i've recently been worried that i am becoming a worse alice, that instead of getting more beautiful and christlike i am practicing more selfishness and fear in relationships and work. perhaps part of it is really that the circumstances in my life never brought out this worse alice and i always had the propensity to be this version of me... but that doesn't negate the fact that i have been practicing indulging in it so that i gradually move away from where I want to be. on the otherhand, maybe i am just seeing more clearly how terribly sinful i am and have always been.
tim keller says all of life is repentence. he distinguishes two kinds of repentence:religious and gospel. Religious repentence is "selfish, self-righteous, and bitter all the way to the bottom." We repent because we fear the consequences of sin (punishment) but the gospel says sin cannot bring us into ultimate condemnation (romans 8); In the gospel, however, we repent because we are sorry for the sin and how it displeases and dishonors God. we acknowledge that Jesus suffered for our sin. "We do not have to make ourselves suffer to merit God’s forgiveness. We simply receive the forgiveness earned by Christ. God forgives us because he is just" (1 John 1:9). "The knowledge of our acceptance in Christ makes it easier to admit that we are flawed,
because we know we won’t be cast off if we confess the true depths of our sinfulness. Our hope is in
Christ’s righteousness, not our own, so it is not as traumatic to admit our weaknesses and lapses" and "this creates a radical new dynamic for personal growth. The more we see our own flaws and sins, the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God’s grace appears to us."
i wonder if my concern with being a more beautiful alice or a more hellish alice leads me to repentance that is religious or gospel. do i want to be more beautiful because i want to be pleasing to God and delight in a good relationship with Him or am i afraid of the consequences/ want to perfect myself? i think it's sometimes one and sometimes the other. i wonder which one it is more (if only the wii fit balance test which tells me i lean right more than left could help me out, tho i'm not sure i want to know the answer since the wii finds pleasure in making me feel weak)
Keller suggests these repentance reflections. I like them because I think I fail all of the questions.
Deep humility vs. Pride:
Have I looked down on anyone? Have I been too stung by criticism? Have I felt snubbed and ignored?
Repent like this: Consider the free grace of Jesus until I sense (a) decreasing disdain, since I am a sinner
too, and (b) decreasing pain over criticism, since I should not value human approval over God’s love. In
light of his grace, I can let go of the need to keep up a good image—it is too great a burden and is now
unnecessary. I reflect on free grace until I experience grateful, restful joy.
Wise courage (v. anxiety)
Have I avoided people or tasks that I know I should face? Have I been anxious and worried? Have I failed
to be circumspect, or have I been rash and impulsive?
Repent like this: Consider the free grace of Jesus until there is (a) no cowardly avoidance of hard things,
since Jesus faced evil for me, and (b) no anxious or rash behavior, since Jesus’ death proves that God
cares and will watch over me. It takes pride to be anxious, and I recognize I am not wise enough to
know how my life should go. I reflect on free grace until I experience calm thoughtfulness and strategic
boldness.
Burning love (v. indifference)
Have I spoken or thought unkindly of anyone? Am I justifying myself by caricaturing someone else in
my mind? Have I been impatient and irritable? Have I been self-absorbed, indifferent, and inattentive to
people?
Repent like this: Consider the free grace of Jesus until there is (a) no coldness or unkindness, as I think
of the sacrificial love of Christ for me, (b) no impatience, as I think of his patience with me, and (c) no
indifference, as I think of how God is infinitely attentive to me. I reflect on free grace until I show warmth
and affection.
Godly motivations (a "single eye")
Am I doing what I do for God’s glory and the good of others, or am I being driven by fears, need for
approval, love of comfort and ease, need for control, hunger for acclaim and power, or the fear of other
people (Luke 12:4–5)? Am I looking at anyone with envy? Am I giving in to even the first motions of lust
or gluttony? Am I spending my time on urgent things rather than important things because of these
inordinate desires?
Repent like this: Consider how the free grace of Jesus provides me with what I am looking for in these
other things. Pray, “Oh Lord Jesus, make me happy enough in you to avoid sin, and wise enough in you
to avoid danger, that I may always do what is right in your sight. In your name I pray, Amen.”
----
and so something about the new year (and actually having the energy to think) makes me want to address each and every one of these. but i'm always a bit wary of new years resolutions. wendy blight says, "...God knows too that these promises and resolutions are often grounded not in His Word but in our flesh. We focus on the end result and not on the process"
So being a more beautiful alice should not mean i am trying to be a "perfect specimen of what [God] can do" as Oswald Chambers warns. God's purpose is to make me one with Himself, not produce "specimens of holiness to put in His museum." It i because chambers says, "if you accept this concept of personal holiness, your life’s determined purpose will not be for God, but for what you call the evidence of God in your life." Hs okay that I feel like a bruised fruit alice sometimes instead of a wonderfully holy and perfect alice because it was "God’s will to bruise His own Son (Isaiah 53:10), why shouldn’t He bruise you? What shines forth and reveals God in your life is not your relative consistency to an idea of what a saint should be, but your genuine, living relationship with Jesus Christ, and your unrestrained devotion to Him whether you are well or sick."
Blight tells us to "examine your New Year's Resolution and prayerfully ask the Lord to reveal the heart issue behind it. Ask Him to lead you through His Word to verses that directly address what you hear."
"For the Word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires" Hebrews 4:12
I feel out of touch with the Word of God for some reason. I think it's because though I get glimpses of it through sermons and bible studies and small group, I haven't spent as much personal time in a book this year and maybe that has hazed my view of my innermost thoughts and desires. I once heard that I should look at the desire and not the sin.
Stephen Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (actually a book i really like even though i'm not effective) says that change must always start within. you can't change others (and ourselves) simply by changing personality traits, which is a secondary trait. you must start with the paradigm from which we see the world. ralph waldo emerson says, "what you are shouts so loudly in my ear that i can't hear what you say."
that's why my goal "not to procrastinate" which doesn't address my fears of being a failure and love of comfort is too weak. or even my goal to "keep in touch" which doesn't address my fear of commitment or insecurity of not being liked or simply again, my selfishness. but c.s. lewis also tells us to act like we love people even if the feelings aren't there yet. so how does it work? at some point i guess God has to do His thing.
i find it hard to "see others as better than me" - not because i think i'm the best at things, but because i am alice-centered. one thing that helps change my paradigm is c.s. lewis's idea on immortality:
(from this article http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/cslewis/7Insights.htm)
Immortality
"Walter Hooper (C.S. Lewis scholar) argues that C.S. Lewis's central idea was that all people are immortal. Lewis wrote: "There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat." Lewis manifested this belief by writing personally to everyone who wrote to him (usually handwritten letters) and giving away all the proceeds of his books.
Hooper tells the story of a time when he was with Lewis and they were talking about a man who was very boring. Hooper told Lewis that the man succeeded in interesting him by the very intensity of his boredom. Lewis replied, "Yes, but let us not forget that Our Lord might well have said, "As ye have done it unto one of the least of these my bores, you have done it to me." In fact, Lewis felt that it was sometimes his duty to visit and help such people.
C.S. Lewis writes:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods
and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most
uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a
creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly
tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such
as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day
long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or
other of these destinations. It is in the light of these
overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the
circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct
all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all
loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people.
