Nothing To Remember: Epilogue

She locked the door behind him and looked at the raw circles set about the extremities of her slender feet, hugging her bare arms against the wrinkled and delicate fabric of the sweater she wore with nothing underneath. Setting a kettle to boil, she gathered sheets and duvet and pillows up, arranging them back about her mattress. Shaking out the quilt, which she’d found at the bottom of a pile of aged linens in a box at the flea market in the west coast city where she’d loved a boy for the first time, the floral print underwear she’d set aside all week tumbled onto the hardwood in a wad. Her mind wandered back so many hours as she sat cross-legged on the floor before them.

In those heels for the third night, she’d been thankful for the acrid apple flavored vodka swirling in the bottom of the sweating glass. So long as she didn’t get carried away in the tingling carbonation of feminine laughter, she’d stood lean and craning. For a moment, she had allowed herself to close her eyes and tilted her head to the side to enjoy the draft from the single pane windows on her neck and the thin flesh stretched across the bone behind her ear. This young man before her kept resting his fingers against the descending slope at the bottom corner of her abdomen and she kept pretending not to notice. Instead, she looked at his boots and nodded as though listening to whatever it was he was just saying about writing. But mostly, she thought about how her pillow would smell of cigarettes in the sunny afternoon after he had left and she lay wondering when next he would call.

Nothing To Remember Pt. III

The flat was palatial in that “old world” sense. The ceilings seemed to be lifting away from the floor all the time, the way the espresso from the café down the rue made the top of your head feel as you reached its bottom. Everything ornate and rosette’d and engraved, so much so that surfaces seemed more pockmarked than decorated. Alyson could hardly imagine this place on a winter evening, the single pane windows like cellophane stretched between shriveled fingers of wood. Those summer months, they just stayed swung open at every hour. Moths made pilgrimages to the few, flickering lamps every night. They had nearly no furniture. Mattresses on floors. Treacherous, wreaking chairs parked beside milk crates and wood boxes pilfered from behind the tavern. The problem with “summer in Paris” was that you were trapped in every other summer in Paris. Even huddled, teeth-chattering, in that damp, frigid alley in March, Alyson didn’t really miss it.

The light, above her in the kitchen window, dumped a yellow wash across the alley. A tittering laughter clattered against the cement around her. His voice, muted and indecipherable, murmured beneath it all. Alyson peaked, though she didn’t need to.

That summer, they would smoke cigarettes and talk too loudly out on the balcony of the sprawling flat. All those American girls, it’s a wonder more of France’s young men didn’t gather beneath that balcony like dogs outside a butcher’s dumpster. They were all but hollering about the tragedy of this or that when they failed to notice the intermingling of a foreign trail of smoke amongst their own. Andrew, in his outrageous boots, had leaned against the column beneath their sheltering parapet, to smoke and listen.

Inside the kitchen, where Alyson didn’t need to see, his hands were on the redhead’s waist and her chin was tucked against her shoulder. Alyson knew that they were leaning against the sink. In Paris, it had been one of those awful cast iron basins with no counter beside it to set your coffee press to dry or to lay out ingredients. Here it was some dull aluminum thing, no doubt, with miles of counter space. Every spurned American housewife, baking away her loneliness, had demanded it. He’d place his thumb along that nigh-translucent waif’s perfect little jaw-line and turn her head up to his. Then he’d press his lips and musky breath with hers.

Andrew threw his hat to them and made them promise to return it that evening. They laughed and made no promises. Inside, Alyson wrote her initials on it’s fraying tag.

When she woke up the following morning, she was still mostly dressed.

His attention had been very much like Paris after the rain. At night, everything sparkles and you feel yourself as the first-born of creation and culture. And yet, in the mornings, the sun casts mottled shadows on every embellishment. Every quaint little flaw of the antiqued is just the marring of too many trespassers.

When the elite of a moment are many, Alyson began to think in a way she’d never say aloud, you realize it may be better to be forgotten.

Nothing To Remember Pt. II

He used to say it sometimes at parties. He’d stare at his scuffy boots and scratch at the greasy hair behind his ear and say it. Or, he’d tug at that stupid thrift store t-shirt and look over your shoulder as he said it. Alyson had watched him do this once a week, every week, for 8 months and now she watched him do it again in that fucking basement. He snapped the folded-down beer can tab with the nail of his forefinger and looked up at the ceiling and said it.


“I don’t know… you know? It’s like, when you make art – when I write – and you do it in public like that, you’re just free. And anonymous. In front of everyone. “

The skinny red-headed girl, that girl that everyone thought was overdressed in her asymmetrical dress and asymmetrical haircut and teetering, perilous heels, nodded solemnly with her eyes closed and her head down, like an acolyte at prayer. He went on. Alyson, on the mildewed basement sofa, stopped smiling.

