘outsiders’ perspectives on Paul (i.e. the perspectives of those who fall outside of the narrow guild of New Testament and Pauline studies).  Often, I think, such ‘outsiders’ are able to grasp essential points that many ‘insiders’ miss because of their own rootedness within particular traditions and their own dogmatic upbringings.  So, coming to Taubes, I think that his lectures on Paul are very close to the mark — certainly on the political level, where he reads Paul has dramatically and subversively political — and the way he reads Paul in dialogue with voices like Barth, Schmitt, Nietzche, and Freud is very enlightening (I believe that it was also Taubes who was responsible for leading people like Badiou and then Zizek to look at Paul).
I also appreciate the way in which Taubes presents his material — he speaks with humility, brushes off a lot of issues that are unimportant to him, and frequently employs humour… but does all of this in a way that still cuts deeply into the discussion of Paul.  I would recommend this book to anybody who is interested in the nexus between Paul, politics, and philosophy.
2. The Folly of Prayer: Practicing the Presence and Absence of God by Matt Woodley (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009).
Many thanks to Adrianna at IVP for this review copy!
This year I decided to begin reading some more popular-level Christian books, just to get a feel for what is going on out there.  As a part of doing that, I read Holy Fools by Matt Woodley and was happily surprised by how good it was (see my review here).  Consequently, I came to this book (another popular-level book) with expectations I would not have had otherwise.
Unfortunately, they were disappointed.  While I continue to appreciate Woodley’s tone and the way in which he raises difficult questions around matters like godforsakenness, I found that most of his suggestions or solutions lacked the depth I had found in his prior book.  Don’t get me wrong, I am very glad that Woodley honestly confronts the experience of being abandoned by God, encountering nothing but silence from God, and lamenting and crying out to (and, perhaps, even against) God, in light of these things.  I imagine that a good many Christians may find this to be liberating (as I did, the first time I started to explore the notions of godforsakenness and lament).  However, when compared to Woodley’s other book, a lot of the content contained in this one felt… fluffy.
Anyway, just to give y’all an idea of the content of this book, Woodley explores twelve different models of prayer.  Prayer as: (1) guttural groaning; (2) skin, trees, blood, bread and wine; (3) desperation; (4) mystery; (5) absence; (6) an argument with God; (7) a long, slow journey; (8) dangerous activity; (9) paying attention; (10) feeling God’s heartbeat; (11) love; and (12) praying.  Ultimately, of course, his goal is that the reader would journey into the act of prayer itself (instead of just reading about prayer) and this is surely a good thing.
3. Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy.
Many critics have described Blood Meridian as Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece — indeed, as one of the masterpieces of American literature.  I have not read enough McCarthy to know if it his best work, but I certainly agree that it is a great novel, and amongst the best that I have read.  There is something about McCarthy’s voice that entrances me.  I find it difficult to describe… some sort of apocalyptic blend of both the violence and beauty of the world, yet presented in such a way that one never feels as though judgment is being passed on any of it.  As if to say: “This is the world in which we live… it’s a bloody clusterfuck, but it’s goddamn beautiful.”
Anyway, Blood Meridian tells the story of a teenager called ‘the kid’ who joined the Glanton Gang in mid-nineteenth century America — a gang of low-lifes and brutes who made money by scalping indians for the bounties offered by the local civic authorities.  Prominent amongst this group of fellows is ‘the judge’ — a fellow of mythic proportions.  Thus, as the gang travels through small towns, deserts, mountains and wastelands — with one violent episode chasing the heels of another — the focus remains mostly upon the (unspoken and unread) thoughts of the kid and the actions and pontifications of the judge.  Really, though, no review or summary is going to do this story any justice — go read the book.
4. Gunnar’s Daughter by Sigrid Undset.
After thoroughly enjoying Undset’s Kristen Lavransdatter trilogy, I thought I would continue reading her writings.  Gunnar’s Daughter is a much shorter and, in some ways, terser, story that mirrors the themes and writing style of the great Icelandic Sagas.  It is the story of Vigdis Gunnarsdatter, how she is courted and then raped by Ljot Gissurson, how she then bears a child, and what follows after.
As with Undset’s larger trilogy, Gunnar’s Daughter is full of fascinating historical details and vividly portrays a world that is now lost and gone.  Furthermore, the characters — their passions, their longings, and the ways in which they self-destruct — strike me as a very real portrayal of people as I imagine them to be.  This is recommended reading.
5. Uncollected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke.
It has been a very long time since I’ve read any poetry, and it has been even longer since I’ve enjoyed reading poetry (when I was younger I really wanted to like reading poetry because I thought it would make me ‘cultured’ but I finally had to give up because it almost always bored me out of my mind).  However, a friend of mine had recently sent me a couple of excerpts from Rilke, and they almost knocked the wind out of me.  So, I decided to go out and pick up a Rilke book.  I’m glad I did.  I find his imagery and voice to be… I don’t know… apocalyptic… devastating and beautiful.  Here are a couple of samples:
Do you still remember: falling stars, how
they leapt slantwise through the sky
like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles
of our wishes–had we so many?–
for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere;
almost every look upward was wedded
to the swift hazard of their play,
and the heart felt itself a single thing
beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance–
and was whole, as though it would survive them!
and
You don’t know nights of love? Don’t
petals of soft words float upon your blood?
Are there no places on your dear body
that keep remembering like eyes?
6 & 7. Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, Vols. 1 & 3, edited by Danzig Baldaev et al.
Over the last little while I have become increasingly fascinated by the multitude of subcultures and lifestyles that people inhabit — from people who are into ‘Live Action Role Playing’ (cf. this movie), to guys who develop personal relationships with sex dolls (cf. this movie), there appear to be endless alternate worlds in which people live and, ultimately, find their deepest sense of identity and value.  Anyway, as I’ve been digging around in this things, I happened to stumble onto Alix Lambert’s documentary on Russian prison tattoos (cf. ‘The Mark of Cain‘).  What I found interesting about this art, is that the images tattooed onto the bodies of the inmates, actually often told their whole life stories, and their entire criminal history — but did so through a series of symbols and (often) through the coded use of religious iconography (where the number of towers on a cathedral represent the number of terms or years served, where a virgin with child means ‘I have been a thief since birth’, where Jesus on the cross represents ‘the king of thieves’, and so on).  This led me to do some more research into this (now pretty much dead) subculture, and led me to Bardaev’s encyclopedia.  The set contains many beautiful pictures, hundreds of sketches, a couple essays on the topic, as well as several stories related to the life lived by the inmate who sported the tattoo at hand.  If you are interested in seeing a sample of the pictures contained in this book you can click this link (but be warned, although some of the tattoos are fascinating or beautiful, a good many are extremely vulgar, sexual, and violent).

