ThinkBlog

all your dreams collapse to alpha waves
mystical REM revelations find a frozen foundation
flickering falsehoods from which you finally wake
to see the ash around you falling, calming snow, burned expectations
newspapers yellowed, unburned, stacked, neatly piled along matte black paths
down which you stumble, drunk with consequences,
forgotten headlines, age-pressed pages, serifed typeface
called Regret, kitschy elegance, clever crossbars, mocking beaks,
an infinity of sweet words overripe and rotten
you remember when your lovers love their others
discarding you and former things foolish and fallacious;
aluminum poles, wind-pickled, hollow, would howl if wind
still were to animate them, anchored in the papers;
leaning weary, heavy, wiping powdered brow against
a noir raincoat’s sleeve worn long years through the drought
to find the pipes too weak to hold you and your leanings, illusory:
each time an iron clamp of recall clicks too late
when the smell of burning bids you cough and you abstain,
knowing the futility of expectoration, as though through
sneezing or ejaculation one recovered love.

you find yourself a eunuch for lack of trust in saccharine words
spoken bodily with quivering calculation, intuitions compelling
shuffled, careful steps to destinations unseen, distance choked
black with smoke, soot-smeared sidewalks cracked with freezing swells
of winter hopes that melt with summer’s green; illness, flush of
fever, beads of sweat lapping at the cinders swirling round about,
numberless stinging grains each of a price paid for holding fast in
faith that friendship needn’t fornicate, that proximity plays no part,
that time you fail to find for a friend is time you didn’t care–
while each of these you violate in turn, selfish, condescending,
self-condemning by your words. you return your attention to the path
to enjoy what you can: soft, warm snow, tender crackling,
loving words now forgotten, the sulfur-scent of indelible lessons.

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Which idea appeals to you more for a feature-length film, assuming all other variables could be adjusted to your own tastes and comfort?*

A1. shot in full color with minimal to zero soundtrack but with penetrating dialogue;
A2. shot in black and white with what you judge near-perfect dialogue but with, again, minimal soundtrack;
B1. shot in full color and zero intelligible utterance at all, but with a superlative, lush soundtrack;
B2. shot in black and white with the same astonishingly gorgeous and descriptive soundtrack ?

Why?

* Meaning, if your pleasure is the theater, so be it; or if at home, so be it. And if your pleasure is headphones as opposed to a 500W 7.1 Dolby digital system, so be that, too; or if accompanied by friends or only one friend or a lover or by no one at all—and so forth.

[WARNING: SPOILERS.]

Watching Fight Club (1998, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton) with a friend the other night, I enjoyed myself by analyzing it with fresh eyes in light of a better grasp of postmodernism than I had the last time I’d seen it (at least a year ago).

In particular, the following. Insofar as Jack (Norton, the unnammed narrator) must imbue his world with meaning as the Everyman struggling to survive in light of a bleak and godless present, and insofar as Durden (Pitt) as the Nietszschean übermensch becomes a kind of antiheroic leader/god-figure among the men of “Project Mayhem,” the scene at Paper Street Soap Company immediately following Bob’s botched mission to “destroy a piece of corporate art and trash a franchise coffee bar” gives a biting critique of progressive theology—whether it “means” to or not.

When Angelface issues a stern edict to “bury him in the garden” in answer to a frantic cry that “we have to get rid of the evidence—we have to get rid of the body,” this god-figure expresses deep disgust and horror.

Jack: What are you talking about? This is not a f—king piece of evidence! This is a person! He’s a friend of mine and you’re not going to bury him in the f—king garden.

The objection comes from across the table on which sits this fresh corpse: “But sir, in Project Mayhem, we have no names.”

This dark figure rounds on him seriously, finger quivering indignantly, accusingly: “No, listen to me. This is a man and he has a name, and it’s Robert Paulson, ok? He is dead now, because of us, alright? You understand that?”

After a brief moment of silence, the dead man’s partner chimes in with quiet reverence: “I understand.” Turning didactically to his colleagues, as though having taken on a role of priest-mediator between this revelation so seemingly dripping for them all with gravitas, the scene recalls pagan sacrifice rituals on which scrolls of law would later be based. “In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulsen.”

