Lot's wife and participation in the human condition

'I always called you Jesus, you always called me Sonny'

1. I want to remember the gratuitousness of grace.

2. It probably wasn’t a single day, but I imagine it as a single day when we stopped thinking of faith as hope and contorted it to mean an intellectual assention to a set of propositions.

3. A blasphemer describes his blasphemy as a break with and a separation from God. Listening to him though, I only hear a prayer.

The desert is blooming.

(via Dan Greene)

Last Night II

There I go, showing up in other people's dreams again.

I don't want to weird you out, but last night you were in my dream.
Yeah? What was I doing?
Just sitting in my house in Georgia.
Yeah?
That's all I remember. It was strange.

The Detroit News on an interesting joining of new urbanism and Berry-style agrarianism, the possibility of urban farming as the hope of Detroit.

Gary Kasparov, chess champion ranked first in the game since 1984, retires from chess for politics, vowing to fight what he calls "Putin's dictatorship" and work for a more democratic Russia.

Note: I don't know anything about current Russian politics and have heard good cases made for and against Putin.

Sunday cracks

So I'm sitting there, in the back, in the corner, and I think, we're not praying together, we just happen to be praying at the same time.

I think, there was no one here who needed to see me. It feels like sitting in an empty theater. Feels like getting rained on in a house.

I think, letting the simple sermon get lost in some example, about Lot's wife and about a meaningless ball rolling down the street in the evening.

And then it was noise

The seats come up thwap-retracting as the crowd stands to ovation. Applause, standing applause in a swelling surge of a surf-roar, of palms smacking out whomp whomp whomp. Somebody whistles. The noise is a rush, a roar, a whoosh, an undifferentiated din of sound.

For a moment the clapping all synchs, sticking, a unison of palms beating a beat and then it breaks, toppling over louder in disorder like rock tumbling from the top of a load in a slide of grinding grating dust-raising down into a rubbley pile.

I wanted to be deaf. To have always been deaf, to have never have heard, never have heard this, this standing ovation adoration of noise thrown like flowers to this man defending torture because it wasn't that bad and it was ours, so okay, and it wasn't as bad as Stalin, so keep you pride in this nation, this nationalism.

I could hear nothing but the noise, the horror of the noise eating the world.

Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

YOU CAN SEE IT THERE, what he told them and they wrote down like a key, written out there long hand and un-coded, open and offered and waiting to be prayed. I know a man who prayed that prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, the Pater Noster. I mean, I’ve known lots of people who’ve prayed it here and again, but this guy prayed it prayed it. Over and over trying to get it, to say it so the power came, so God stepped out from behind, to pray it so the empty words filled like a sail before the west-blowing winds of God. He gave it a year, everything for a year and then another year, praying it in different spaces, varying paces and pauses and accents. He felt ridiculous but he kept praying. It has to work, he said, these are God’s words. God has to hear them.

Killing the Buddha has published my essay (seen, encouraged and helped out by some of you) called Praying the deus ex machina. Take a look.

Physicist Hans Bethe, nobel prize winner described as highly respected and as one of the "last giants of modern physics," who explored the sun's energy production by the fusion of hydrogen to release helium, and participated in the invention of the nuclear bomb, dies at 98.

May he rest in peace.

"WE MUSTN'T complain too much of being comedians - it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed - that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men."
        - Graham Greene

We didn't have a family, we had a clan

We were standing at the fence along side the softball diamond, Val, Dave and me with our fingers in the chain link watching dad's team in the dugout spitting sesame seed shells.

Mike was just born, we were still getting meals delivered from friends, and dad had decided to make it to the softball game and get us out of the house. So, mid-May evening with the sun setting long shadows to right field and the players pulling their caps down over their eyes, we're standing there at the fence watching the end of the game and one of the guys turns to us and says Heeeey, it's the Silliman clan.

The men laughed and Dad turned and said, Hey guys. I had to ask him later what a 'clan' was. I kind of liked the sound of it, the difference of it and the way that laughter was a little nervous.

When people couldn't just call us a family, because we were more than that, because they thought of family it terms of nuclear family, that, we would say later, was when we gave up being normal. It was the end, I would say, of the minivan experiment and Val and Dave would laugh because we never had a minivan but when everyone else was driving minivans we drove the weirdest, wildest, and funniest family cars. The minivans was mostly a symbol, though, of what we didn't have: We didn't have games, we had tournaments. We didn't have fights, we had wars. We didn't have dinners, we had feasts. We didn't have meetings, we had councils.

We didn't have it normal, we had more than that. It made us, I think, gluttonous for life.