You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures,
arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to
ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we
joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—
immortal horrors or everlasting splendours
i wonder what that's like. to treat everyone i meet in a way that reflects their true worth. the fact that they are all immortal, possible gods and goddesses and so amazingly oved by God. how would that change the way i interact with my students, my family, even random strangers and the most insignificant and boring (or weirdest/drugged up) people i come in contact with.
yesterday i did something for someone else and it felt relieving/joyful. i've been feeling bitter about helping others/ doing things for others, but the few moments i am able to get over myself and do something simply because i see someone as important has done more wonders to my soul/ relieving me from the burden and drudgery of myself than hours of reflection and even prayer sometimes.
so maybe i should stop thinking and get up and be sweet to my family...who always takes such good care of me.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Sunday, December 26, 2010
my mom bought lots of clothes for me from taiwan. while she was shopping, the woman there convinced her she could wear some outfits as well, so she bought some for herself. she went to work wearing one of those long sweater with tights. only the tights were not regular tights. they were special, bunchy shiny tights. (i looked so good, she tells me). the next day the office got a memo: "We now have a dress code." and "No skin-tight pants" was listed multiple times. ("Were you so embarrassed?" I asked? "Of course not. I looked great. They were just jealous" mom replies.)
Thursday, October 21, 2010
little anecdotes from today.
my coworker's brother has been a huge pothead. a few months ago he developed this rash and thought he got food poisoning. he goes to the doctor who tells him it's some sort of allergic reaction - perhaps nuts. but months later he still gets the rash. the other day he comes home and tells his family, "i've found out what i'm allergic to." as it turns out, he's allergic to ...pot. his mother is so happy.
----
question for my sister's 8th grade homework. what part of speech is "swish" in "the blade went swish." i asked sasha who asked her english university professor father...who now wants to ask the entire department...we're guessing interjection?
----
as of monday i am having my entire schedule changed around so i will be teaching 3 preps (ap english, english IV, and senior project), 5 classes... and in 4 different classrooms (up and down the stairs). also, i will need to bring labtop carts up and down the elevator to three different rooms. instead of teaching 3 english IV classes and 1 writing class, the principal wants me to take charge of the senior project and teach 1 english IV class and 3 senior project class. i'm hoping God has a plan or something. also my students don't know about this yet...
not amazingly thrilled at this mess. not quite sure to pray for selflessness and hope or strength to fight. maybe a little wisdom and humility.
----
from the senior project proposal letter by my newest student (and for some reason a fan of mine...he comes to my room during his other classes/lunch to do my work and i have to kick him out): "for my senior project i am doing video game violence. all my video games are violent 90% are rated m - extremely violent adult. but i am the most unviolent person. video games are not the cause of violence" as i delete/edit a bunch of his ramblings, in particular the word "unviolent" to nonviolent, he tells me he liked the stuff he wrote and punches his desk really hard while exclaiming "ouch!" i look at him and say, really? unviolent?" he chuckles and continues working on his proposal letter...he's also the kid who told me last year that he drank all the chemicals in the science lab on the first day of school and then made himself throw up.
---
today i high-fived a kid for not falling asleep in my class (yesterday's big step) and completing the 5 sentences of his opening activity (today's big step)! yayy...baby steps!
-----
i am a slow person, so why do i feel like sometimes 3 times the amount of things are happening in one litle moment?
i saw a yalie i knew sitting outside the art room at school today. i know you, i said. we figured it was from dwight hall through amy rothschild. but maybe i was hallucinating because at the same time i was pulled to a group and was showed off to the visitor from a university to our school by one person. and being told i was not allowed to give up my lunch (i hadn't! i ate TWO frozen dinners, including a pizza) to meet with a student by another person. then my student who is failing my class and now no longer allowed to meet with me during lunch told me he'd go library so he wouldn't get me in trouble even tho he had my class in 3 minutes. and so now i knew he'd be late. then i rushed back to my classroom to teach the next class...3/4 of whom had ditched yesterday because it had been the second to last period of a half-day. kinda feeling connected to holden caulfield in the insanity piece. except the girl facebook friended me. at least facebook is real. so i think it actually happened. tgif(acebok).
---
i keep watching 3 episodes of tv every night. i think it's to keep me from falling too deeply into the chaos of school.
----
i cut my hair when i feel stressed. probably a control thing. i now have bangs. =)
my coworker's brother has been a huge pothead. a few months ago he developed this rash and thought he got food poisoning. he goes to the doctor who tells him it's some sort of allergic reaction - perhaps nuts. but months later he still gets the rash. the other day he comes home and tells his family, "i've found out what i'm allergic to." as it turns out, he's allergic to ...pot. his mother is so happy.
----
question for my sister's 8th grade homework. what part of speech is "swish" in "the blade went swish." i asked sasha who asked her english university professor father...who now wants to ask the entire department...we're guessing interjection?
----
as of monday i am having my entire schedule changed around so i will be teaching 3 preps (ap english, english IV, and senior project), 5 classes... and in 4 different classrooms (up and down the stairs). also, i will need to bring labtop carts up and down the elevator to three different rooms. instead of teaching 3 english IV classes and 1 writing class, the principal wants me to take charge of the senior project and teach 1 english IV class and 3 senior project class. i'm hoping God has a plan or something. also my students don't know about this yet...
not amazingly thrilled at this mess. not quite sure to pray for selflessness and hope or strength to fight. maybe a little wisdom and humility.
----
from the senior project proposal letter by my newest student (and for some reason a fan of mine...he comes to my room during his other classes/lunch to do my work and i have to kick him out): "for my senior project i am doing video game violence. all my video games are violent 90% are rated m - extremely violent adult. but i am the most unviolent person. video games are not the cause of violence" as i delete/edit a bunch of his ramblings, in particular the word "unviolent" to nonviolent, he tells me he liked the stuff he wrote and punches his desk really hard while exclaiming "ouch!" i look at him and say, really? unviolent?" he chuckles and continues working on his proposal letter...he's also the kid who told me last year that he drank all the chemicals in the science lab on the first day of school and then made himself throw up.
---
today i high-fived a kid for not falling asleep in my class (yesterday's big step) and completing the 5 sentences of his opening activity (today's big step)! yayy...baby steps!
-----
i am a slow person, so why do i feel like sometimes 3 times the amount of things are happening in one litle moment?
i saw a yalie i knew sitting outside the art room at school today. i know you, i said. we figured it was from dwight hall through amy rothschild. but maybe i was hallucinating because at the same time i was pulled to a group and was showed off to the visitor from a university to our school by one person. and being told i was not allowed to give up my lunch (i hadn't! i ate TWO frozen dinners, including a pizza) to meet with a student by another person. then my student who is failing my class and now no longer allowed to meet with me during lunch told me he'd go library so he wouldn't get me in trouble even tho he had my class in 3 minutes. and so now i knew he'd be late. then i rushed back to my classroom to teach the next class...3/4 of whom had ditched yesterday because it had been the second to last period of a half-day. kinda feeling connected to holden caulfield in the insanity piece. except the girl facebook friended me. at least facebook is real. so i think it actually happened. tgif(acebok).
---
i keep watching 3 episodes of tv every night. i think it's to keep me from falling too deeply into the chaos of school.
----
i cut my hair when i feel stressed. probably a control thing. i now have bangs. =)
Saturday, September 25, 2010
"And whoseoever shall compell thee to go a mile, go with him twain." - Matthew 5:41
Every day my quiet time seems to speak directly to what God's been revealing to me. Today, Oswald Chambers wrote, " 'I have chosen you.' That is the way the grace of God begins...Our Lord's making of a disciple is supernatural. He does not build on any natural capacity at all. God does not ask us to do the things that are easy to us naturally; He only asks us to do the things we are perfectly fitted to do by His grace, and the cross will come along that line always."
All last year I wondered, why am I stuck here? I don't like teaching and the only way I remained sane was praying for a better day. I didn't like doing something I was not good at and facing people whom I saw as having too much attitude and too little respect. Too big of a self-image and too little drive. I felt like my personality simply did not fit my position and I coveted people who were good at their jobs. I prayed and prayed to be a better teacher. I convinced myself that it was all right if some kids didn't like me too much (some of the "good" ones did at least). I was there to teach, not to be liked. But secretly (or not so secretly) I really like being liked.
