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.

[An attempt to capture images from a fever dream in early December 2007. And you thought ThinkBlog was down for the count.]

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.

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.

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.

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!”

Vanitas-Viciosa © 1991 by Elsie Russell

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.)

Just a couple of years later, this concept was gilded into the floor of my psyche.

As was the custom in earlier times, my father’s side of the family went on a sojourn from the far reaches of South Carolina to a quaint little town near its center, a town famous for slow talkers, the wisdom connoted by grey hairs, and a recently-restored historical Opera House. We all gathered at Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Matriarch’s house—dearly beloved and much-respected mother of my father—a barely-modern one-story embedded like a fine gem in the residential district of what could be called the “downtown” of this minor city. We drove for what seemed like days to reach this little house: all the cousins would be driven by their respective parents, and all would park on the lawn because there was so very much of it. I got in trouble if I parked my bike on the grass at home; so I surmised there was some rule of which adult children were aware, approximately phrased, “You can do whatever you want, within the restraints of your own self-discipline.” (That I would have abused this rule only served as a reminder that I wasn’t “old enough.”)

There was a peculiar, warm mysticism that hung around this abode and the activities to which it was a witness, like a wreath of pipe-smoke might ever ring the smiling avuncular face of an ancestor’s informal portrait. Bounded by a shallow drainage ditch I always thought of as a creek on two sides, and buttressed by a lush and meticulously cared-for, award-winning rose garden on the rear, this was a mysterious little oasis of fellowship with all the cousins born of Grandmama’s seed. Many lessons were learned, many deep thoughts found their birth on the granite steps of that old house. Whenever we would get together, I soaked up the experience with all the voracity a curious youth could muster, and attempted to varying degrees of success to act years ahead of the age I looked. The youngest cousin save for my sister on my father’s side of the family, I knew that the more mature and calm, the more understanding I not only acted but truly was, the more respect I would gain from my cousins, who I knew somehow, someday, I would consider my peers. If we were ever to have a relationship in which I didn’t look like a stupid, whiny, desperate toddler in their minds, it would have to be up to me not to act but to be an adult, with all the pains and responsibilities thereunto pertaining, whatever that meant.

A den view from the kitchen, off of which is also the dining room.

So when one Thanksgiving in my eighth year I sneaked into the dining room to see the usual preliminary spread of homemade rolls and so forth, I was surprised to find a scalloped porcelain dish filled with a grand bundle of small, purplish-black orbs, around which was what looked like an expertly crafted domino-cascade of very expensive-looking seeded crackers. Set aside in the official dining room, whose walls were paneled with a richly-stained wood, it sat on a pristine crimson tablecloth that covered what I knew was an ancient, hand-crafted table whose particular veneer matched the shade of the China cabinet—an inconceivably old set of shelves on which were priceless, sparklingly ornate vessels of lead crystal and Sterling silver that were apparently designed to look practical, but were never in my lifetime touched, let alone used. I lingered over these tiny fishy spheres, segregated to a place of honor amongst these majestic sundries. Something about the whole arrangement seemed perfectly ridiculous, perfectly adult, to me. It wasn’t chip dip—there wasn’t enough of the purple stuff for one to pile it liberally on each cracker and have enough to go around, and I’d never seen the likes of this anywhere in the grocery store. It looked foreign, and smelled fishy; and had it been on the floor with no crackers, even lacking felines at any gathering in this place of gathering, I would have fancied it cat food. But to my young senses, you must understand—this look was the look of very adultness; this smell was the bouquet of sophistication. This wasn’t the usual salsa, and it certainly bore no kinship to sugary, processed “kid-food” I held in such contempt as a child. Growing up, the “kids’ menu” was my enemy, not only because of disappointingly-sized portions and disappointingly-fried selections were frustratingly insufficient to satiate a rapidly-growing preadolescent boy, but because I resented the symbol of a whole “world” that adults had made up for kids, to keep them contained, manageable, and happy only because of an ignorance about what they were missing. If adults could do it, I wanted to do it—including being thoughtful and doing things that made me really uncomfortable without a second thought. To possess the courage not to complain about anything, but to learn from everything—this was the lofty ideal to which I held adulthood, the bedrock criterion of maturity to which I aspired.

The rest of the family was scattered about the kitchen and den in pairs and trios, talking mostly about what I considered mundane mathematical nonsense that adults liked to talk about when they couldn’t find any other creative way to fill the air (the insufferably dry conversation, including words like “debits” and “credits” and “annual withholding” was the only part of adulthood I didn’t idolize). Knowing somehow they thought it rude to stop talking once they’d started, I seized the opportunity to test the waters by first wading out just a bit: I had a fancy cracker. It was brittle, tough, and seedy; and left a taste in my mouth quite different than the Saltines I had known from times of illness. I didn’t like it at first; but this sentiment was crushed with all the swiftness that I realized my own reaction—and in my anger at being a child, schooled myself: “No, this cracker is a symbol of adulthood. Adults eat these thin crackly wafers, you silly child!” I acquired a taste for rye, right then and there, by force of will.