Notes on a Friday

1. Trying to convince a professor to buy a used book for $150 so I can borrow it.

2. Not thinking it's strange at all to be moving to Georgia to join a Christian commune, but still not knowing what to say about "Christians living in community."

3. Wondering why no one's driven over the edge of the drive way before while standing around for 30 minutes looking at the precariously tetering car and then decideding the simplest thing is to push.

4. Saying that you always say rest in peace to the dead, no matter who they were.

5. Wanting to share a picture of my littlest brother and another one of a brother's crucifix he drew himself on a cross shaped piece of cardboard he found.

For your consideration: religion and media

Mad dog

The little Ann Arbor art museum has on a show of 20th century art. More of a montage, really, than a show. It was very scattered, an eclectic assortment of Picasso's and second-name abstracts where any sense movement of 20th century art is missing and garishly supplemented back in with contextless posterboard quotes that sound pompous and have a look of get it? get it?

A Japanese family was laughing and wisecracking at their side of a cell phone conversation while one of the women video taped her husband standing still between two paintings.

There was a little black and white drawing of a dog, done by a Mexian artist contemporary to Diego Rivera. He might have been a muralist. I don't know and I don't remember his name. The dog's coming at you leaning in a lunge at the end of his chain. He's teeth are out, barking and spitting. He's a crossbreed, a matted-hair mutt, a cur and his eyes are rolling wildly out of sync with the left eye dialated to a dot rolling up and the right staring straight and mean.

I hate dogs. Mostly because of dogs like this one mad, enrarged with violence, chain-pulling fence-jumping ghetto dogs always mean. Because of country dogs killing to kill kill for the feel of blood. Bad tempered foul mooded cur sons of canines always snarling, always wanting to bite.

I hate dogs, which they know and while you're telling me to pet your pet and telling your pet it's okay he's a friend he goes barking into a low throat growl as old as emnity and the hair on the back of my neck rises.

Still, I felt like that dog. I felt cranky, in a bad temper foul mood of blood, teeth, spittle and mad rolling eyes. We were two of a kind that would have killed each other, given the chance.

Just happened to be feeling that way without warnin'

I'm going to Ann Arbor for the weekend. Three reasons: 1. to talk to Prizio about a "eulogy of God" reading list and perhaps project, 2. to get out of Hillsdale, 3. to do a relaxed bit of homework in AA's internet cafe and wander around her streets and bookstores broke.

Of interest:

-Adam Prizo and Gail Armstrong on writing and the question, what are you trying to accomplish?
- My uncle on cyberpunk's Bruce Sterling.
- Jeremy Huggins' picture writing project.
- Jim Wallis and Chuck Colson debate what it means to be pro-life.
- Old Crow Medicine Show

Expect a bit of writing this weekend.

Eidetic: I-'det-ik, adj., marked by or involving extraordinarily accurate and vivid recall especially of visual images; of visual imagery of almost photographic accuracy.

[German eidetisch from Greek eidos]

Wendell Berry

Woke up this morning thinking of a chicken scratching dirt, for no apparent reason except the sun was out like a promise of a day for sitting on the porch.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Wendell Berry, last few days, and in the last few posts. I’ve been thinking about how to use technology conscious and and concerned about its reshaping of society, about sense of place and our relations to it, about a Berryian sense of ethics (running in my mind with a Girardian/Foucaultian concerns of violence and power and a Derridian hope for the impossible), ethics as personal responsibility for and an attitude of humility towards my world.

You can dismiss Berry and his agrarianism as romantic, as caught in daydreams of a dead age, but that reading’s cheap, I think. It’s misdirected. Berry’s project isn’t about a radical and fanciful reshaping of the world, isn’t a Moaistic sort of endeavor, isn’t about recapturing an imagined epoch. Berry’s project is about the indivisibility of the world, and about attempting to approach the world with a sense of stewardship and responsibility. To call it agrarianism, even, is a misnomer, for it’s not about living in the country but about living.

Hear the world

Andrew Sullivan is worrying about the iPod people, the growing technological retreat, and society being eaten by isolation.

Sense of place

I met my dad crossing the line into Arizona, in the night, sitting high on the hard jostling seats of the Penski cab. I knew who he was as a person there, what he was and what it meant to be a man. He was telling me stuff, stories and thing’s he’d read and how he liked to drive and always thought maybe he’d become a trucker and I was watching him shift, watching him drive drinking from a two liter Coke lit up by the green glow of the dash board lights. He told me he’d had motorcycle, a Norton he was riding on an Indian reservation road and he came over a little rise and the road was all washed out. Laid the bike down, wrecked it way out in the middle of nowhere. He walked out. He told me he’d had a job at a gas station, one point, but they fired him when he wouldn’t take the night shift the morning he came in and found the night guy dead and his dog too. Didn’t want the job, he said, I figured there’s always something else.