“It’s like, because everyone is there and sees you, it's like you matter. But you don’t have to explain to anyone why and no one could say for sure why, but everyone knows that this guy, with his typewriter…”

He touched the little, freckled thing on the hip with the tips of his fingers of his non-beer hand.

“or this girl with her sketch pad, or whatever. They know that you matter.”

He shrugged and pressed the sweaty beer can against his forehead and the little red-headed girl bit her lip, blushing behind all her adorable goddamn freckles.

Allyson stood and smoothed her sweater, swaying a little. Leaving that half-full beer can on the coffee table she’d carved their names into in the Spring, she climbed the stairs out of the heat and the sweat and the noise of the basement. The rest of the house was cool and all you could hear was traffic outside and the muted thump of the music downstairs. She tried a few cupboards and finally found the glasses and selected the biggest, cleanest one. At the sink she let the water run and and stared at her reflection in the window out on the alley between disheveled bungalows.

She knew she was pretty. Delicate featured, with fair skin and a great mass of healthy dark hair. It wasn't just her looks he didn't talk to anymore. It was her, in all the invisible ways.

Alyson dipped a finger into the water coming from the faucet and it was that shocking mid-winter cold. She filled her glass and lit a cigarette at the stove. Ducking outside, she sat in the late-march cold with her water and chain-smoked, shivering. And not crying.


She'd left her coat down there on the couch and couldn't decide if it was worth retrieving.

Nothing To Remember Pt. I

“Everyone knows that girl,” this other girl exclaimed, “is a liar.”

That girl sat at the end of a basement sofa balancing a can of beer on her knees pulled to her chest, heels of her flats on the ratty cushions. Her fingers tapped rhythms on her cantilevered soles. Her jacket was folded beside her and in it were three loose cigarettes. She smiled while the room performed for her benign spectatorship and, eavesdropping, she sometimes laughed. Before the end of the night, her cigarettes would be ash and filter in the street.


There, across the grey institutional carpet was the only thing that undid the smile in her eyes, if not her mouth. His boots were just too big and never tied, as though he’d been in some kind of hurry to get to this chair in this room and not talk to her.

Alive. Alone. Alight.

The boy sat all bold angles and subtle curves in the belly of the cast iron tub. Soap bubbles had collected at the edge of the water ringed in filthy grey and the ripples of that way little boys are never still. His head was lathered in a great frothy white wig of shampoo so that he looked cast in a pageant. The man’s hands moved deftly and quickly through the froth, so that when the time came, he cupped an inverted hand over the boy’s brow and ladled bathwater with the other. When he was finished, the man swept the boy’s bangs out of his eyes and kissed his slippery forehead. The boy wiped at his eyes with fingers that seemed longer every day to the man.

“Do moms sometimes give sons baths?” the little boy asked while the man ruffled him briskly about the shoulders with a towel.

“They do, mostly when they’re little boys.” Said the man. The boy stepped into the underpants the man held sprawled between his hands.

“And then do they brush their teeth together and floss and shave together?”

“Well, Mom’s don’t shave their faces the way dads do, but yeah, then they brush their teeth.”

“And read together before bed?”

“The best moms do, yes.”

“My mom was one of the best, right?”

The man put his hand on the little boy’s chest, flat and broad like he was giving compressions to keep the child alive until help arrived. He looked at the wallpaper and all its little swoops and textures. He felt his heartbeat 7 times round and then spun the boy to face the sink. They brushed their teeth. They flossed their teeth. They spread shaving cream about their faces and wiped it away from their chins and cheeks and upper lips, the boy with a plastic razor, the man with the real deal.

“You want batman or superman tonight?”

“I want to be spiderman.”

“Spiderman’s dirty, pal. Tomorrow night.”

“Okay. Okay, batman.”


The man started to help the boy into his pajamas, but he didn’t need it. The man leaned against the doorframe to the room she had painted with care. It was only barely just dark out on account of the summer and he could see the boundaries of their world together, him and the boy. That afternoon, he’d sat with his thoughts and his iced tea on the steps to the kitchen door and watched a pale warrior make-believe a victory at the edge of the lawn. The sun had made the man tired and the boy wanted him to come and fight at his side. He could have and maybe should have. With the cinematic memory that rested in sepia tones through his thoughts now, he was glad he didn’t.


The boy was dressed for bed and they read a story of turtle’s stacked to the sky that one might reach the moon, like some inversion of the Hindu foundations of the world.