The objector, now suddenly seeming as though recast as studious acolyte, quietly intones, “His name is Robert Paulsen.”

They all take up the cry for this the first true martyr of their gathering: “His name is Robert Paulsen. His name is Robert Paulsen….”

What do we see from this? A sardonic parody of the beginnings of tribal religion—and by extension, all religions, especially ones claiming progressive revelations (Christianity and Islam, e.g.). In the framework of postmodernism, Jack is only clinging to what he knows and is trying to make sense of the world around him; but as one of the founders of Project Mayhem, this everyman has taken on an incredible power for these men, his “followers,” who overinterpret simple statements and turn them into proverbs and parables.

This bleak picture of humanity seems characteristic of the late 1990s, now that we’re far enough from that decade to evaluate it at least a bit better in its historical context, with all its axioms, clichés, and presuppositions. In some sense, Fight Club is as clearly existential as No Exit or Edward Scissorhands, with an austerity of moral grounding that leaves man primal and with his own means of creating a meager truth for himself while he lives—and a bleak picture of the instinct to worship and sacredness that threatens to undermine this primal and paradoxically “higher” state of man.

[From Introduction to Phenomenology by Dermot Moran.] In his discussion of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Moran mentions off-hand, “Of course, Frege held the strange view that all true sentences have the same reference, namely the true, whereas for Husserlthe references of sentences will be the state of affairs that they affirm as holding.”

I need to look into Frege’s view, but this practice—though a perhaps cumbersome, idiosyncratic way of thinking about true sentences—seems to be rigorous in a way that forces one to think of the metaphysics underlying any utterance at all. This sounds to me more Platonic than I remember any of Frege’s writings to be, though.

I concede that there certainly is a sense in which when I state any true sentence, then it refers ultimately to The True, but it does so by-way-of that circumstance or thing I posit. There has to be something I’m not seeing: it seems either redundant to say that each true statement has as its reference the true—or indolent not to affirm it.

A good salutation requires a bit of thought: are we familiar enough or too familiar with the individual we’re addressing to use dear, should we use first or last names, and if so, how about honorifics? Most of us don’t have to pause over this; and even if we should, we don’t, preferring instead to just slap the standard “Dear [Title] Lastname,” and be done with it. However, the conclusion of a letter, an email, or note should warrant more care—I think of it as a blessing, the final words with which you may ever again address whomever you’re writing.

Those of you with whom I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding personally will know that I conclude, “Be well”—in person as often as in print. There are several reasons, but mainly, I believe it to be a superior cap to the alternatives, some of which I consider presently.

• “Sincerely” has been overused to the point that it almost sounds insincere: it’s like saying, “Can’t-think-what-else-to-say, bye.” It can be used artfully and to great effect, but only if one has covered a broad base of topics and the whole letter could be punctuated paragraph-wise with, “(I mean this quite seriously.)” Furthermore, the focus of “sincerely” is your own attitude, not the well-being of the person you’re addressing. If you are truly sincere, you will be able to convey that by each carefully selected word that crafts every sentence you’re writing—and if it’s a careless letter, why send it as a letter with a proper structure instead of a text message? Overusing “sincerely” is like overtraining your biceps: it’ll look better if you buffer it by something else and give it a rest. Try something else.
• “Be good” is insufficient because of its colloquial use, which is actually just confused with what would otherwise say “be well,” but when taken literally (that is, outside its mostly-Southeastern US context), this conclusion is telling the person to achieve moral excellence or to keep up his or her health. Sounds great, right? But what if the person needs dwell in the grace of Christ more than he or she needs to seek to achieve moral excellence, being already driven unhealthily by a misconception like “performance theology.” Maybe in order to truly be well, this person needs to relax a bit; or even in the long run needs to be sick, yes, even to experience momentary pain, or to be challenged in a new way, in order to grow and ultimately be a better individual and more actively beneficial influence on the persons whose company he or she keeps.
• “Take it easy”—this one always gets me. Hereagain, this well-intentioned phrase is an insufficient blessing. If I have a busy day ahead of me, or if I need to be much higher-strung than I am in order to complete some task or another, then the last thing I need to hear is “take it easy”—either because I’ll take it to heart and fall from underperformance into uniform indolence, or because I’ll mentally contrast what “taking it easy” would look like (e.g., a neat twelve-year Scotch blend, a nice cigar, good friends, good conversation deep into the night) with what must actually be accomplished that day (e.g., finishing work, writing a paper, doing laundry, working out, writing emails, paying bills deep into the night) and will thus be more discouraging than helpful! Furthermore, while some Type-A personalities really do need to hear this and take it seriously, taking it easy is usually the last thing we really need to do, and in the best of cases is still an incomplete motivational invocation.
• “Grace and peace” is the closest letter-closing I’ve ever heard to “be well,” and is characteristically charitable and thoughtful: who wouldn’t enjoy the blessing of grace and peace? And yet, if one is truly to be well, he or she will enjoy the grace and peace of Christ, and many more blessings besides, though the path to get there be riddled with the thorns of hard lessons that inevitably expose that grace and that peace.