Which is what we were doing there – moving on to something else. I was 9. He was 42, with everything he owned packed in the extra-long truck moving his wife and four kids to Texas, betting it’d be better there. He was moving for a better place, a better country.

We sat the atlas out on the bed, gathered for a leaving-Texas family meeting, out on the green king-sized comforter, and looked at the country all laid out in interstates and US routes and state-shaped boundaries. The whole thing was laid out open and we could choose, we could go anywhere. What about Minnesota, we said, what’s that like? What about Arizona, Idaho, Virginia, and we’d trace the little lines tying them together.

It was there, looking at the atlas, that we knew we were from somewhere only until we were from somewhere else. We knew we were mobile, movable, free to pick up and fly and land anywhere, call anywhere home. We didn’t have roots, we had an anchor.

You can get to know the road, moving; it has a sense to it. The highway’s a shape shifting community. The truckers are there, living there, and the cars flow in and out together, through motels and gas stations. Traffic drifts and merges. Everyone’s moving, directional together, a society communing in its mobility. And when the night comes cloaking over the curves, you pull in behind a pair of road-tracing taillights measuring turns, two of you settling into a tandem touching out the reflection of the yellow line. You work the road together, co-op it, and them there’s some unique-named exit numbered by the miles to the state line and he pulls off. He gets off, leaving you to watch the speedometer alone. You try to think he’s just getting gas, finding restrooms, that he’s still thinking of hours termed in miles, still thinking of ‘there’ as ‘out there’ but no, no he’s probably pulling home.

He’s probably picking up a pile of saved mail and yesterday’s doorstep-stacked newspapers covering statutes at the city meeting. He’s probably left you, gone home, forgotten you to tumbling towards the hour-mile marker and the state line. And that was it, the never-constant community, the mobility that is Amer’ca. You had it, for a moment following taillights, and you lost it at the last exit.

What we’ve lost, he says, is a sense of place. Gotta find it again, get it again. At some point we gotta stop. Stop moving, stay, plant ourselves down and learn the seasons of the creek out back and learn the names of the trees and plant some trees. Since we weren’t given a place we’ll have to stop and claim one, be claimed by one. We have to stop and listen, until we can hear it when we close out eyes.

It gets to be hard to explain where you’re from, when you’ve moved a lot. It gets to be hard to explain why you’re where ever you are, when you’re talking to people who’re there because they’ve always been there and you’re there because you’ve never been, until now. The guy at the bookstore said to come back, tell him how the book was. Not from here, I said, I’m from there, but that’s just for now. My brother’s here. Not from here, but here.

Didn’t mean to pry, he said.

No, no, it doesn’t matter. We’re just a family that moved a lot, growing up, and grown up we’ve just kept moving.

I’ve driven or ridden from Seattle to Philadelphia seven times in the last three years, which works out to a trip short of the length around the globe. First time I saw the continental divide I was listening to a Vegas musician talk about Kennedy and Hendrix and what kind of drugs they serve in heaven. One time I listened to a construction worker with a leprechaun tattooed on his neck talk to the just ex ex-con till they got off in the Columbia to get a beer. I shared a hamburger once with a guy describing the restraining harnesses he used to transport violent criminals. Watched a kid said he was going to Maine videotape Iowa with a homemade camera. One time a smoke jumper told me about his mom.

My friends leave for Europe, Africa, the Middle East but I just keep going back and forth between borders. You really ought to go, they say, but they can’t see it, I can’t see it. Somewhere you gotta stop. Some place you gotta sense, listen.

I think I’ll be taking the greyhound again this summer, out to Washington to see my family, see my sister before she leaves for Austria, and back again to Philadelphia. A six day ride. Mostly of silence. Six days of sleeping in my seat and the seat next to me, of reading and looking out at the farms and fields coming up. The bus a ride from east to west to east listening to strangers talking in the quiet dark, talking on the bus station curb in the morning in North Dakota, talking over accidentally shared meals on Formica tables back of a truck stop. I want to rest on that ride until again I lean my head back on the slightly rumbling seat, close my eyes, and hear this place.

Hunter S. Thompson, inventor of gonzo journalism and the weird voice of the American Dream turned to fear and loathing, died last night at the age of 67, apparently having shot himself.

May he rest in peace.

- "Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "Hell yes, I'm from Texas," deserves whatever happens to him." (with mention of Gov. Nunn).
- "I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum."