Smiles and Tears

Since I'm wide awake and it's well past bed time, how about a few thoughts? A few, marginally connected thoughts:

- The world is so BEAUTIFUL! It's just chockers with this beauty stuff. Rain drops clinging on the minute leaves of a hedge and sparkling in the street lights. The soft velvet of a cloud nestled on a New England hill, enveloping a walk home. The breath-stealing pressure of bass-drum-hits in an oak-and-leather pub. The tender tear of sandwich bread around spicy meatballs and tangy marinara, swallowed with a swig of cream soda. Televised performances of historical mourning. Parisians wearing gifted ties. Stone-work buildings with fancy windows and long, well worn tables. Three piece rock bands from Wheaton, Illinois. Fancy, fancy root beer.

- The world is so SAD. I'm haunted everywhere by the beauty's concomitant sadness. The creeping loneliness of proximity over community. The stupid, thoughtless, irresponsibility of lenders and borrowers. Everyone's oblivion to everyone else's hurt and confusion. The ways we hide our hurt and confusion, mostly from ourselves. Partisan hackery. Misplaced hope. Fanciful obsessions and the traps we return to willingly. Sin, sin and sin.

- Both make me feel so FULL! I'm bursting these days. Smiles and tears, both in good supply.

Godspeed.

Bavarian Beverage

"This award-winning root beer is brewed with all natural ingredients. The well water used in this special edition root beer comes from the Bohemian Forest region of Bavaria, one of the purest sources in the world for water. A hearty, full-bodied brew, bottled in Virgil's original spring-top stopper, Bavarian Nutmeg is dedicated to the root beer purist.
All natural ingredients - anise, honey, licorice, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, wintergreen, cassia oil, sweet birch and molasses. No preservatives, no artificial flavors."

On a scale of one to awesome, this stuff is the shit!

Reality's Musicality

There are two stanzas in an obscure song by an obscure midwestern band that most intimately express the hurt and the hope of my heart. It almost always puts tears in my eyes.

Go check out www.myspace.com/sleepingatlast and listen to "Needle and Thread

The verse:

They say this place has changed
but strip away all of the technology
and you will see that we all are hunters
hunting for something that will make us OK...

And then:

"You were a million years of work"
said God and his angels with needle and thread.
They kissed your head and said
"You're a good kid and you make us proud,
so just give your best and the rest we'll come and we'll see you soon."

Feeling a tad overmatched tonight, but I'm looking forward to keeping a promise tomorrow.


Godspeed

Celebrity Levity

William H Macy plays the ukulele:


Lauren Graham, who is in fact the cutest cute to ever cute, sort of plays the piano:


And if you don't have She & Him's album yet, pick it up. You should all fall in love w/ Zoe Deschanel:

Incarnation Disclosed

Paintings of Jesus are often painful to look at. Either painfully idealized or obviously ethnocentric, they betray all of our own projections and reveal very little of the truth of who this God-become-man could have been and continues to be.

Lately, my faith stumbles over the Incarnation. A human being who is at once God... it has seemed ludicrous in the extreme. My belief in such a thing embarrassed me.



In searching for the above painting, called "The Contemplator" by Kramskoy, that Dostoevsky mentions in "The Brothers Karamazov," I stumbled upon this painting of Christ in the wilderness.



He is bathed in light, but he willing hunches into His own shadow. His beard is dirty and maybe a little matted. His bare feet touch the earth He created unceremoniously. His hands are clenched so tightly his tendons stand out. His eyes are elsewhere, with a hint of lament. Still, His forehead seems creased with resolution

This is a powerful aspect of Jesus glimpsed through art. It is the concordance of discordance in Christ. It is precisely His Godly humanity. It enlivens my faith in Incarnation, at least for as long as my fickle heart can grasp its Truth.

Godspeed.

Morning Tide of Thought

I think the one of Jesus commands that I'm most focused on these days is to not worry. I'm trying to be obedient, but sometimes I just end up worrying about worrying.