I therefore propose “Be well” as the superlative benediction. Maybe it is ultimately in my best interests not to take it easy, but rather to go to the gym and sweat a bit under a squat bar, run in the cold winter sunlight and breathe in the fresh air, write a letter, sing a song, or make a tough call to an old friend or family member with whom I’ve had rough relations in the past. Maybe I need to push past my own limitations and do something that’s quite the opposite of easy, and so become an encouragement to others and become a better man. Maybe what I need to be truly well is to have the opportunity of becoming violently ill in order to re-evaluate my priorities and get my life in order. Maybe I’m in a dead-end relationship out of which I’d never myself see a way if not for the “Dear John” letter that might initially seem to perforate my joy and fill me with dread, but which will seem in the long run a great blessing, as an aerator punctures a lawn and tills the garden to make the plot more fruitful. Maybe, though I might never consciously wish it on myself, I need something other than a candy-coated reality full of apparent charm and warmth in order to become the kind of man that I was intended to become. By wishing my wellness, you invoke all of this—and since true wellness cannot be attained apart from the grace and the peace that surpasses all understanding, you thereby wish that to my person, and I will partake of it if I am well—whether the means be straight and flat or crooked and full of obstacles by which I learn, grow, and am ultimately made better.

And so to you, dear reader, I say, be well.

Technorati Tags: wellness, benediction, blessing

Men do hear the calls of Christ, but they are willfully deaf, because they think he wants them to do something. But he does not want anything of you; he wants you to receive what he has already done. He comes laden with mercy, with his hands full of blessing, and he knocks at your door. You have only to open it and he will enter in, and salvation will enter with him.

It’s a real struggle, since we earn everything else, for good or for ill, to accept free grace as free. But that’s the gospel—right there, summed up.

On Joy & Sorrow
Our joy is like the wave as it dashes on the shore—it throws us on the earth. But our sorrows are like that receding wave which sucks us back again into the great depth of godhead. We would have been stranded and left high and dry on the shore if it had not been for that receding wave, that ebbing of our prosperity, which carried us back to our Father and our God again.

Tacitus tells us that an amber ring was throught to be of no value among the Romans till the emperor took to wearing one, and then immediately an amber ring was held in high esteem. Bereavements might be looked on as very sad things, but when we recollect that Jesus wept over his friend Lazarus, they are choice jewels and special favors from God. Christ wore this ring. Then I must not blush to wear it.

Our sorrows are all, like ourselves, mortal. There are no immortal sorrows for immortal souls. They come, but blessed be God, they also go. Like birds of the air, they fly over our heads. But they cannot make their abode in our souls. We suffer today, but we shall rejoice tomorrow.

The Quaker was right who, when he saw a lady fretting on the sofa some year or so after her husband was dead, still harboring grief without a token of resignation, said to her, ‘Madam, I see you have not forgiven God yet.’ Sometimes, grief is not a sacred feeling, but only a murmur of rebellion against the Most High.

On Works:
Many Christians appear to think that if they are just believers, it is enough. We do not in business think it enough if we barely escape bankruptcy. A man does not say, if his dear child has been ill in bed for years, that it is quite enough so long as the child is alive. We do not think of our own bodies, that so long as we can breathe, it is enough.