While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words…

I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit— I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel.
~ Paul, Ro 9.1-4a
I have given a lot of thought to this passage in Ro 9.  What it says to me, is that Paul was willing to do anything — anything — if he thought that the result of his actions would be life and salvation for the people whom he loved.  Specifically, he appears to be willing to engage in the sort of activities that would get him removed from God’s covenant people, the sort of activities that would cause him to be damned, if he thought that the actions performed would make a difference for his beloved.
Of course, Paul does not write these words as some sort of academic or theorist.  He writes as a person of action, longing not for the best appropriate theological expression, but for the next level of action — the type of activity that might create an apocalyptic rupture, that might create space for an Event.  Thus, he does end up gambling (and finally losing) everything, in his efforts to spread the Spirit of life and the good news of the crucified one who overcame Death.
Now, when I compare this sort of way of thinking and living to what I have encountered amongst those who claim to know Paul intimately — those involved in biblical and theological studies — the contrast is pretty striking.  What we find in this company is endless criticisms — this course of action is not sufficiently trinitarian, that way of thinking is not christocentric, this way of living neglects the fundamentally pneumatological and eschatological nature of New Testament ethics, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.  Of course, what we don’t (generally) find in this company is anything close to the risk-taking and sacrificial activity that Paul himself practiced.
Similarly, when you compare Paul’s approach with the way that many (so-called ‘radical’) Christians approach matters related to social justice, the contrast is stark.  With Paul we find a person who was genuinely and wholly committed to those whom he loved — so much so, that he bore on his body the brand-marks of Jesus (i.e. the disciplinary scars inflicted upon those who dared to resist the Powers).  With Paul we find a person willing to wager it all — even his own salvation — if he thought it would make a difference.  So, how does this compare to most contemporary Christian social justice circles?  In those circles, we hear a lot of talk about justice, we watch some captivating documentaries, we dress up in costumes and engage in a little street theatre or political drama… and then we go home to our places of comfort and privilege and exclusion and feel good about ourselves.  It’s all a bit of a rush, but nothing was really at risk, and nothing was really required of me.  And this is what we say we do out of our ‘deep love for poor people’ (or something like that).  What a sham.
As for me, I’m at a place where I’m willing to act in any way possible.  Willing to act against my own faith even, if I thought that it would genuinely make a difference in the lives of those who have been abandoned.