The man awoke on the floor of his bedroom, all those photos spread around him and the glass on its side having been earlier drained. The boy was crying, frantic. When the man stepped to the door of the child’s room, still bright from the moon and being painted white save for the clouds stenciled about the ceiling, he heard the boy but didn’t see him. And then there he was, folded into a pile just inside the door by the wall, his eyes wide with terror and drenched in grief.

“What is it, pal?”

“It was a bad dream… a bad dream.”

“Oh, no… You know you’re okay now, okay?”

“I just – yeah, I know, I just – it was so scary and-- so scary.”

“Do you want to tell me about it, pal?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”



The boy trembled with sobs and his breath rippled the room like frothy bath water.

“It was all of us on the bridge, but it wasn’t the bridge,” the boy let tumble out.

“All of us?”

“You and me and mr. mittens and mommy and we were on the bridge but it wasn’t the bridge.”

“How did you know it wasn’t the bridge?”

“Because it was real high. It was so real high up and mommy was out front while we crossed it and and then…” The boy’s voice broke. “ but and then she fell and you couldn’t catch her.”

“You knew it was your mom?”

“Yeah and she fell and you reached and couldn’t catch her and you were holding mr. mittens and we all began to slip. We slipped and we fell too.”

“And then you woke up?”

“I woke up and I was crying and then I tried to find you but I was scared. I was scared.”

“It’s okay to be scared and I’m always going to come find you.”

“But I don’t like it.”

“And that’s okay too. Just look for me, okay?”

“I wish you played with me today. I wanted you to.”

“Sometimes dads have to let their little boys play by themselves. It’s good for us. For both of us.”

“Okay.”

The man held his boy in that empty house and well within the boundaries of their world. The boy was asleep soon and the man soon after. In the morning, they made pancakes and they laughed in the sunlight that found its way onto their faces through trees and windows.

Noble Lies & The Things Implied

Cigarettes were, for him, always the triumph of context over reason. He never smoked them in America, but on the Continent, the air smelled wrong without the hint of acrid tobacco smoke about his clothes. Except now, he’d been in Europe so long he was always cold. He spent most of his mornings rubbing his hands together and trying to get the fluid slowly gripping his lungs to settle for the day's work. European editors were used to phlegmatic writers. American editors couldn’t be bothered to get up early enough to call in the morning. If his daughter called, she would have worried.

Still, she never called.


He wrote the same six pages every day. In those pages, she walked from the kitchen and collected a basket with blankets and pads of paper and brushes and paints. He would describe, everyday, that same dress, that same gold ribbon in her hair. And she would walk through the back woods to the clearing and his words would describe what her brushes would portray. Then, in his description and even in the room a bit, the air would take a chill and the light would go gray. Day after day, twilight would be creeping around her enclave, her clearing.

Then he would stop, light a cigarette and get to work.


Today, when he pulled his kerchief away from his mouth, it was streaked with red. Today, the phone would not ring, nor the day after. Today, in the six pages, she was grown and in a white dress and he didn’t follow her to the clearing. Today, he narrated as though wrapped in gauze and only half awake. And, in the distance, she sat on the swing he’d always meant to build in the woods and smiled.

Also, A Poem

I want every poem
To be read like
I read them aloud
To myself
On the toilet, with the door open
When my apartment is empty and
I wonder if anyone
In the hall can hear
My impromptu rendition
Of a stranger's beloved
words, published for
promotional purposes.

And my enjoyment
too, I suppose.

Aptly Alternating Alttitudes

There wasn’t a square corner in the place. Every angle pinched acutely or yawned obtusely. Every line bowed this way or that. If you rested your temple against the wall and looked towards a corner, it was as if you perceived the curvature of space itself. The building was skewed with the drunkenness of its architects those generations ago. It lay at the edge of the clearing in a murky wood. At this elevation, nearby peaks caught hulking afternoon thunderheads as they trundled past, but the golden hour was often left clear and placid. God Himself tied finishing touches on the day in rainbow’d ribbon. The soil beside the deck was spongy and cold beneath her feet as she waved goodbye to the guests who’d ventured here only to speak in generalities and leave behind the odd article of clothing.

The parties were nearly as unbearable as the stretches of aloneness. Anyone she invited out here never came alone. It was always handfuls of people and usually one or two more than there were seats for. They staggered and sprawled across worn out rugs and worn-smooth floorboards alike. They would parade through, like a band of mendicant friars, in a clinking of glass, a shuffle of feet and a dull, spiraling murmur of vacant illocutions.