I remember a story of one, who remarked to a minister what a wonderful thing it was to see so many people weeping. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I will tell you something more amazing still, that so many will forget all they wept about when they get outside the door.’

To be unfeeling is to be unfruitful. Prayer without desire, praise without emotion, preaching without earnestness–what are all these? Like the marble images of life, they are cold and dead.

A hard-hearted Christian—is not that a complete contradiction? Must not our hearts have been broken before we could ourselves be penitent? And he who bound them up and healed them did not harden them with his gentle touch. I reckon that he gave them an additional tenderness by the very act of binding them up with his own dear pierced hands.

On Salvation (or, “Wait, I Thought He Was Baptist”):
I believe there will be more in heaven than in hell. If you ask me why I think so, I answer, because Christ in everything is to have the preeminence, and I cannot conceive how he could have the preeminence if there are to be more in the dominions of Satan than in paradise.

I rejoice to know that the souls of all infants, as soon as they die, speed their way to paradise. Think what a multitude there is of them!

It is said there is to be a multitude that no man can number in heaven. I have never read that there is to be a multitude that no man can number in hell.

Some of you could not be happy if you were allowed to enter heaven. Shall I tell you why? It is a land of spirit, and you have neglected your spirit. Some of you even deny that you have a spirit.

These are some I found encouraging and challenging, sometimes one more than the other; though ultimately the two are inseparable.

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
—Goethe

When I was just old enough to know that I should control myself in the company of my elders but young enough to know I could still get away with being obnoxiously rambunctious and what was to my parents embarrassingly honest, I found myself confronted by a crisis of conscience.

At that point in my life, I thought of “department stores” as something like cubby holes, only bigger, where adults walked around like they knew what they were there for, while I hid giggling inside the circular standing racks of women’s blouses just because I knew that somehow it was something I could never get away with someday. My mother and I had gone to one such department store, and there in the midst of an aisle was standing a ridiculously irate toddler. He wanted something, clearly, from his mother; or rather, for her to buy him something—you know, I wasn’t clear on how all those transactions worked at just over half a decade old—and I crept up to investigate. I was an extremely shy child, you understand, but I just had to know what that kid was screaming about—and it ended up being something that I thought was utterly ridiculous. I thought to myself that he ought not to have been screaming about something so stupid, so utterly needless. But then, it hit me: maybe that’s how Mom thought of the stuff I wanted….

That didn’t make me want it less, whatever “it” might have been—and I would whine, beg, flash those doe eyes kids and seductresses share, and tug at her blouse to get it (thereby prophetically setting my path before me as a philosopher who would disprove the Socratic knowledge-as-virtue tenet). But that was only because I knew I could get away with it.

Another time, in a J. C. Penney, around the same age, the horrifying fate that must befall all firstborn sons and their poor distraught mothers occurred to me: I got lost. Here in these suffocating cubby holes, these cold, gridded floors with their fake tile and unyielding, Astroturf-esque carpeting that comprised some system that I just couldn’t grasp, I had gotten distracted by a diamond necklace or some such at the jewelry counter. Obediently not touching the glass, I stared in wide-eyed wonder at this sparkly rainbowmaker; and when my reverie broke, I turned to find—men, women, racks of clothing, an infinite sea of “stuff” and “things”—and precisely zero people who were my mother.

Knowing that this was when the “little kids” always panicked, I gathered myself, determined to outstay the anxiety with faith that Mom would realize where I was and come to rescue me from my present state—uncertain, hands clasped behind my back, rocking from the balls to the heels of my feet across the line between pseudotile flooring and stiff beige carpeting. Finally (probably after all of ninety seconds), my resolve eroded and I wandered at a near-gallop past all the places I thought she had been, only to find myself more lost than before, somewhere between “soft shiny things Dad likes on t.v.” (lingerie) and “things that would make Mom sneeze a lot” (perfume)—my sense of direction has only marginally improved since then. It was somewhere around this time that I passed the escalator, that great unmanned beast of a machine I’d heard of trapping my peers’ feet and ceaselessly moving people to and fro, up and down. Presently, I gave up hope, and began to tremble, then to softly weep; for it had been an eternity, and I had moved from the spot I’d been left besides, against all admonitions I’d ever received to the contrary. Lost to my curiosity, inadvertently abandoned light years from home, at the top of the gaping maw of an unfriendly peoplemover, a bad son for making my mother worry (and God only knew what Dad would say when we got home), I presently gave up hope. I felt more vulnerable standing, so I walked very slowly, sobbing quietly into my sleeve, embarrassed at the looks I got and still anxious about (not) being rediscovered—