I've always been the type of person to recover easily. The technique is to live with a sort of cynical sort of happiness that I don't care too much about something - relationships, image, etc. It was a wall built by stripping away the importance of anything that was seemingly impossible for me to have. Yet Isaiah Berlin says, "The logical culmination of the process of destroying everything through which I can possibly be wounded is suicide."
I've been pondering that quote for a week. I realize that I'm often afraid to put myself wholly into something because I don't like being dissapointed. I don't see myself as a go-all-out person, though I've always admired those people/ found them a bit foolish, albeit wonderfully so. Last week I decided I'd step over the ledge a bit and be a go all-out person when it came to my kids and getting my kids into college. I wasn't just going to be polite and distant. I really wanted my kids to succeed, and I wasn't going to be so deficient of hope to do all I could to fight for that.
2 Peter 1:7 says, "Add to yoru brotherliness...love." Oswald Chambers says, "You won't reach it on tiptoe." Every day I pray for love. Even more so, I pray for hope. I want to be positive and not miserable no matter how little appreciation I seem to receive. In small group we talked about how God has commissioned us to live for Him, not seek the approval of those we're serving. I've realized that it is only recently that I truly care more about being right with God than being on good terms with my kids.
And it is only recently that my kids have expressed appreciation for me. Last year, I had some students who talked about enjoying my class, but it was only a few. This year, for some reason I have a class that I know loves being there. They respect and support each other and really want to learn. I have students from my other classes who I'm told "love me." That is bizarre. And I am joyful yet nervous that a) people are fickle and b)I will forget that this only came to me through hope in God and the determination to serve Him not gain approval from people.
I still don't think I am naturally a good high school teacher. I don't like speaking in front of people, being the leader...and talking is definitely not my best form of communication. I'm not organized, and I really don't like mean people. Plus I like little kids. Yet I have the hope that God is enough. I realize that teaching is not simply being in front of the class, being organized, speaking clearly, and telling people to do things. Teaching involves exuding hope, and I can only do so by trusting in God so that I can be comfortable and let my kids in. I tell more stories now. I listen more and am more willing to admit I am wrong rather than see poorly communicated annoyances by them as attacks. I've learned from other teachers that sometimes an outpouring of kindness is the appropriate response to a rude comment. Ironically, those days I am more relaxed and more kind rather than "stubborn," my kids have listened more and cared more. And I end the day more positive. I think I finally love my kids. I haven't been able to say that until now.
Every day my quiet time seems to speak directly to what God's been revealing to me. Today, Oswald Chambers wrote, " 'I have chosen you.' That is the way the grace of God begins...Our Lord's making of a disciple is supernatural. He does not build on any natural capacity at all. God does not ask us to do the things that are easy to us naturally; He only asks us to do the things we are perfectly fitted to do by His grace, and the cross will come along that line always."
All last year I wondered, why am I stuck here? I don't like teaching and the only way I remained sane was praying for a better day. I didn't like doing something I was not good at and facing people whom I saw as having too much attitude and too little respect. Too big of a self-image and too little drive. I felt like my personality simply did not fit my position and I coveted people who were good at their jobs. I prayed and prayed to be a better teacher. I convinced myself that it was all right if some kids didn't like me too much (some of the "good" ones did at least). I was there to teach, not to be liked. But secretly (or not so secretly) I really like being liked.
I've always been the type of person to recover easily. The technique is to live with a sort of cynical sort of happiness that I don't care too much about something - relationships, image, etc. It was a wall built by stripping away the importance of anything that was seemingly impossible for me to have. Yet Isaiah Berlin says, "The logical culmination of the process of destroying everything through which I can possibly be wounded is suicide."
I've been pondering that quote for a week. I realize that I'm often afraid to put myself wholly into something because I don't like being dissapointed. I don't see myself as a go-all-out person, though I've always admired those people/ found them a bit foolish, albeit wonderfully so. Last week I decided I'd step over the ledge a bit and be a go all-out person when it came to my kids and getting my kids into college. I wasn't just going to be polite and distant. I really wanted my kids to succeed, and I wasn't going to be so deficient of hope to do all I could to fight for that.
2 Peter 1:7 says, "Add to yoru brotherliness...love." Oswald Chambers says, "You won't reach it on tiptoe." Every day I pray for love. Even more so, I pray for hope. I want to be positive and not miserable no matter how little appreciation I seem to receive. In small group we talked about how God has commissioned us to live for Him, not seek the approval of those we're serving. I've realized that it is only recently that I truly care more about being right with God than being on good terms with my kids.
And it is only recently that my kids have expressed appreciation for me. Last year, I had some students who talked about enjoying my class, but it was only a few. This year, for some reason I have a class that I know loves being there. They respect and support each other and really want to learn. I have students from my other classes who I'm told "love me." That is bizarre. And I am joyful yet nervous that a) people are fickle and b)I will forget that this only came to me through hope in God and the determination to serve Him not gain approval from people.
I still don't think I am naturally a good high school teacher. I don't like speaking in front of people, being the leader...and talking is definitely not my best form of communication. I'm not organized, and I really don't like mean people. Plus I like little kids. Yet I have the hope that God is enough. I realize that teaching is not simply being in front of the class, being organized, speaking clearly, and telling people to do things. Teaching involves exuding hope, and I can only do so by trusting in God so that I can be comfortable and let my kids in. I tell more stories now. I listen more and am more willing to admit I am wrong rather than see poorly communicated annoyances by them as attacks. I've learned from other teachers that sometimes an outpouring of kindness is the appropriate response to a rude comment. Ironically, those days I am more relaxed and more kind rather than "stubborn," my kids have listened more and cared more. And I end the day more positive. I think I finally love my kids. I haven't been able to say that until now.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
does coming up witha title here even matter in the grand scheme of things?
there's currently a big sign set up downstairs that says "don't count the days. make the days count." as i am in the habit of counting days (crossing each day off happily or woefully), i start to think...
What if my view on life had the following premises:
1) God is in every moment.(every blink as it connects to every other blink i've ever had/will have. and in the very thread that weaves this moment with all other moments in my life and in the lives of others near far, future, past, present)
2)God can be revealed through every moment/ experience/ breath.
3)God is willing to be known.
4)I cannot even begin to fathom how deeply and brightly God's presence is embedded in each moment.
5)Everything i currently see and believe/ believe that i know is tainted at least in part with assumptions, ignorance, sin...all of which serve to distort my awareness of truth and lead me towards hopelessness, lovelessness, death.
6) the outcome of #5 is not inevitable/permanent. truth has come to set us free :D
7) "What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience" (C.S. Lewis, Miracles)
8) God's way is always best, and just because i don't understand it,just because my understanding is clouded with all the stuff i currently hang onto/ drip in doesn't mean I can't follow Him to the best of my knowledge/strength even if i don't understand why he wants it that way.
maybe that would mean, as the cliche would have it, that every moment counts. that prayer brings us in deeper relationship with Him, not so much to dictate what He should do, but in one way, to draw us to Him and to help us seek Him first...help us to seek Him in every moment,perhaps allowing us(or at least setting up the groundwork for a future ability) to see Him in that moment (and in countless others)...unveiling another layer of blindness from our souls and hearts. i wonder if i believed all this, what conclusions i could come to, how i would treat people, and what joy, peace, adventure life would be.
What if my view on life had the following premises:
1) God is in every moment.(every blink as it connects to every other blink i've ever had/will have. and in the very thread that weaves this moment with all other moments in my life and in the lives of others near far, future, past, present)
2)God can be revealed through every moment/ experience/ breath.
3)God is willing to be known.
4)I cannot even begin to fathom how deeply and brightly God's presence is embedded in each moment.