“This place must be a hundred years old.”

“Don’t you get lonely out here?”

“The view is just beautiful.”

Usually, on the second or third day, everyone would come to a hush, the better to hear the muffled sublimity of the afternoon tempests beyond the meandering walls. That was always the day they’d leave and the only one she wished they wouldn’t.

A Cabin of Incorrigible Castigations

The wood flooring was rough and uneven. She had feet like a boy’s; soft, un-calloused, vulnerable. The walk from her place near the fireplace to the stove every morning was to her feet like staring into a welder’s torch was to the eyes. Her coffee mug always had the earthen grit of coffee grounds at the bottom, no matter how gently she poured. The bicycle ride into town was long but not unpleasant. However, the blizzard ruled that out as a possibility. She’d poured pot after pot of boiling water into the wash tub that day and it was the last time she’d bathed in this or that many days. It was supposed to be a romantic retreat. It was supposed to be a working vacation, out here in the sticks, writing with pen and paper. Her editor had recommended it. Her friends had applauded it. Stubble on your legs and under your arms tends to dissolve romantic pretensions surely and swiftly.

The papers lay strewn about the small, wobbly table, sparsely annotated here and there, ringed in Olympic rings of spilt coffee. Only her pens were in a row. She laced her boots with her back to the flames and was determined to find, out there in the cold, inspiration for this day’s writing. There would be writing today. She was sure. With her coat about her throat and her hands buried in its deep pockets, she shouldered the door open against the gathered snow. She trudged calf-deep about where she believed the trail would lead. Green and youthful pines bent supply under a weight of collected snow in their branches, like the daughters of landed gentry might before suitors at a ball, their sixteenth birthdays only so recently behind them. The hoof prints of a deer led across her projected path through the narrow and magickal clearing, culminating in a pressed bed about a fallen tree, where on a recent night the lithe and musky figure had found a break against the wind.


Upon the finishing of her walk, she stepped through the sagging gate and noticed, amongst the spread of even snow, something previously missed; a mushroom, bare itself of snow and emerged where a garden might be found in another season. She stepped wide of the slate-colored thing and crouched. She ran a bare finger along the frilled underside of its cap, like you might scratch the chin of a kitten. She sat her heels there for a long time. The dull glow of the sun behind the clouds shifted uncertainly towards the horizon. After digging away the snow towards the frozen soil and taking firm grip about its stem, she finally plucked it from the snow and held the mushroom there for a moment, its immense cap spread out like the sheltering hand of god over her own feeble fingers.


What little oil she had left went to frying the thing in its meaty, earthen flavor. Sliced across and laid about some hearty rice, she ate well and slept better.

Often enough, to save some miraculous thing precisely as it has been found is only the surest way to bring about its dissolution before the eyes of God and Man.

Notions of the Novelistic

John asked if the Eric in the story below was the same as my other short story. In the shower, where I always feel the most ambitious, I realized that maybe it was.

And maybe... just maybe, I could write a novel about him.

So...

Shit.

So, All Saints Suffer?

And now, a little Halloween story...

We were the first folks in the county to get a Ford, and I’ll tell you, we were off to California. For a people emerged from the bleakness of a coal-mine into the bleakness of a Midwestern winter, to roll up shirt-sleeves on Christmas is quite the heralding image. We found our home and a parish. The new jobs were simple, but easy enough. Yes, a job each, since we thought ourselves modern. I’d not been in the Great War. She’d not had to see me go. Things were quiet enough and our world was small. We didn’t own a radio. We only got a newspaper on Sundays. A whole city began to grow around us, as others came to roll their sleeves on Christmas too. But we paid that little mind.

That day had been dark, like clouds rolling through a diamond sky. But with the dark came a hiss. Almost a hum, and with it a living roil of swarming life. The black cloud of what would prove a pestilence lifted over our city, and then dropped from the air like a balloon had burst, and lay like dust on every surface. This fine, alien dust that choked your throat and ringed your nostrils. The streets sat quiet for days as people swept and mopped with rags across their nose and mouth. And then the bleeding began.

The yellowed sheets were threadbare and loosely knit. This gauzy lens through which we saw the cathedral ceilings was lifted above our heads as soon as we arrived. No waiting for death to pull the shroud across our faces. That time weeks ago. The glossy, red stains would wick through them rapidly, like a nation fleeing toward the coasts. They all but dripped at the corners as though taps had been installed and opened wide. If the shift nurses forgot to roll you every few hours, or if things advanced considerably, you’d be wrapped in a gestalt of your own lifeblood in just a few seconds. Weighted and suffocated in a glistening, crimson death shroud. In 1918, you could drown from the inside on your own fluids, if the fever didn’t cook your mind first. But now...well, not so much the opposite as a new the-same.