But then there was a certain man who greeted me sheepishly. He was an elf to my hobbit, tall and thin and full of years yet still youthful somehow. (Looking back, he couldn’t have been any more than in his late twenties.) Kind but somehow timid eyes regarded me beneath a concerned brow framed by a close-cropped shock of black hair; he was dressed in a suit with shoulder pads the likes of which no one has seen since 1989. A regular joe, just a customer in the store, he had found me and asked me if I was lost. Yes, I replied, but truth be told it was Mom who was lost, or both of us, or—oh, I didn’t know! And he smiled a half-smile that bespoke what I later understood to be amusement and a gentle kindness tempered by the social awareness that he was trying to exude extreme professionalism and yet was talking to a lanky wet-faced six-year-old in the midst of a department store in the middle of the afternoon. Still nearly smiling, he offered to help me find my mother. Having grown up with pure, 1980s archetypes of what good and evil looked like (the former with geekiness, silliness, bombasticism, or at least, self-consciousness, and the latter with cigarette-smoking, sleazy self-assuredness, and sly turns of phrase), I trusted him for his half smile and his youth, which won out over his height and suit-wearing.

Rising in a small elevator with no more than this stranger who wore the look of kindness and pathos, my eyes dried. I steeled myself, drawing up my chest and clenching my fists; and with all the power of every bit of manners that had been drilled into me, I thanked the man straight-faced. But it was the kind of caricature of a straight face that I fancied must have looked like Jean Claude Van Damme in every movie in which I’d ever seen him, so I couldn’t help but smile, then giggle in spite of myself.

In what seemed a miracle tantamount to Philip being translocated by the Spirit, the two invested parties found each other upon the opening of the elevator doors. My mother was, as she tells it, “boo-hooing,” thinking she’d lost me forever, and I thought how interesting, how meaningful it was that she was just as upset as I had been (”—and then some,” I’m sure she’d interject). She thanked the man profusely, but kept crying till we got to the car, and even as we were pulling out of the parking lot. Finally, pitying her and thinking she must be going through the same thing I was going through in the store (only outside the store, that whole adults-thinking-abstractly thing), I patted her leg softly and said, “It’s okay, Mom, I’m right here, now. I love you!”

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I learned a lot in those department stores, from the ridiculously chainsaw-loud crying toddler who was murderously desperate for something inconsequential, and the half-smile man in a suit who, though a tall stranger, neither offered me candy nor tried to seduce me into his car. I learned that adults have different priorities than I did; and that if I were to earn worth and respect in their eyes—not as a child, not as a human being, but as someone real, someone worth hearing out—then I was going to have to really think about the things I wanted, and the things I did around them. And I learned that not all strangers are evildoers and “bad” to talk to, and purposed thenceforth to be kind to children when I became an adult—because maybe they would feel suspended in eternity, abandoned in deep space, just like me. In short, I began to really ponder how I came across to others, and how important it was to think and be conscious of how I should interact with what, years later, I would learn Sartre and Camus dubbed the Other. Indeed, how important was maturity itself—to act one’s age was not enough, but to act more than the age that one looked! (In my case that was quite a disparity, being very tall for my age.)

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Just a couple of years later, this concept was gilded into the floor of my psyche.
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It’s really not like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross got it completely wrong.

It’s just that, perhaps, she didn’t flesh it out enough.  Instead of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, I propose a few less abstract labels.  The first one looks a lot like Pablo Francisco’s sketch of “Tommy” in his standup routine in New York on Comedy Central: “No!  It’s not over!  I love you!  The band’s gonna make it, c’mon”—now, that’s Denial.  Anger, well, maybe it looks something like this.  The third level of stages of grief usually looks like something we’ve all done before, at some time or another, involving some good work that we promise to do (consistently or not) in exchange for a change of a situation for the better.  Of course, none of us hold up our ends of the bargains, but that’s only because we somehow know that if we did, we’d be no better off.  Depression usually looks like something of an amalgam of that which has already been described and that which is yet to come, a transitition : a little anger mixed with acceptance.

Acceptance looks different than acquiescence, though, I think; and a lot different than we have traditionally conceptualized it.  When we grit our teeth, dig in our heels, and accept the situtation for what it is and assume that because of entropy it will only worsen (and remain stable for all that)—that is acceptance.  There is no need for acceptance in the face of true pleasure; so only in the case of pain, we say, “I am content,” and are able to mean it in a sense that extends beyond the moment; come what may, we say, even though the situation shall deteriorate, I will bear it.  Frankly, this is often a beautiful state for one to inhabit, because it makes one aware both of grace and of his or her own relations to others; but sometimes—sometimes—this is the very attitude God uses to shatter the hell-on-earth we take for granted and turn it into something better than we expect.  I don’t recommend adopting my dear friend’s old philosophy that by expecting the worst we will never be disappointed, because if we truly always expect the worse, we will drive ourselves into a state that cannot comprehend the good that happens around us (the same happens in the case that we expect too much; and it is named Depression).

There is something about which we all grit our teeth and bear it.  Some are more punishing than others, but we all have one or two at the top of our list that have been there so long we’ve forgotten them; or, more accurately, we’ve become jaded to them to the point that we take them as for granted as gravity in our lives, that force by which we are dragged down but against which we struggle with some measure of success day by day, and becomes as natural to us as breathing.

As a major in philosophy, I love to challenge people’s beliefs; I love to discuss why and how you and I believe that which we believe.  As a psychologist, sometimes that includes the feelings that we have for each other, against each other, and generally in our own lives.  (As a cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist, that makes me extremely curious about the nature of subjective experience in general and, particularly, how we conceptualize sorrow; but that’s, of course, beside the point for this post.)  Where the rubber meets the road?  Right at our points of the most certain.  Until a few weeks ago, I was sure that the surest thing in the world apart from “Sol appears to rise on such-and-such a time within such-and-such a solstice from the planet Earth” was “She and I shall never again share laughter or fellowship—only bare-bones forgiveness at best.  Maybe in the same sense that you can live in a structure with four walls and a roof against the elements and call it a house (though never a home).  But like a character out of a Dickens novel, I eventually took this for granted; not as a thing to be warred against, but an obstacle to be worked around.  One more wall in a life-perimeter lined with failed expectations, lost promises, and quiet acceptance of what must have always been.

Nevertheless: for Christmas, God granted me reconciliation and laughter.

We all get used to the ruts in our lives, our minds, our patterns of behavior, without knowing it; that’s how they become ruts, after all.  You make a decision and that’s final, and it will never change; whatever else happens, you know that X is in stone, and that’s all there is to it.

The force that took me down was more powerful and more subtle than the brute force (including argument) of which I’m so fond: it was the true Laughter that I’ve been missing for more than half a decade.  My favorite method of argument to coming around to a mutually agreeable solution is that of intense fighting, from a position of rock-solid opinionation to open-minded willingness to really listen on both sides.  But for Christmas, I was given something sweeter and more powerful than a brute-force argument: mutual laughter.  What?

Seriously.  This is the man in whom the Dragon dwells; this is he who stands, a statue in the cracked desert floor, another simple program in the great OS from the sky, and nothing more.  And yet—

Aye, the impossible was granted.  The best Christmas present I’ve received in memory was over half a decade in the making; and it was Yield in the form of Laughter that had nothing to do with artifice generated by comedy flicks, stand-up, or what-have-you.  I would never have thought that Laughter could have melted the fortress of ice I’d hid myself in; but nothing says “sovereign” like something five years in the making.

I just finished the final, ten-page paper of my entire undergraduate career. This Monday, I will graduate with a dual BA in experimental psychology and philosophy from the University of South Carolina. It’s been a long road, and I wouldn’t know where to begin to thank everyone that’s helped me get here.

But I just have to thank a few, even though I’ll miss a multitude and have to keep updating the post. My friends I’ve met in Columbia since I arrived here a couple of long years ago, you’ve been an enormous encouragement. If I named you all I’d be here till noon and this would look like Facebook!

JCS, JMB, SKM, CAC, DHN3, APS, HCI, B#L, DRP, JRM, D#A, &c.—your solidarity through the years means the world.

Thom C.—I’m a better writer, thinker, and Christian man because of your influence.

Drs. F. Provenzano, A. Almor, R. Bruster, C. Bryson, H. Sefrin-Weis—you are who inspired me to pursue my dreams in academia.

To my dear friends from Louisville back in ‘01-’02, if you ever somehow see this, know that your tireless patience and thoughtful questions gave me direction when I thought the only way was down.

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You know what this means, right? With all the new time I have after work to read, think, and write, you can expect excellent things from ThinkBlog and ThinkForums in ‘07! (And I’ll also have time now to reply to all those messages and go through those stacks of papers that have been waiting on me for literally years! Ha!)

How unpopular does this sound today, in our culture of weak-minded non-committal laissez faire “tolerance”?

Avoid a sugared gospel as you would shun sugar of lead. Seek that gospel which rips up and tears and cuts and wounds and hacks and even kills, for that is the gospel that makes alive again. And when you have found it, give good heed to it. Let it enter into your inmost being. As the rain soaks into the ground, so pray the Lord to let his gospel soak into your soul.

—Spurgeon

But if I say, “I will not remember Him
Or speak anymore in His name,”
Then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire
Shut up in my bones;
And I am weary of holding it in,
And I cannot endure it.

Jeremiah 20:9, NAS

If I don’t write what’s really important to me, I lose the fire to talk about it at all; but then it becomes to me almost like a sin of omission, after the fact. This weekend promises to sharpen my focus; more on that later.

I’ve been thinking lately about how hard it is to meditate in the Christian sense—to meditate in actual prayer, as opposed to just going through the motions of insincere rote incantations. A friend and I were discussing this, in fact: it’s really hard to concentrate on how great God is because mere intellectual assent gets in the way so often. When we are commanded to dwell on God’s sovereignty, it’s not a matter of saying the words that acknowledge that this hypothetical being and-or great commander of the universe is in control. He’s not a Greek god satisfied with rote prayers and insincere libations poured out before Him just to appease His greatness. No, we are commanded to get a grip on Hs actual greatness in terms of what that means for our lives, which is at once terrifying, humbling, and comforting—and it’s the first thing in what we call the Lord’s Prayer! Here’s to making that kind of meditation first priority.

For information on creatine, check the creatine FAQ. It’s not a prohormone and it’s not a steroid. I’ve been learning more about it as I work at the Vitamin Shoppe and the more I think it’s a great thing. Check it out; and also if you have time, check out the Men’s Health Forums in regard to the latest creatine research.

This is more of a thank-you post than it is theoretical or even practical in any sense. I can be myself around PJ, my former roommate and my constant friend. He is, like me, goofy, Christian, and southern—but he especially keeps me rooted when I come visit him in Charlotte and I realize only by his invitations to southern restaurants and by his jabs at my non-regional intellectualism that I can by my hailing-from-SC self with him. Last week we went to John’s Country Kitchen in Charlotte, voted by all sorts of quasi-unofficial organizations the “Best Breakfast” and “Best Southern Food” in Charlotte, for lunch. It was the best meat loaf I’d ever had, let alone the gravy, lima beans, fried okra, and sweet tea and cornbread I’d had short of Grandmama Leila. Seriously, what more could you possibly ask for? (I have a menu here that I’ve been meaning to scan in, but as I write this, I don’t have access to that scanner. Will upload ASAP.)

There are generally two types of people: the Jungian “Feeling” types that are very suspicious of psychology because they are simply “too unique to be put into a box” (like all the other people who can be categorized into that same group, ironically enough) and who believe that psychology exists only to impose external, arbitrary, restrictive boundaries on the nature of humanity (these are quick to point out that humans are so different that they are hardly categorizable); and the Jungian “Thinking” types, who are suspicious of psychology because it is so soft and subjective a science, such a framework that allows so much play in comparison to, say, biology. Both are right and wrong; isn’t that interesting! Where do you fall on the continuum?