5)Everything i currently see and believe/ believe that i know is tainted at least in part with assumptions, ignorance, sin...all of which serve to distort my awareness of truth and lead me towards hopelessness, lovelessness, death.
6) the outcome of #5 is not inevitable/permanent. truth has come to set us free :D
7) "What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience" (C.S. Lewis, Miracles)
8) God's way is always best, and just because i don't understand it,just because my understanding is clouded with all the stuff i currently hang onto/ drip in doesn't mean I can't follow Him to the best of my knowledge/strength even if i don't understand why he wants it that way.
maybe that would mean, as the cliche would have it, that every moment counts. that prayer brings us in deeper relationship with Him, not so much to dictate what He should do, but in one way, to draw us to Him and to help us seek Him first...help us to seek Him in every moment,perhaps allowing us(or at least setting up the groundwork for a future ability) to see Him in that moment (and in countless others)...unveiling another layer of blindness from our souls and hearts. i wonder if i believed all this, what conclusions i could come to, how i would treat people, and what joy, peace, adventure life would be.
Monday, June 21, 2010
family :)
1) i have grown noticeably fatter in the 3 days that my family has been with me...
2) i love my family. they seem to enjoy spoiling us. my mommy says it's because she was never spoiled when she was a child so she wanted to spoil her kids.
3) i don't want amy to be spoiled so sometimes i will yell at her if she is being very selfish. sometimes i accidently forget to separate her action out from who she is as a human being. i think that makes her feel sad and unaccepted and i feel awful. then i have to tell her how much i love her and how her she's wonderful (because she is) that even tho i seem to have forgotten that for the moment, i remember again :)
4) i spoil amy. she knows she's queen. she's a little insecure. i hope she remembers that we all love her...even if mommy is scratching my back instead of hers.
5)amy spoils me too. today my mommy gave me a foot massage while amy gave me a hand massage. i told my dad where to put my laundry... i realized this is not out of the ordinary in my family. is that bizarre? then we all went for all you can eat brazilian steak buffet and i gave amy lots of kisses. she counted them. i yelled at her for texting her little boyfriend too much- a little blond boy who now has a little mohawk and sends her pictures of rubber duckies. i love rubber duckies. i think she got that from me. he asked her if she liked his haircut. my mom said to tell him that hair will grow out and not to worry. he asked her what world cup team she was rooting for. she asked me what team she was rooting for. i told her to say brazil because they have great steak. so she told him that.
6) amy is overdosing on the omega-3 gummy vites. she's only supposed to eat 2 at a time. she keeps saying I REALLY WANT ANOTHER ONE...JUST ANOTHER ONE...IF IT'S STUCK TOGETHER, IT COUNTS AS ONE, RIGHT? my mom said, ok...just eat another one then. amy said, but...i already ate more than 10. we gasp in disbelief (but i know i've done the same...and as i'm thinking that...) my mommy confesses that when she was a kid she wasn't ever given sweets. and once grandma gave her a bottle of 50 vitamin that was sweetish...and told her to eat one a day. but between 4pm when my mom got home and 6pm when my grandma got home, little mommy ate the entire bottle. this is how i know i'm in the right family. very little self-control...
7) in the car, i pretended to be a puppy so amy would scratch my head. i meowed in between but she stopped scratching my head and said she was allergic to cats and didn't like them. so i started barking again. then i got bored and barked deeply and i think that freaked her out. so i started barking like a puppy again and she started scratching my head again. the end. i think my family is nice. i like having them around. i think i will be quite annoyed if i ever have a family less sweet than this one... even tho we are sometimes grumpy at each other...everyone takes care of me...is it bad that i like that a lot? is it possible that God will bless you with two awesome families in a lifetime?
2) i love my family. they seem to enjoy spoiling us. my mommy says it's because she was never spoiled when she was a child so she wanted to spoil her kids.
3) i don't want amy to be spoiled so sometimes i will yell at her if she is being very selfish. sometimes i accidently forget to separate her action out from who she is as a human being. i think that makes her feel sad and unaccepted and i feel awful. then i have to tell her how much i love her and how her she's wonderful (because she is) that even tho i seem to have forgotten that for the moment, i remember again :)
4) i spoil amy. she knows she's queen. she's a little insecure. i hope she remembers that we all love her...even if mommy is scratching my back instead of hers.
5)amy spoils me too. today my mommy gave me a foot massage while amy gave me a hand massage. i told my dad where to put my laundry... i realized this is not out of the ordinary in my family. is that bizarre? then we all went for all you can eat brazilian steak buffet and i gave amy lots of kisses. she counted them. i yelled at her for texting her little boyfriend too much- a little blond boy who now has a little mohawk and sends her pictures of rubber duckies. i love rubber duckies. i think she got that from me. he asked her if she liked his haircut. my mom said to tell him that hair will grow out and not to worry. he asked her what world cup team she was rooting for. she asked me what team she was rooting for. i told her to say brazil because they have great steak. so she told him that.
6) amy is overdosing on the omega-3 gummy vites. she's only supposed to eat 2 at a time. she keeps saying I REALLY WANT ANOTHER ONE...JUST ANOTHER ONE...IF IT'S STUCK TOGETHER, IT COUNTS AS ONE, RIGHT? my mom said, ok...just eat another one then. amy said, but...i already ate more than 10. we gasp in disbelief (but i know i've done the same...and as i'm thinking that...) my mommy confesses that when she was a kid she wasn't ever given sweets. and once grandma gave her a bottle of 50 vitamin that was sweetish...and told her to eat one a day. but between 4pm when my mom got home and 6pm when my grandma got home, little mommy ate the entire bottle. this is how i know i'm in the right family. very little self-control...
7) in the car, i pretended to be a puppy so amy would scratch my head. i meowed in between but she stopped scratching my head and said she was allergic to cats and didn't like them. so i started barking again. then i got bored and barked deeply and i think that freaked her out. so i started barking like a puppy again and she started scratching my head again. the end. i think my family is nice. i like having them around. i think i will be quite annoyed if i ever have a family less sweet than this one... even tho we are sometimes grumpy at each other...everyone takes care of me...is it bad that i like that a lot? is it possible that God will bless you with two awesome families in a lifetime?
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
---thought this was interesting . it's almost like this guy jumped into my mind and sewed up loose thoughts with better craftmanship than i could do...not even sure if i agree with everything. not necessarily even that inspired...but it's nice to have someone else organize some of your thoughts so you have a little foundation to start on...this summer i want to think more :o)
Hive of Nerves
Posted By Christian Wiman On June 1, 2010 @ 9:20 am In Highlighted Story, Summer 2010, lincoln the persuader | Comments Disabled
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
That unrest formed a heart.
—Paul Celan
During a dinner with friends the talk turns, as it often does these days, to the problem of anxiety: how it is consuming everyone; how the very technologies that we have developed to save time and thereby lessen anxiety have only degraded the quality of the former and exacerbated the latter; how we all need to “give ourselves a break” before we implode. Everyone has some means of relief—tennis, yoga, a massage every Thursday—but the very way in which those activities are framed as separate from regular life suggests the extent to which that relief is temporary (if even that: a couple of us admit that our “recreational” activities partake of the same simmering, near-obsessive panic as the rest of our lives). There is something circular and static to our conversation, which doesn’t end so much as frazzle indeterminately out. And though there is always some comfort in comparing maladies, I am left with the uneasy feeling that my own private anxieties have actually increased by becoming momentarily collective—or no, not that, increased by not becoming collective, increased by the reinforcement of my loneliness within a collective context, like that penetrating but enervating stab of self one feels sometimes in an anonymous crowd. It is a full day later before it occurs to me that not once, not in any form, not even with the ghost of a suggestion, did any of us mention God.
THE GREATNESS of James Joyce’s Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal.i want to read this book. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. And that is the book’s horror too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet. How much cruelty is occasioned simply because of the noise that is within us: the din is too great for us to realize exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name. Thus an offhand remark, which leaves us as easily as a breath and which we think no more of than a breath, cuts a friend to the quick. And thus a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space in individuals to think. Life has accelerated greatly since Joyce’s time, and now, as our selves scatter into bits and bytes, and our souls, if we are conscious of them at all, diminish to little more than a vague wish for quiet, even the linear associativeness of Ulysses can seem quaint.
HOW DOES one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? It is one thing to encourage contemplation, prayer, quiet spaces in which God, or at least a galvanizing awareness of his absence (“Be present with your want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,” as the 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne puts it), can enter the mind and heart. But the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that any consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and how does one relax and resist at the same time?
Note to self: can i incorporate God into the mundane activities of every moment, every thought? do i even have time to think? is it Godly to think...more than a quiet time, more than "contemplation time." but in every moment be thinking about God, life, working things out.
Commute (1)
O the screech and heat and hate
we have for each day’s commute,
the long wait at the last stop
before we go screaming
underground, while the pigeons
court and shit and rut
insolently on the tracks
because this train is always late,
always aimed at only us,
who when it comes with its
blunt snout, its thousand mouths,
cram and curse and contort
into one creature, all claws and eyes,
tunneling, tunneling, tunneling
toward money.
IN THE GOSPELS Jesus is always talking to the crowds in parables, which he later “explains” to his disciples. The dynamic is odd in a couple of ways: either the parables are obvious, and the explanations seem almost patronizing, or they are opaque, and the explanations only compound their opacity. (Or could it be—and I confess to relishing this possibility—that the explanations illustrate Christ’s wry sense of humor, which is nowhere else evident?) In any case, the notable point is just how little the explanations amount to, how completely the ultimate truths of the parables—just like dreams and poems—remain within their own occurrence.
Behind every urge to interpret is unease, anxiety. This can be a productive and necessary endeavor, whether it’s literary criticism or theology or even the dogmas and rituals of a religion (since all religion is, ultimately, an attempt to interpret God and numinous experience). Such effort deepens and complicates our initial response, even as it gives us an aperture through which to see our moments of mystery, crisis, and revelation more clearly—to give them “meanings,” to integrate them into our lives. The trouble comes when the effort to name and know an experience replaces the experience itself. Just as we seem to have grasped every level of meaning in a poem, the private and silent power that compelled us in the first place seems to drain right out of it. Just as we plant the flag of faith on a mountain of doctrine and dogma it has taken every ounce of our intellect to climb, our vision becomes a “view,” which is already clouding over, and is in any event cluttered with the trash of others who have fought their way to this same spot. Nowhere to go now but down.
“If that’s what he means,” says the student to the poetry teacher, “why doesn’t he just say it?” “If God is real,” says the parishioner to the preacher, “why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?” The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance, but their answers are similar. A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.
Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved but a narrative to be inherited, and undergone, and transformed person by person. He uses metaphors because something essential about the nature of reality—its mercurial solidity, its mathematical mystery and sacred plainness—is disclosed within them. He speaks the language of reality—speaks in terms of the physical world—because he is reality’s culmination and code, and because “this people’s mind has become dull; they have stopped their ears and shut their eyes. Otherwise, their eyes might see, their ears hear, and their mind understand, and then they might turn to me, and I would heal them.”
I DON’T THINK the “answer” to the anxiety felt by everyone at that dinner party is Christianity. In fact I’m pretty sure that is not the case, as we represented several different traditions (including no tradition)—and anyway Christ is not an answer to existence but a means of existing, and I am convinced that there is no permutation of man or mind in which he is not, in some form, present. (This from the Catholic nun, Sara Grant, speaking about, and quoting from, the Kena Upanishad: “Brahman is not ‘that which one knows,’ but that by which one knows, as though a crystal bowl were aware of the sun shining through it. ‘When he is known through all cognitions, he is rightly known.’” But it seems to me you could quote Christ himself in support of this idea: “To believe in me, is not to believe in me but in him who sent me; to see me, is to see him who sent me.”)
I do think, though, that both the problem of, and the solution to, our individual anxiety is a metaphysical one. Some modern philosophers (Heidegger, Kierkegaard) have argued that existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately conscious of, death. True, I think, but I wonder if the emphasis might be placed differently, shifted from unconscious reaction to unrealized action: that is, our anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit’s need to be. It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music which, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is not hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult indeed to learn to hear it as music.
Who is it that clasps and kneads my naked feet, till they unfold,
till all is well, till all is utterly well? the lotus-lilies of the feet!
I tell you it is no woman, it is no man, for I am alone.
And I fall asleep with the gods, the gods
that are not, or that are
according to the soul’s desire,
like a pool into which we plunge, or do not plunge.
THE OPERATIVE WORD in these lines from D. H. Lawrence, who wasn’t a conventionally religious person, is soul. It’s a word that has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people, unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning. Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its religious meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical incrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. That’s what the 20th century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge and truth and ours—until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul with the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitably, it breaks.
“GLIMMERINGS are what the soul’s composed of,” writes the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, an interesting—and, I think, accurate—thought, if the word glimmerings is read as both literal and metaphorical: the soul is not simply the agent that does the seeing (the entity to which metaphorical glimmerings are given), it is in some way the things that are seen (the world that glimmers); or, perhaps more accurately, it is the verb that makes an exchange between the self and reality, or the self and other selves, possible. It is the soul that turns perception into communication, and communication—even if it’s just between one man and the storm of atoms around him—into communion.
THE MEANINGS that God calls us to in our lives are never abstract. Though the call may ask us to redefine, or refine, what we know as life, it does not demand a renunciation of life in favor of something beyond it. Moreover, the call itself is always comprised of life. That is, it is not some hitherto unknown voice to which we respond; it is life calling to life. People think that diagnosing the apostle Paul with epilepsy or some related disorder nullifies any notion that God might truly have revealed something of himself on that road to Damascus. But God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is comprised of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment. “I think there is no light in the world / but the world,” writes George Oppen. “And I think there is light.”
THERE IS A DISTINCTION to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to—and, if attended to, discloses—our souls. And yet it is a distinction without a difference, perhaps, and as crucial to eventually overcome as it is to initially understand, for to be truly alive means to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence, to feel one’s trivial, frittering anxieties acquiring a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such. (YES YES YES....It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to . . . the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. . . . I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.-Heart of Darkness)
I DON’T MEAN to be describing an intellectual transformation, or a transformation that is available only to “intellectuals.” I suppose that for many people—people inclined to read essays like this one, for instance—the transformation might seem to begin with a mental decision and a definite application of the will. In fact, I think taking such a step indicates that some rift of meaning and feeling has already opened inside of us, and we are clutching, consciously or unconsciously, at the rock face and rubble above this sudden abyss. In the end if we are to integrate our anxieties into our lives—and thereby alleviate them—any merely intellectual understanding of them is inadequate.
Consciousness among contemporary Western intellectuals is an “apprehensive” quality: that is to say, we become conscious by taking hold of, or apprehending, our selves and reality, by standing apart from them. Not at all coincidentally, we grow apprehensive as we do so (for where, exactly, are we standing?). (YES! like thatout of body state of confusion and displacement that i've found myself in since i was a kid) There are other, fuller ways of being in the world, which Eastern religions, as well as Christian mysticism, strive to articulate. (Meister Eckhart: “It is not that we should abandon, neglect or deny our inner self, but we should learn to work precisely in it, with it and from it in such a way that interiority turns into effective action and effective action leads back to interiority and we become used to acting without any compulsion.”) But again, the best evidence comes not from books but from people, some of whom would never think to pick up a book. Suddenly I am seeing someone out of my own childhood, recalling a habit of mind too attentive to be called passive, too intuitive to be called thought. I am thinking (thinking!) of a presence so in love with life, so in tune with time, that death seemed only to drive her further in.