The Repetitive Price of Purgation

Okay, okay, I feel guilty about yesterday's vacuous (if not unpleasant) photo-entry. Here's a little content for balance' sake.

I wrote this sitting outside the cafe one afternoon, using my phone and publishing immediately to Twitter. Micro-micro-fiction, I suppose. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing" at the time and borrowed a bit of the premise for the story from a passage in that.

a note: each sentence had to be 140 characters or less, as is Twitter's custom.

-The Cost of Things: a story (inspired by McCarthys "The Crossing")

-A man dreamt each night, less and less, of the casual beauty and her smile since losing sight at twenty-eight.

-He would feel sometimes, wandering here and there, at stranger's faces, but never pictured any but hers.

-Now old and beset only with his cane, the clothes about him and sturdy boots that cradled ancient feet, he ceased to dream at all.

-Wrecked between world and reveries, sleep having lost its lure, he called upon a man of tonics and oils.

-A tonic prescribed, promising to restore dreams and their contents, cost the same as sturdy boots, not more.

-Unshod and set in thoroughfares' dust, his mind's eyes saw what carried further than feet.
And carried thus, more and more, till no more sleeping could be had. (The End)

Remembering The Revenant's Role

The dreams are always the same. The dreams are never the same. Or rather, the elements never coalesce in quite the same way twice, though there is repetition to the themes. Oh, I do wish there was some way to be clearer about all of this, but you know dreams. They are so set in their peculiar ways, and they make their own kind of sense. They have that dream-logic. You see people and they don’t look like themselves, though their identity is certain. You flash from place to place, though they might be in wholly different parts of the country. The world.

I’m beginning to suspect she doesn’t have dreams. I know, I know, everyone has dreams. And yes, its common to, having no practice in recollecting them, awake with no memory of those dreams everyone has. It isn’t her not remembering that I take as evidence, but the sort of sleeping she does. The sleep of the dead, you might say. Or the innocent, though that seems increasingly unlikely. Like a horizontal yogi, she selects some lithe position and holds it till morning. Then she’ll stretch like a cat; claws out and back arched, purring a little.

Then, 5 days out of seven, we fuck.

But that’s not the point.

In the dreams (my dreams, that is) the world is itself, only darker. And every entity presses, first, from the velvety panel of a night-time universe, then bursts into color. Into the color one can almost hear with the remarkably common synesthesia of dreams. Its nature, mostly, but sometimes buildings. Everything oddly proportioned. Not that I can see myself, but I’m present as my 13 year old self. Pre-adolescent and awkward and so aware that nothing about me is unchanging or ready yet for the world. And all the women I’ve loved begin to lurk into a clearing, only they are fawns. I mean, it’s them. We both know I know it’s them. But they are delicate, feminine deer. White tails and brown noses and dark eyes, with Bambi lashes.

It’s often now that I’ll notice there are birds singing with that spring-time urgency. Sirens, in both senses.

They stroll with varying steadiness and poise into the clearing and fold their spindly legs beneath their musky torsos. They first kneel, then lay about me in a circle, nibbling grass but mostly staring with those eyes, like ink-dipped marbles.

Then the silence is appearant, and the dead bodies of sparrows and robins rain down out of the card-paper-cut-out trees. Or, sometimes, from the pop-up-book power lines.

And that’s when I wake up. Wake up and see her sleeping still, in both senses.

Stereophonic Phrenetics; A Stunning Stasis

The money saved on rent, on rolling her own cigarettes, on plastic-bottled liquor all went to clothes. To stylish, outlandish, belle-of-the-ball clothes. Dresses with petticoats. Jackets of varying lengths. And shoes. Dear god, those stacks of shoes. Some weeks it would all hang pristine in the hallway closet, between the galley kitchen and the sliding-glass-door-ed living room. Other times, strewn in piles of tulle and silk and wool, like some giant textile-digesting animal had been left alone in the place for a week and never walked. All of the clothes that never saw the air beyond her dry-walled world. Out there, black slacks and a green apron did the job. Sometimes that hoody from an old boyfriend that smelled like any brand of cigarettes but hers and which I fucking hated.

She never dressed up for me. Or anyone, as best I could tell.

She didn’t even own a TV and I’d never seen her cook. Grinning plastic bags declaring their thanks would leer up from the trash. Stacked forts defended the refrigerator’s interior with Styrofoam walls. I was never not surprised to discover it was day or night at the front door. If you asked me how we passed the time, I couldn’t answer. Only that we did and in whirling, haphazard stretches.