For Charles

cbrm

They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”
He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”
Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.
~Mark 8.22-25

Charlie, my boy, when you were born I felt like the blind man in this story.  I felt like I had been walking around in darkness for so long that when I finally (and miraculously) began to see again, I didn’t know what I was looking at.  I didn’t know what I was feeling.  It took some time for me to realize: oh, this is what it is like when sunlight bursts into the darkest places of my being; this is what it is like when love banishes old wounds that had clung to me like parasites; this is water on parched soil; this is stars falling like fire from heaven.
And so, Charlie my boy, I will try, to the best of my abilities, to ever only give you good gifts — for you are a miracle and a gift from God.  Never believe those who will tell you that you were born a sinner; when you were born you were beautiful, and breathtaking, and pure… and good gifts are all that you deserve to receive.
I love you, I love you, I love you.

Remembering 9/11

As today, is September 11th, I thought I would engage in a bit of remembering — it is, after all, important to recall moments of our history, for this is the story in which we live.
On this day in 1973, Augusto Pinochet’s American-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.  This resulted in seventeen years of torture, terror, and disappearances in Chile, and (according to people like Milton Friedman, who saw Chile as a textbook example of the type of world he wished to create) set a precedent for the way in which the United States acted in Latin America (particularly in the ’70s and ’80s… although they are at it again, as Obama’s government backed the Honduran coup which overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya in June of this year).
Sponsoring terror, imposing military rule, depriving local populations of their rights, their food, their land, their livelihood, their health, their children and their lives… this is the way that the US continues to engage with the world at large.  It is enough to make some people want to fly planes into buildings.  Which, not altogether surprisingly, is what happened on another September 11th.

Capitalism and Individualism (not what it seems)

As far as I can tell, it has now become something of a truism to connect rampant individualism with the economic structures of global capitalism.  Individualism, to borrow the words of Fredric Jameson, is a part of ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’, and one sees this idea expressed in the writings of everybody from Catholic theologians, to Communist economists, to Post-Marxist cultural theorists.
In fact, while initially an exciting thought (‘ah yes, capitalism has fractured us from our communities, leading us to live as isolated monads, so a renewed investment in the Church/the vanguard of the revolution/the multitude/the neighbourhood/our tribe/whatever will produce change!’), I have recently been thinking that it is a somewhat deceptive line of criticism.
The truth is that capitalism would be completely unsustainable if it genuinely did produce a sweeping form of individualism across all layers of society.  Instead, the inculcation of the type of individualism we see expressed today is a part of the old ‘divide and conquer’ technique employed by those who benefit the most from the world of global capitalism.  Individualism becomes an in-habited ideology that ensures that the many remain fragmented from one another, and therefore also remain impotent, poor, or just trapped in the cogs of the machine.
Meanwhile, those who are at the top of the chain live anything but lives structured as individuals.  This is easily illustrated in the common expression, “It’s all about who you know.”  Knowing the right people, joining the right clubs, living in the right (gated) communities, gets you into the right schools, which gets you into the right jobs and the right marriages, and so on.  So, while the many in the middle or on the bottom of society are encouraged to live as radical and free individuals, those at the top are maintaining and consolidating networks of power and control.  Individualism for the hoi polloi, community for the wealthy and powerful!  (So, community ends up becoming the private property of the rich.)
To me, then, this suggests the priority of class-based analysis over criticisms that rely upon subsidiary notions like individualism.  Why is it, I wonder, that people talk far less in class-based language these days?  Is it, perhaps, because some many of our critics are themselves members of the upper classes?