She who in her last days loved too well to lose
A single weed to namelessness, in creosote,
Blue gramma, goatsbeard that is not thriving, is,
Amid the cattails’ brittle whisper whispers
O Law’, Honey, ain’t this a praiseful thing.
THE ITCH inside of contentment, or the itch that perhaps is contentment, as if despite our problems with anxiety, inner rest required outer restlessness, as if peace with ourselves and our times were found only within frenzy. Or, for some, never found at all. W. B. Yeats:
Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter’s best of all;
And after that there’s nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come—
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.
This is life as pure death wish. There is a sense in which Yeats is right: what we seek is meaning for our ceaseless, anxious, and always-anticipatory actions, and death is part of that meaning. Any life that does not take account of death, that does not, in one way or another, hear the annihilating silence inside every sound, the nullifying stillness within every action, is a life that can neither harness nor redress that dark energy—which is to say, a life of which death already has possession. Yeats’s mistake, though, is to make death the entire meaning of life, which, ultimately, makes not only our anxieties, but also our actions, meaningless. Here’s another take:
WHEN God at first made Man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by—
Let us (said He) pour on him all we can;
Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.
So strength first made a way,
Then beauty flow’d, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all His treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.
For if I should (said He)
Bestow this jewel also on My creature,
He would adore My gifts instead of Me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast.
In this poem, “The Pulley” by George Herbert, our very restlessness is a gift, as it reminds us, even when we are most content, what we most need and why we are on this earth at all. The poem is perhaps theologically suspect (why this rat’s maze of a world for a known result?) but intuitively true. We are driven ceaselessly onward in this life and are certain of our desires only until we realize them, at which point they seem to dissolve and shimmer further off, like a heat mirage on a road down which we can’t stop racing. Unlike Yeats, though, for whom that road ends at a massive wall into which we finally, fatally slam, for Herbert the very permanence of our longing is proof of longing’s eventual fruition. Which is not to say, though, that this fruition is forever forestalled. It isn’t “heaven,” exactly, except insofar as we learn to see, as he says in another poem, “Heaven in Ordinarie.”
AT FIRST, attending to the anxiety of existence can seem like a zero-sum game. Any attention turned toward the truth of the spirit is attention turned away from all we have come to think of as “life.” Thus we parcel out our moments of devotion—a church service here and there, a walk in the woods, a couple of hours of meditation a week—all the while maintaining the frenzy of our usual existence outside of those moments. This is inevitable, for the initial demands of the spirit are intense, but it is not sustainable, for the soul is not piecemeal. We are left with this paradox: only by hearing the furthest call of consciousness can we hear the call of ordinary life, but only by claiming the most mundane and jangling details of our lives can that rare and ulterior music of the soul merge with what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens.”
IT IS A STRANGE THING how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits. You thought you were unhappy because this or that was off in your relationship, this or that was wrong in your job, but the reality is that your sadness stemmed from your aversion to, your stalwart avoidance of, God. (wow true true true!) The other problems may very well be true, and you will have to address them, but what you feel when releasing yourself to speak of the deepest needs of your spirit is the fact that no other needs could be spoken of outside of that context. You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being is unsure.
THE FIRST STEP in the life of the spirit is learning to let yourself experience those moments when life and time seem at once suspended and concentrated, that paradox of attentive oblivion out of which any sustaining faith grows. These moments may not be—and at first almost certainly will not be—“meditative.” They are more likely to break into your awareness, or into what you thought was awareness (“inbreaking” is the theological term for Christ’s appearance in the world and in our lives—there is no coaxing it, no way to earn it, no way to prepare except to hone your capacity to respond, which is, finally, your capacity to experience life, and death). This is why we cannot separate one part of our existence, or one aspect of our awareness, from another, for there is a seed of peace in the most savage clamor. There is a kind of seeing that, fusing attention and submission, becomes a kind of being, wherein you may burrow into the very chaos that buries you, and even the most binding ties can become a means of release.
Commute (2)
There is a dreamer
all good conductors
know to look for
when the last stop is made
and the train is ticking cool,
some lover, loner, or fool
who has lived so hard
he jerks awake
in the graveyard,
where he sees
coming down the aisle
a beam of light
whose end he is,
and what he thinks are chains
becoming keys . . .
KEYS TO WHAT, though? For I can’t end with that flourish of poetry and privacy. Art, like religious devotion, either adds life or steals it; it is never neutral; either it impels one back toward life or is merely one more means of keeping life at arm’s length. (The subject matter and tone of art have less to do with this than many people think: nothing palls the soul like a forced epiphany, and one can be elated and energized by a freshly articulate despair.) Keys to what? In this poem, the keys are, on one level, to the constraints felt in the earlier section (the miserable commute, the crush of others, the “screech and heat and hate”), which prove to be their own means of release (“what he thought were chains / becoming keys”). On another level, the keys are to the mysteries of death; or, rather, the key is to the blunt, immutable, physical fact of death (the train “graveyard”), which opens, if only for a moment, to reveal a mystery.
And now it’s over. Now the man on the train—like the man who imagined him (me!), like Paul God-struck outside of Damascus (alas, it wasn’t quite like that for me)—must move. Now the revelation either becomes part of his life or is altogether lost to it. Either his actions acquire a deeper purpose, and begin to echo and counterpoint each other, or the moment and the man slip back into unfeeling frenzy, and the screech and heat and hate of his days lock metallically around him again. ("don't let retreat be like vegas: what happens at retreat stays at retreat")
Death is the only lens for true transcendence, but, paradoxically, transcendence is possible only when we cease being conscious of our own death. I don’t mean that we are unconscious of our own death, but that we pass through what we think of as consciousness—that “apprehensiveness” I mentioned, that standing-apart-from and taking-hold-of—into something more profound. What you feel in amateur photographs—it’s a large part of the poignancy—is the pressure, or the lack of pressure, actually, of all the reality missing from the picture, which is really just a chopped-off piece of life. An artist, on the other hand, makes you feel just how much missing life is contained within a given image; it is as if the image is surrounded with, enlivened and even created by, the invisible, the unknowable, the absent. It’s not accurate to say that someone who has learned to see like this has forgotten that there is a lens between himself and life. It’s more that the lens has become so intuitive and fluent that it’s just another, clearer eye.
That dinner party with which I began this essay was a failure of mine—not of nerve, exactly, for nothing I have said in this essay had even crossed my mind at that point. No, it was a failure of consciousness, which is always a spiritual failure. I believe there is a kind of existence in which meditation and communication, epiphanies and busyness, death and life, God and not—all these apparent antinomies are merged and made into one awareness. I am a long way from realizing such perception myself, but I have lifted the lens to my eye—there is a sense in which it must be voluntarily lifted, even if, perhaps especially if, it has been roughly thrust there by circumstance—and am learning.
Article printed from The American Scholar: http://www.theamericanscholar.org
URL to article: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/
Hive of Nerves
Posted By Christian Wiman On June 1, 2010 @ 9:20 am In Highlighted Story, Summer 2010, lincoln the persuader | Comments Disabled
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
That unrest formed a heart.