One assumes someone else has wondered that if there’s a difference between boredom and love, its not one easily pegged.

Entropy's Transitional Turpitude

I can remember the last summer I had. The last summer I knew (see also; the biblical sense). The heat of that summer lept up from the pavement and glared from the windshields of cars. It was the summer of the last time I rode a skateboard. The last summer when the beach of was fun. I can remember it in all its sunburned laziness. It wasn’t the last summer she’d sleep with me, but it was the last summer she’d much want to.

She’d never seen the ocean before. Sometimes I worried that maybe it was the smell of salt and kelp she loved, not my voice in the morning, the way she said. We shared the place more than we “lived together,” and the owner’s golden retriever played gracious host for 6 weeks. The place was mostly kitchen or mostly bedroom, depending on the hour. We mostly assembled sandwiches and salads, more than the other thing. I was nervous about the neighbors we didn’t know. I was the Californian, but she was at home here.

Next we made retreat (see also; the military sense) in the woods of some Midwestern place. I’d known forests, but not the dense, foreboding thicket that woods could be. Or the intransigent maze of play, as well. About there, I mostly remember the deer and the fireflies. And the odd cup of coffee sweltered through mornings that straddled thunderstorms. She had begun to notice that people set to fleeing rarely do so really together, but only in tandem. Only incidentally in the same direction. And yet, there, with no neighbors about whom to worry, we found our proper stride.

The chilled rains of deep autumn in the city broke some fever. Passion turned to good natured bemusement and our lives relaxed together. And city neighbors don’t merit much consideration.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except maybe to ask later which parts you think are true.

Autumnal Anticipation of Advent

First things first; aren’t these just the most attractive white people you’ve ever seen in your life. And aren’t they just living the life? My jealousy is rather unparalleled. And my admiration.

I’m glad to see there are people out there having a lovely time. Or pretending to have a lovely time for a camera so that I can imagine that somewhere in the world, people are having a lovely time. Life has occasionally, lately, let me glimpse into the undercurrent of unremitting loveliness that God pushes intravenously into the world. But only occasionally.

Otherwise, things have been fairly difficult and unlovely. Hopes are often disappointed in life, confirming incrementally that we assume too many promises and never a realistic amount of indifference on the part of the universe. However, having hopes disappointed just in time to fall desperately ill and thereby tumble desperately behind the logistical demands of new semesters, new jobs is enough to bring a generally easy-going young man to despair of ever climbing out. Or, at least, finding a small, natural peace before the supernatural peace of Advent leaps upon us.

Gosh, Advent seems so far away. At least Autumn resides in between. Crisp, crunchy, creaky autumn. Not such an awful in-between, if I can ever get my feet back under me and into a pile of leaves.

I might start writing little pieces of micro-fiction again. I wrote a short story over May and June that I’ve submitted to Esquire’s short story writing contest. I won’t hear anything for months and my hopes are not high that they’ll think anything of it. Still, if I ever get it published anywhere, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I realized I’ve never really commented on the method for those little bits of description and place and person I’d posted here before. I’ll collect a handful of photos (whichever that strike me, for whatever reason) from blogs that I follow, much like the one’s included in this post, and bundle them together around a theme. A color. Or a place. Whatever. Then I’ll open them all up on the desktop of my computer, and just let a scene or a place or an interaction creep out and onto the page.

Then they are all posted together, as you’ve seen. Worse ways to be creative, I suppose.

Once I have a better picture of my new tattoo, I’ll post it.

Godspeed, everybody.

Acting Worship (Last Part)

What Do We Do Now?

Good worshiping is like good acting, only more important. And good acting takes a lot of work and practice. So, as worshipers, there is work we’ve got to do and practice to get to.

What does that work look like?

In acting, one must live a paradox, in which the words and actions are given and known in advance, but they need to be performed as if they are happening for the first time. Somehow one has to be spontaneous and authentic with words and actions that are as familiar as breathing. Well, that sounds just like the conflict between the Traditional and the Contemporary, doesn’t it?

So, first, we must become familiar with our “given circumstance.” This means reading our Bibles so that we know our shared story. This means exploring forms of worship we might not seek out otherwise. This means getting to know our history as a Church, both universal and denominational. It means acknowledging our “scripts,” which are just our own cultural expectations.

Also, we must practice “living honestly.” This means listening to the Holy Spirit, which means seeking out silence. This means we have to learn to be present for the performance, without distraction or self-consciousness. This means we have to be respectful of our fellow performers, by listening to them and being open to their innovations. Open to their honesty.