Growing still more brave, I withdrew another from the domino-arrangement and plunged it into the purplish-blackness in the center of the plate; and, with a heap of the slick-looking fishy stuff, crammed the whole thing into my mouth, suddenly afraid I’d be discovered and embarrassed—not for eating prematurely, but by the awareness that I, a then-prepubescent child whose age could be numbered with a single stroke of a pen, was trying so hard to be an adult. But, half-cowering, chewing ferociously, I tried to get a handle on what I was tasting: little bursts of salty fishiness were exploding quietly like muted firecrackers of sophistication in my mouth; crunching on the rye, the crisp taste of grown-up reality! I reveled in the experience as much as in the taste—as when at a stranger’s wedding reception one hears an otherwise intimate toast by a tipsy groomsman transmuted by champagne into a wisecrack about the groom’s lavatory habits and, despite his ignorance, one finds himself laughing.

Before I realized what I’d done and came back to myself, I’d finished off almost the entire bowl of the mystical purple spheres that had hailed anonymously from the Adult Realm. Fulfillment yielded haltingly to the second round of the aforementioned shame as I realized I would be found out. I made peace with my decision to own my gluttonous misdeed when asked, so that I didn’t seem even more the child. Meanwhile, I weaved my way sheepishly through the discussion of insurance policies and football scores into the den, to at least appear as though I was on my way to doing something meaningful. But the only people in the den were staring into the television. Rapt to near-sacrilege at what seemed to me a bunch of bullies in helmets running over each other to the elation of a crowd who apparently felt that a dome was technically no occasion to use “inside voices,” and since to sit still was a punishment mete for breaking vases and not for independent volition, I went off to explore—

—Until I got called with great authority back into the dining room. Demanding an explanation, my aunt and parents had realized that the one who had single-handedly pilfered all the tiny fish marbles and spicy unsalted crackers was none other than I. Blushing, I apologized and attempted to explain away my private ambitions of sophistication by the highly plausible excuse that I had just been hungry and impatient.

My aunt, however, was thoroughly amused and, chuckling earnestly with understanding eyes, bent down conspiratorially to explain that the reason I’d been called in with such gravitas was that I had just eaten caviar with rye crackers. She asked gingerly, tenderly as though somehow seeing yet not laughing at my plight to be an omniscient adult, whether I knew what the word “caviar” meant. Though sorely tempted to lie, my curiosity directed my tongue to the negative. She explained the concept, bracing herself visibly for a starkly and altogether childishly negative reaction, that it was a French word for “fish eggs.”

Having steeled myself against an answer lesser children (and other poor mortals) might have found disgusting, the barest flash of a grimace was replaced with a proud and authentic declaration that I enjoyed it, and to prove it presently took another triumphant bite! Fledgling freedom over arbitrary internal schemas, innovation over familiarity, sophistication over naiivete, adulthood over childishness—this was my victory, an initiation, a step from naiiveté to experience! Everyone laughed; but I felt they were laughing with me, anticipating my future…. Twelve adults—and one child well on his way.

Obviously, I came to realize that adulthood was not nearly so ideal as I’d anticipated, as must be the course of all who live with any awareness of themselves and of others. The point is not, however, that starry-eyed youth inevitably fades, but rather that it makes all the difference how we conduct ourselves in light of our failures—and those of people and the circumstances in which we find ourselves—to meet our expectations. If, knowing that every member of the category of persons broadly called “adults” has any number of unemulable character traits, and that with tragic frequency we show the vestiges of the self-seeking, careless, petulant brats we once were—does that give us license to stagnate, or impetus to change?

Sophistication need not mean jadedness; complexity need not mean waste; and the changing of tunes from “Twinkle, Twinkle” to the Song of Experience need not mean a transition into a minor key. Those who consciously insist on the bliss that is ignorance say so only until they realize that to say so is to minimize the gift of awareness of Himself, of others, and of the universe God gave man. Infants can’t even handle honey, and children find steak hard to swallow, but women and men know that caviar on rye is finer than reconstituted American on Saltines. Indeed, is the gift of marital coitus, that singular instantiation and signification of Christ and the Church, accompanied by the love a couple is commanded and delighted to show one another, for children? Little ones are precious beyond words to God and to Man, and cannot affirm that ignorance is bliss precisely because of the blessedness of their state; but an adult who allows the child within to reign into the ripeness of age is merely pining for the womb, or the grave.

David J. Grossman, Quaternion Julia Set (7). [Info: Julia set.]

A quaternion fractal that does not morph over many iterations is more than an anomaly; it’s a mathematical impossibility. Even so for humans: to settle instead of striving, to exist instead of thriving, to complain instead of acting, to criticize instead of creating, to remain children instead of maturing, to choose ignorance instead of truth—in so doing, we try to keep the variables of our experience from iterating—i.e., we fight the complexity and dynamism with which we were intended to live. Empower yourself by empowering your brother and sister; encourage your neighbor by being better than you are; and love your family by authentically forgiving more than just their peccadillos—and overcome the temptation to pit one against another by being even-handed through all the vicissitudes that cause you or your brother to stumble into childish ambition and resentment.

Are we content to live slothfully yet miserably within our own narrow parameters we in our frailty have tried to impose upon the world and so bury the talents we’ve been given, or do we push ourselves to learn, to grow, to love, to forgive, and to do all the rest of the things that entropy and flesh would have us neglect? Do we claw in vain at the riverbed of Time to hold on to the familiar and the comfortable, and so spend our lives always on the brink of death by drowning in our own arbitrary rules—sentencing ourselves to suffering that is unique to the self-willful failure to adapt and grow, to forgive and let go, to take on the new and the dangerous if it will mean change? The human—not the spirit, the body, or the mind, but rather all these and the private world of his experience—was meant to adapt, to flourish under pressure, to endure, to grow and move at the same pace as the rock onto which he was born, hurtling through space and time.

It is by the power of God’s grace that we have what we have; and by the very same that we are empowered to grow beyond our natural limits of selfishness and hatred into humility and brotherly sacrifice. May 2007 prove for you a rich glass of edifying challenges: great with grace; abundant in love; full of dynamic lessons and rediscoveries of eternal Truth, a canvas for your creativity and a template for personal growth.

Technorati Tags: challenges, relationships, grace, innocence, ignorance, sophistication, vanitas, Christ, personal growth, archetypes, anecdotes, childhood, experience, aging

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.

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.

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.

These are all based on assumptions that we hold that pertain to our daily lives. I will be soon posting a list of my “assumptions” as well, though of course these will be for public discussion and will not be unchallenged in the sense that I am asking you, my beloved readers, to consider your “assumptions.” Do you know of any off the top of your heads?

In good old times, remember my friend
Moon was so bright and so close to us, sometimes

We were still blind and deaf, what a bliss?
Painting the world of our own, for our own eyes, now?

“Can we ever have what we had then?
Friendship unbreakable
Love means nothing to me
Without blinking an eye
I’d fade, if so needed,
All those moments with you
If I had you beside me”

One cloudy day we both lost the game?
We drifted so far and away

Nothing is quite as cruel as a child
Sometimes we break the unbreakable, sometimes?

“And we’ll never have what we had then
Friendship unbroken
Love means nothing to me
Without blinking an eye
I’d fade, if so needed,
All those moments with you
If I had you beside me now”

I was unable to cope with what you said
Sometimes we need to be cruel to be kind
Child that I was, could not see the reason
Feelings I had were but sham and a lie

I have never forgotten your smile
Your eyes, oh, Shamandalie

Time went by, many memories died
I’m writing this down to ease my pain

You saw us always clearer than me
How we were never meant to be
Love denied meant the friendship would die
Now I have seen the light
These memories make me cry

“Can I ever have what I had then?
Friendship unbroken
Love means nothing to me
Without blinking an eye
I’d fade, if so needed,
All those moments with you
And see the world with my wide open eyes

Friendship got broken
There’s no other for me
Like the one of my childhood days
Can you forgive me?
The love got better off me,
On that one day back in old times”

© 2004 Sonata Arctica, Reckoning Night

I do not believe there is a single honest man living who, having once heard the gospel simply preached, does not in his conscience believe it to be true. I am persuaded that light will penetrate. There is such force, such energy in Christ, it must and will pierce through some crevice and convince at least a natural conscience. but this is the very reason why men oppose it. They do not want it to be true.

This was supposed to guarantee free upgrades, right?

Wrong. Now, WinZip has changed their tune and will only allow you to use your old registration key for the new 10.0 version if you pay 50% of the brand-spanking-new license, both of which are ridiculously exorbitant for mere compression capabilities.

If you, like me, have been stung by this and don’t care to search for a WinZip crack and descend into the dark halls of computing’s arcane underbelly, you can still find WinZip 9.0 via FTP searches (forget Google, it’s uselessly pointing to version 10.0). See specifically here, for instance.