This kind of obedience is especially important for philosophy right now. If I'm doing philosophy to try to meet the expectations of an exterior, posited, super-ego-like standard of what a philosopher should be or do or whatever, I end up lying all the time.

"Sure, I love reading Wittgenstein."

I end up reading things in order to impress people and to try to be someone else. To try to be the REAL philosophy student and not just my fraudulent self.

Even Truth isn't really my goal, if by truth we mean some out-there-now-real that has to be discovered and comprehensively comprehended. If that were the case, I would never stop worrying about all that will inevitably escape my grasp.

No, I think I'm here to do only this: To do the work I love and love the people I'm doing it with.

That and, as Shaq says, not "come inside the paint w/ any weak shit."

No more ambition. It is just the self divorcing and judging itself. It's horrendous doubleness.

If I pursue this place, these people and this work in passionately LOVE, I will be exactly the kind of successful I'm supposed to be.

and nothing more.

Godspeed.

Connaitre of the Co-Natural

"What is God?" is the wrong question. The first 3 pages of Augustine's Confessions shows the trouble that kind of thinking gets one into.

Instead, "Who is God?" is a finer place to start.

God is The Father who gifts His full being to the Begotten Son. This is Charity.

God is The Son, who receives from the Father (from eternity!) His whole being. This is Hospitality.

God is the The Spirit, who is the eternal Love of Father for Son and Son for Father. This is Unity.

God knows me. God knows me not just with an encyclopedic knowledge, like I might know my times tables. God knows me like a people know one another. We are "familiar." We are of a family. The french verb "connaitre" gets closer to the way in which God knows me. Connaitre means familiarity or knowledge, but more literally means that God and I are co-natural. Being "connaitre'd" by God (and meagerly knowing God, as we are able) is to share in God's nature. Is to be made in God's image.

Because God and I are co-natural, my self-hood is intimately tied up in the self-hood of God. The God of Love Loving Love is intimately familiar with me and values me and LOVES me.

And though I have peculiar gifts and weaknesses and fanciful obsessions and meager patience and self-delusion and self-obsession and every other kind of messy, vulgar particularity...I know that I am co-natural with the God. There are many gifts, but one Spirit.

And at my best, I may rest transparently on the spirit which gave me rise. Gave me rise, I'll add to Kierkegaard, into a Creation of rampant Goodness. A goodness which includes me.

A goodness I have only because I am valued by the source of value and loved by the lover of love.

Godspeed.

Despair That Does Not Know Itself As Despair

It seems that with all the talk of "hope" and "change" going on in the political arena during this election, good old fashioned cynicism has lost favor among even the most critical radicals among us. We are once again enamored of the American political/industrial complex and I reckon it is because we have gladly re-upped our addictions. A black man and a white woman are in the race and we have swallowed this illusion of progress. It's understandable, what with the state of things being what they are. War. Economic trouble. Social and moral fragmentation. We have been provided with novel programming, not a true vision for national revitalization.

Families stay broken. Marriages stay fragile. Lives stay purposeless. The sick remain unhealed. The hungry stay hungry. The alien stays distrusted. The widowed stay lonely. The imprisoned stay forgotten. The soldier keeps fighting.

I remember a brighter time, when the shame of a political system was put through the ringer by a few frustrated voices. I remember a brighter time, when the bullshit was easier to detect.

I remember when President Bush and Senator John Kerry were running two campaigns of stale horse shit spun into golden fluff. And everyone was pissed.

Jon Stewart takes us back:









Godspeed. We'll need it.

Dichotomy Rejection at Depth

The following was first published during the 2004 election, but it's arguments still apply today. While I prefer to vote third party, in what you might call an "active non-vote," I still think MacIntyre is right on.

The Only Vote Worth Casting in November

Alasdair MacIntyre
University of Notre Dame
(Original can be found at http://ethicscenter.nd.edu/archives/macintyre.shtml)

When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives. These are propositions which in the abstract may seem to invite easy agreement. But, when they find application to the coming presidential election, they are likely to be rejected out of hand. For it has become an ingrained piece of received wisdom that voting is one mark of a good citizen, not voting a sign of irresponsibility. But the only vote worth casting in November is a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush's conservatism and Kerry's liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target.

Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.

The basic economic injustice of our society is that the costs of economic growth are generally borne by those least able to afford them and that the majority of the benefits of economic growth go to those who need them least. Compare the rise in wages of ordinary working people over the last thirty years to the rise in the incomes and wealth of the top twenty percent. Compare the value of minimum wage now to its value then and next compare the value of the remuneration of CEOs to its value then. What is needed to secure family life is a sufficient minimum income for every family and that can perhaps best be secured by some version of the negative income tax, proposed long ago by Milton Friedman, a tax that could be used to secure a large and just redistribution of income and so of property.

We note at this point that we have already broken with both parties and both candidates. Try to promote the pro-life case that we have described within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down. Try to advance the case for economic justice as we have described it within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court. Above all, insist, as we are doing, that these two cases are inseparable, that each requires the other as its complement, and you will be met with blank incomprehension. For the recognition of this is precluded by the ideological assumptions in terms of which the political alternatives are framed. Yet at the same time neither party is wholeheartedly committed to the cause of which it is the ostensible defender. Republicans happily endorse pro-choice candidates, when it is to their advantage to do so. Democrats draw back from the demands of economic justice with alacrity, when it is to their advantage to do so. And in both cases rhetorical exaggeration disguises what is lacking in political commitment.

In this situation a vote cast is not only a vote for a particular candidate, it is also a vote case for a system that presents us only with unacceptable alternatives. The way to vote against the system is not to vote.

Unwieldy Consciousness

I'll attempt to temper the impending blow-hard-y-ness of this entry by starting this way: I suck at a great deal of life. I'm not athletic. I don't grasp mathematical concepts easily. I can't draw well. Tactile tasks are always a struggle and my fine motor skills are deeply lacking. I'm emotionally stunted and probably a little self-isolating. I have little self control unless I take extreme measures. On and on and on...

But I'm mentally very good with words and language. Remarkably so, I think. Without any extra effort or particular intention, I tend to fashion complex and eloquent thoughts and phrases. I don't notice it much, but occasionally people will look at me askew or accuse me of trying to show off. Or they'll just chuckle. A friend working on a system for analyzing personal writing asked for a sample of my journals or other informal writing. I sent him a sample. He said that maybe I misunderstood. He had wanted something informal and personal. Nothing so flowery and complex as what I'd sent him. I explained that was my personal journalling. He just labeled me as an outlier, I think.

It's been this way for a long time. In Jr. High, other kids teased me for my vocabular. No shit. They called me "Webster."

In fact, my intellectual capacity for language is so agile that it's almost a problem. It's undisciplined. It's a Bull-in-a-china-shop kind of thing. I can examine my own language (written or spoken) so quickly that I end up deconstructing my own language. Or crafting incredibly dense sentences. I feel the anxiety of the information left out as I'm writing, so I engage in linguistic gymnastics in order to cram in as much as possible. Instead of one idea per sentence, you'll get 3 or 4 out of me. I'm getting better at it, but I have to stop and refocus every paragraph so as not to get ahead of myself.

In a sea of my other short comings, it is this one thing I'm very, very good at. In a way, that is exciting. I've never felt very good at anything for most of my life. I've always been mediocre at best in most measurable areas. Now I've got a talent for something. On the other hand, it feels like a responsibility too. Like I'd be wasting something if I didn't work very hard to cultivate it. And I'm not (by inclination) a very hard worker. Remember that thing about self control from the first paragraph? Flavor that with some protestant guilt and WHAM-O! you're paralyzed by perfectionism.

It's easy to unmask ourselves. It's harder to ignore the mask and just walk around, getting things done.

I'm making BBQ Tofu sandwiches tonight. Well, technically they are seared tofu sandwiches, but they are marinated in bbq sauce, so...yeah, you get the idea. You should come over and have some.

Godspeed.