As much as we’ve all experienced bad performances in the theater or in a movie, we’ve also experienced bad performances in worship. We’ve been in services so rigid in ritual that we can’t seem to engage it with conviction. We’ve also been in services where it was so spontaneous (or messy) that we couldn’t keep up (or relax).

But when we bring these together, the “living honestly”(or the Contemporary) and the “given circumstance”(or the Traditional), we provide a grand performance for God. It doesn’t really matter which “script” or ritual we are packaging the Truth of our worship in. Whether my prayer is liturgical or improvised, I can be just as honest before God, if I am prepared and present. Whether the music is tried-and-true or experimental, I can approach the beauty of God through it if I am listening.

But all of this takes preparation and practice. And patience, for one another. And faith, that God will be present. And hope, that the story we’re acting will come to its full reality. And love, most of all for God and also for each other.

Indeed, our services on Sunday mornings should be a kind of rehearsal for our eternal task before the throne of God; Worship.

Acting Worship (Pt. 4)

Imagining Honestly

So, let’s use our imaginations.

I mean ”use our imaginations” both in the sense of imagining solutions to our division, but also that imagination is the solution to our division. Imagination is the place where the traditional and the innovative are inseparable. The “play” of imagination is where we marry the old to the new.

Worship that is both Traditional and Contemporary is about imagination. It is about, for that hour on Sunday, pretending that God’s promise for the completion of the world is already here. But don’t let the word “pretend” throw you. When we pretend faithfully, God makes good on his promise and provides the very reality we are playing at. A theologian might say that we “incarnate the Eschaton.” Sunday morning worship gives us the precious chance to act like we’re living in the Kingdom of Heaven. We don’t often get to do that during the rest of the week.

In certain substance abuse recovery groups, one might hear this idea as, “fake it till you make it.”

Like it or not, worship is a ritual. Worship is a kind of community performance. Whether there are sensors and kneelers and candles or whether there are video screens and drums and spot-lights, worship is a ritual we perform. Our particular community, our particular culture shapes what that ritual looks like. Sometimes, our ritual is to tell ourselves we don’t have rituals. That’s what a philosopher would call “modernism.”

“But,” you might be thinking, “imagining, pretending, performing and acting are all fake. They are all fictional. They aren’t real.” The Contemporary will especially feel this way, right? Worship shouldn’t be a performance. It shouldn’t be inauthentic. Worship should be true!

Who says that good performances aren’t true?

Let’s take a look at another kind of performance. One that isn’t so stuffed full of our emotions. Let’s look at acting, like on a stage or in a movie.

Good acting is about “living honestly in the given circumstance .” The ‘given circumstance’ is just the script. It tells you both what to say and when to say it. It tells you where the scene takes place. It tells you what goes on in the scene.

The ‘living honestly’ is the courageous task of the actor. We’ve all seen someone who isn’t up to the challenge, right? The words that leave their lips are hollow. The way they hold their body or the way they gesture seems not-quite-right.

But we’ve also encountered the brilliant performance of an exceptional actor. Most recently, I think of Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” or Daniel Day Lewis in…well, come to think of it, in just about everything. What is going on there that gives us such joy? What do they do that lets us in on the Truth of the story?

On the one hand, they provide us the satisfaction of getting what we paid for. Heath Ledger’s Joker has the face paint and the scary laugh and the flamboyant clothes. We know we’re going to get that from a Batman movie. It comforts us to receive it. It would make us anxious and upset if he never walked on screen in the purple suit and smudged grease paint.

This is what the Traditional values. It desires to know we know where we are. There are familiar words and symbols that help us feel like a part of a community. Like a part of a shared story. It lets us know that when we invest our hearts into Church, we aren’t going to be deceived or left out in the cold. The sight of stained glass and the sound of the organ let me know I’m home.

On the other hand, great performances delight us with innovations and surprises. Ledger’s Joker transforms a character we thought we knew so well. He speaks with the flat, familiar monotone of a Midwesterner. He reveals a horrifying kind of intelligence. We appreciate that he surprises us, because that makes him more than a type. It makes him alive. It makes him ring true.

This is what the Contemporary provides to the performance of our worship. It toys with our expectations to remind us that our Faith is alive. It provides us with the delight of surprise . It shines light on new aspects of our Faith that we might have been underemphasizing. At worst, what we might have been ignoring. A new kind of musical instrument can evoke a new metaphor for God’s power or love. A new word or phrase can open up possibilities we hadn’t discovered.