—Paul Celan
During a dinner with friends the talk turns, as it often does these days, to the problem of anxiety: how it is consuming everyone; how the very technologies that we have developed to save time and thereby lessen anxiety have only degraded the quality of the former and exacerbated the latter; how we all need to “give ourselves a break” before we implode. Everyone has some means of relief—tennis, yoga, a massage every Thursday—but the very way in which those activities are framed as separate from regular life suggests the extent to which that relief is temporary (if even that: a couple of us admit that our “recreational” activities partake of the same simmering, near-obsessive panic as the rest of our lives). There is something circular and static to our conversation, which doesn’t end so much as frazzle indeterminately out. And though there is always some comfort in comparing maladies, I am left with the uneasy feeling that my own private anxieties have actually increased by becoming momentarily collective—or no, not that, increased by not becoming collective, increased by the reinforcement of my loneliness within a collective context, like that penetrating but enervating stab of self one feels sometimes in an anonymous crowd. It is a full day later before it occurs to me that not once, not in any form, not even with the ghost of a suggestion, did any of us mention God.
THE GREATNESS of James Joyce’s Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal.i want to read this book. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. And that is the book’s horror too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet. How much cruelty is occasioned simply because of the noise that is within us: the din is too great for us to realize exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name. Thus an offhand remark, which leaves us as easily as a breath and which we think no more of than a breath, cuts a friend to the quick. And thus a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space in individuals to think. Life has accelerated greatly since Joyce’s time, and now, as our selves scatter into bits and bytes, and our souls, if we are conscious of them at all, diminish to little more than a vague wish for quiet, even the linear associativeness of Ulysses can seem quaint.
HOW DOES one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? It is one thing to encourage contemplation, prayer, quiet spaces in which God, or at least a galvanizing awareness of his absence (“Be present with your want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,” as the 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne puts it), can enter the mind and heart. But the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that any consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and how does one relax and resist at the same time?
Note to self: can i incorporate God into the mundane activities of every moment, every thought? do i even have time to think? is it Godly to think...more than a quiet time, more than "contemplation time." but in every moment be thinking about God, life, working things out.
Commute (1)
O the screech and heat and hate
we have for each day’s commute,
the long wait at the last stop
before we go screaming
underground, while the pigeons
court and shit and rut
insolently on the tracks
because this train is always late,
always aimed at only us,
who when it comes with its
blunt snout, its thousand mouths,
cram and curse and contort
into one creature, all claws and eyes,
tunneling, tunneling, tunneling
toward money.
IN THE GOSPELS Jesus is always talking to the crowds in parables, which he later “explains” to his disciples. The dynamic is odd in a couple of ways: either the parables are obvious, and the explanations seem almost patronizing, or they are opaque, and the explanations only compound their opacity. (Or could it be—and I confess to relishing this possibility—that the explanations illustrate Christ’s wry sense of humor, which is nowhere else evident?) In any case, the notable point is just how little the explanations amount to, how completely the ultimate truths of the parables—just like dreams and poems—remain within their own occurrence.
Behind every urge to interpret is unease, anxiety. This can be a productive and necessary endeavor, whether it’s literary criticism or theology or even the dogmas and rituals of a religion (since all religion is, ultimately, an attempt to interpret God and numinous experience). Such effort deepens and complicates our initial response, even as it gives us an aperture through which to see our moments of mystery, crisis, and revelation more clearly—to give them “meanings,” to integrate them into our lives. The trouble comes when the effort to name and know an experience replaces the experience itself. Just as we seem to have grasped every level of meaning in a poem, the private and silent power that compelled us in the first place seems to drain right out of it. Just as we plant the flag of faith on a mountain of doctrine and dogma it has taken every ounce of our intellect to climb, our vision becomes a “view,” which is already clouding over, and is in any event cluttered with the trash of others who have fought their way to this same spot. Nowhere to go now but down.
“If that’s what he means,” says the student to the poetry teacher, “why doesn’t he just say it?” “If God is real,” says the parishioner to the preacher, “why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?” The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance, but their answers are similar. A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.
Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved but a narrative to be inherited, and undergone, and transformed person by person. He uses metaphors because something essential about the nature of reality—its mercurial solidity, its mathematical mystery and sacred plainness—is disclosed within them. He speaks the language of reality—speaks in terms of the physical world—because he is reality’s culmination and code, and because “this people’s mind has become dull; they have stopped their ears and shut their eyes. Otherwise, their eyes might see, their ears hear, and their mind understand, and then they might turn to me, and I would heal them.”
I DON’T THINK the “answer” to the anxiety felt by everyone at that dinner party is Christianity. In fact I’m pretty sure that is not the case, as we represented several different traditions (including no tradition)—and anyway Christ is not an answer to existence but a means of existing, and I am convinced that there is no permutation of man or mind in which he is not, in some form, present. (This from the Catholic nun, Sara Grant, speaking about, and quoting from, the Kena Upanishad: “Brahman is not ‘that which one knows,’ but that by which one knows, as though a crystal bowl were aware of the sun shining through it. ‘When he is known through all cognitions, he is rightly known.’” But it seems to me you could quote Christ himself in support of this idea: “To believe in me, is not to believe in me but in him who sent me; to see me, is to see him who sent me.”)
I do think, though, that both the problem of, and the solution to, our individual anxiety is a metaphysical one. Some modern philosophers (Heidegger, Kierkegaard) have argued that existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately conscious of, death. True, I think, but I wonder if the emphasis might be placed differently, shifted from unconscious reaction to unrealized action: that is, our anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit’s need to be. It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music which, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is not hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult indeed to learn to hear it as music.
Who is it that clasps and kneads my naked feet, till they unfold,
till all is well, till all is utterly well? the lotus-lilies of the feet!
I tell you it is no woman, it is no man, for I am alone.
And I fall asleep with the gods, the gods
that are not, or that are
according to the soul’s desire,
like a pool into which we plunge, or do not plunge.
THE OPERATIVE WORD in these lines from D. H. Lawrence, who wasn’t a conventionally religious person, is soul. It’s a word that has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people, unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning. Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its religious meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical incrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. That’s what the 20th century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge and truth and ours—until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul with the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitably, it breaks.
“GLIMMERINGS are what the soul’s composed of,” writes the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, an interesting—and, I think, accurate—thought, if the word glimmerings is read as both literal and metaphorical: the soul is not simply the agent that does the seeing (the entity to which metaphorical glimmerings are given), it is in some way the things that are seen (the world that glimmers); or, perhaps more accurately, it is the verb that makes an exchange between the self and reality, or the self and other selves, possible. It is the soul that turns perception into communication, and communication—even if it’s just between one man and the storm of atoms around him—into communion.
THE MEANINGS that God calls us to in our lives are never abstract. Though the call may ask us to redefine, or refine, what we know as life, it does not demand a renunciation of life in favor of something beyond it. Moreover, the call itself is always comprised of life. That is, it is not some hitherto unknown voice to which we respond; it is life calling to life. People think that diagnosing the apostle Paul with epilepsy or some related disorder nullifies any notion that God might truly have revealed something of himself on that road to Damascus. But God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is comprised of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment. “I think there is no light in the world / but the world,” writes George Oppen. “And I think there is light.”
THERE IS A DISTINCTION to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to—and, if attended to, discloses—our souls. And yet it is a distinction without a difference, perhaps, and as crucial to eventually overcome as it is to initially understand, for to be truly alive means to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence, to feel one’s trivial, frittering anxieties acquiring a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such. (YES YES YES....It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to . . . the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. . . . I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.-Heart of Darkness)
I DON’T MEAN to be describing an intellectual transformation, or a transformation that is available only to “intellectuals.” I suppose that for many people—people inclined to read essays like this one, for instance—the transformation might seem to begin with a mental decision and a definite application of the will. In fact, I think taking such a step indicates that some rift of meaning and feeling has already opened inside of us, and we are clutching, consciously or unconsciously, at the rock face and rubble above this sudden abyss. In the end if we are to integrate our anxieties into our lives—and thereby alleviate them—any merely intellectual understanding of them is inadequate.