But in the excellent performance, both of these things happen at once. We are both reassured by our fulfilled expectations and delighted by our surprise. Like when an old hymn suddenly finds new meaning because of our circumstances. Like when a new metaphor illuminates a familiar passage of scripture. This is the tension between the old and the new that siding only with the Traditional or the Contemporary against the other is guaranteed to miss. The Traditional and the Contemporary cannot be separated, even if we so easily distinguish between them.

Acting Worship (Pt. 3)

The Traditional and The Contemporary

We’ll start with the Traditional.

Some of us ache for our old beloved hymns, the long-respected creeds and liturgical prayers with their roots deep in our personal memory and the memory of our community. The reliability of well-worn words and melodies and “the way we’ve always done things” are a comfort to us as we travel through this veil of tears. In simple terms, the Traditional values what is time tested. In simpler terms, the Traditional values what is old, though our culture is very unfair to that word.

And the Contemporary?

If you’ve used a word like “relevant” or “authentic” or “spirit-lead” in the last sixth months, you are probably among the Contemporary. The Contemporary often looks over the church’s walls at the “culture” and sees new and useful tools for expressing the fundamental Truth in the Gospel. New kinds of technology or music or language that, when filled with the Truth of the Gospel and lead by the Holy Spirit can remind us of the fresh and ever-new vibrance of what God has done for us. St. Augustine calls this “pillaging the Egyptians ,” in reference to the treasure Israel carried out of Egypt during the exodus . In simple terms, the Contemporary values what is innovative. In still simpler terms, the Contemporary values what is new, though our culture thoughtlessly elevates that word.

At their best, both the Traditional and the Contemporary are good ways of thinking about worship. They both value things that are really, actually good. That is, when they are at their best. When they are at their worst, they fall to being the opposite sides of the same bad coin.

One group says, “Whatever is old is best!” The new music is too loud. The new technology is too distracting. All that casual dress and casual language is disrespectful.

The other group says, “Whatever is new is best!” Those old songs are boring. Those old prayers are stale and rote. All that lofty language is phony.

Once we get to that point, the conversation is dead. We’re just shouting at each other. Or, perhaps more commonly, we aren’t talking to each other at all. In a case of the all-too-apt metaphor, we end up preaching to the choir. We just roll around in our own chronological snobbery.

“Whatever is old is best!”

“Whatever is new is best!”

Still, each one’s dissatisfaction with the other is reasonable. They aren’t crazy or stupid.

The Traditional feels that the new and “relevant” worship songs and practices don’t carry the weight of meaning that a century-and-a-half old hymn has accrued since it was written. Worse, they are going to bring in those “noise makers ” and banish our beloved organ and choir to that attic.

The Contemporary looks at the traditional structures and content and feels like those things have lost their freshness and vibrance. Sure, for one time and place, they were great. After all, everything was new once. Now, however those old things are clichéd and unmoving.

That both the Traditional and the Contemporary are reasonable positions isn’t a contradiction. This isn’t a game of tug-o-war where, in order for one side to win the other has to lose. That they are both reasonable hints to us that the conflict we are experiencing isn’t necessary. That the division can be bridged.

Or better yet, closed.

That Traditional, scripted worship practices have tended towards rote and lifeless performance doesn’t mean they have to be that way forever. The Contemporary, innovative practices don’t have to let go of their ties to tradition or be completely unstructured. Those are assumptions based on the way things look right now, but they lack imagination about how the Traditional and the Contemporary can meet one another at the altar.

Acting Worship (Pt. 2)

Worship “Wars?”

We usually mean by “worship” something like “the practice of expressing our individual and communal adoration of God through the arts, particularly song.” This way of thinking about our Sabbath gatherings is fairly new in the scope of Christian history, but hopefully this discussion of where we find ourselves will encourage us to take a look at where we come from. Of course, it is okay if that’s a different discussion for a different day.

Worship has been becoming a problem for us as evangelicals for a long time now. If you know the phrase “worship wars,” then you probably already know how we are divided over this, often by generation. We’ve, all of us, probably identified with one side of the divide or the other. Usually, we account for the division by pointing to how the “Traditional” and the “Contemporary” are in conflict.

Of course, this distinction can be found under any number of different names, and the irony of evangelical culture is that even what we label “contemporary” is very rarely all that contemporary. The same goes for our use of “traditional,” most of the time.

I want to offer hope that this conflict is escapable. It is escapable precisely because there doesn’t need to be a conflict. The division we see and feel isn’t a necessary one. A philosopher might say it is a “false dichotomy.” A philosopher also might say that the Traditional and the Contemporary are “distinct but not separable.” Let’s start by distinguishing the two and we can get to how they can’t really be separated later.