Consciousness among contemporary Western intellectuals is an “apprehensive” quality: that is to say, we become conscious by taking hold of, or apprehending, our selves and reality, by standing apart from them. Not at all coincidentally, we grow apprehensive as we do so (for where, exactly, are we standing?). (YES! like thatout of body state of confusion and displacement that i've found myself in since i was a kid) There are other, fuller ways of being in the world, which Eastern religions, as well as Christian mysticism, strive to articulate. (Meister Eckhart: “It is not that we should abandon, neglect or deny our inner self, but we should learn to work precisely in it, with it and from it in such a way that interiority turns into effective action and effective action leads back to interiority and we become used to acting without any compulsion.”) But again, the best evidence comes not from books but from people, some of whom would never think to pick up a book. Suddenly I am seeing someone out of my own childhood, recalling a habit of mind too attentive to be called passive, too intuitive to be called thought. I am thinking (thinking!) of a presence so in love with life, so in tune with time, that death seemed only to drive her further in.
She who in her last days loved too well to lose
A single weed to namelessness, in creosote,
Blue gramma, goatsbeard that is not thriving, is,
Amid the cattails’ brittle whisper whispers
O Law’, Honey, ain’t this a praiseful thing.
THE ITCH inside of contentment, or the itch that perhaps is contentment, as if despite our problems with anxiety, inner rest required outer restlessness, as if peace with ourselves and our times were found only within frenzy. Or, for some, never found at all. W. B. Yeats:
Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter’s best of all;
And after that there’s nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come—
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.
This is life as pure death wish. There is a sense in which Yeats is right: what we seek is meaning for our ceaseless, anxious, and always-anticipatory actions, and death is part of that meaning. Any life that does not take account of death, that does not, in one way or another, hear the annihilating silence inside every sound, the nullifying stillness within every action, is a life that can neither harness nor redress that dark energy—which is to say, a life of which death already has possession. Yeats’s mistake, though, is to make death the entire meaning of life, which, ultimately, makes not only our anxieties, but also our actions, meaningless. Here’s another take:
WHEN God at first made Man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by—
Let us (said He) pour on him all we can;
Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.
So strength first made a way,
Then beauty flow’d, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all His treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.
For if I should (said He)
Bestow this jewel also on My creature,
He would adore My gifts instead of Me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast.
In this poem, “The Pulley” by George Herbert, our very restlessness is a gift, as it reminds us, even when we are most content, what we most need and why we are on this earth at all. The poem is perhaps theologically suspect (why this rat’s maze of a world for a known result?) but intuitively true. We are driven ceaselessly onward in this life and are certain of our desires only until we realize them, at which point they seem to dissolve and shimmer further off, like a heat mirage on a road down which we can’t stop racing. Unlike Yeats, though, for whom that road ends at a massive wall into which we finally, fatally slam, for Herbert the very permanence of our longing is proof of longing’s eventual fruition. Which is not to say, though, that this fruition is forever forestalled. It isn’t “heaven,” exactly, except insofar as we learn to see, as he says in another poem, “Heaven in Ordinarie.”
AT FIRST, attending to the anxiety of existence can seem like a zero-sum game. Any attention turned toward the truth of the spirit is attention turned away from all we have come to think of as “life.” Thus we parcel out our moments of devotion—a church service here and there, a walk in the woods, a couple of hours of meditation a week—all the while maintaining the frenzy of our usual existence outside of those moments. This is inevitable, for the initial demands of the spirit are intense, but it is not sustainable, for the soul is not piecemeal. We are left with this paradox: only by hearing the furthest call of consciousness can we hear the call of ordinary life, but only by claiming the most mundane and jangling details of our lives can that rare and ulterior music of the soul merge with what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens.”
IT IS A STRANGE THING how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits. You thought you were unhappy because this or that was off in your relationship, this or that was wrong in your job, but the reality is that your sadness stemmed from your aversion to, your stalwart avoidance of, God. (wow true true true!) The other problems may very well be true, and you will have to address them, but what you feel when releasing yourself to speak of the deepest needs of your spirit is the fact that no other needs could be spoken of outside of that context. You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being is unsure.
THE FIRST STEP in the life of the spirit is learning to let yourself experience those moments when life and time seem at once suspended and concentrated, that paradox of attentive oblivion out of which any sustaining faith grows. These moments may not be—and at first almost certainly will not be—“meditative.” They are more likely to break into your awareness, or into what you thought was awareness (“inbreaking” is the theological term for Christ’s appearance in the world and in our lives—there is no coaxing it, no way to earn it, no way to prepare except to hone your capacity to respond, which is, finally, your capacity to experience life, and death). This is why we cannot separate one part of our existence, or one aspect of our awareness, from another, for there is a seed of peace in the most savage clamor. There is a kind of seeing that, fusing attention and submission, becomes a kind of being, wherein you may burrow into the very chaos that buries you, and even the most binding ties can become a means of release.
Commute (2)
There is a dreamer
all good conductors
know to look for
when the last stop is made
and the train is ticking cool,
some lover, loner, or fool
who has lived so hard
he jerks awake
in the graveyard,
where he sees
coming down the aisle
a beam of light
whose end he is,
and what he thinks are chains
becoming keys . . .
KEYS TO WHAT, though? For I can’t end with that flourish of poetry and privacy. Art, like religious devotion, either adds life or steals it; it is never neutral; either it impels one back toward life or is merely one more means of keeping life at arm’s length. (The subject matter and tone of art have less to do with this than many people think: nothing palls the soul like a forced epiphany, and one can be elated and energized by a freshly articulate despair.) Keys to what? In this poem, the keys are, on one level, to the constraints felt in the earlier section (the miserable commute, the crush of others, the “screech and heat and hate”), which prove to be their own means of release (“what he thought were chains / becoming keys”). On another level, the keys are to the mysteries of death; or, rather, the key is to the blunt, immutable, physical fact of death (the train “graveyard”), which opens, if only for a moment, to reveal a mystery.
And now it’s over. Now the man on the train—like the man who imagined him (me!), like Paul God-struck outside of Damascus (alas, it wasn’t quite like that for me)—must move. Now the revelation either becomes part of his life or is altogether lost to it. Either his actions acquire a deeper purpose, and begin to echo and counterpoint each other, or the moment and the man slip back into unfeeling frenzy, and the screech and heat and hate of his days lock metallically around him again. ("don't let retreat be like vegas: what happens at retreat stays at retreat")
Death is the only lens for true transcendence, but, paradoxically, transcendence is possible only when we cease being conscious of our own death. I don’t mean that we are unconscious of our own death, but that we pass through what we think of as consciousness—that “apprehensiveness” I mentioned, that standing-apart-from and taking-hold-of—into something more profound. What you feel in amateur photographs—it’s a large part of the poignancy—is the pressure, or the lack of pressure, actually, of all the reality missing from the picture, which is really just a chopped-off piece of life. An artist, on the other hand, makes you feel just how much missing life is contained within a given image; it is as if the image is surrounded with, enlivened and even created by, the invisible, the unknowable, the absent. It’s not accurate to say that someone who has learned to see like this has forgotten that there is a lens between himself and life. It’s more that the lens has become so intuitive and fluent that it’s just another, clearer eye.
That dinner party with which I began this essay was a failure of mine—not of nerve, exactly, for nothing I have said in this essay had even crossed my mind at that point. No, it was a failure of consciousness, which is always a spiritual failure. I believe there is a kind of existence in which meditation and communication, epiphanies and busyness, death and life, God and not—all these apparent antinomies are merged and made into one awareness. I am a long way from realizing such perception myself, but I have lifted the lens to my eye—there is a sense in which it must be voluntarily lifted, even if, perhaps especially if, it has been roughly thrust there by circumstance—and am learning.
Article printed from The American Scholar: http://www.theamericanscholar.org
URL to article: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)