Clive

I started reading Mere Christianity over the break back in Wisconsin. Nine pages in, still the preface, Lewis is talking about why he's chosen not to touch on certain subjects and says that he won't comment on issues that he hasn't had personal experience with. "Ever since I served as an infantryman in the first world war I have had a great dislike of people who, themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line. As a result I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed.”

He then goes on to tell us that he’s never experienced the temptation to gamble. What struck me was that he then said that he probably also lacks the good impulse that gambling is an excess or perversion of as well.

That got me thinking about what could possibly be the inherently good, God-given desire that has been twisted into something so evil that its Mecca goes by the moniker of Sin City. I remembered something Lewis had said in the Four Loves about his personality, how he is a safety oriented creature, reluctant to put himself in vulnerable positions. I quoted it in my Shakespeare paper, and I’ll quote it again here because the simplicity and weight of these words is so good; “Of all arguments against love, none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’” Is the missing good desire here something like risk-taking? Stepping out on a limb that you aren’t sure will support you? It seems to fill the role of an innocent desire that can be the platform and fuel for gambling like a man possessed.

Putting it in terms of stepping out begs the question; Is there a connection between this missing desire and a lack of faith? If faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen, that without it it’s impossible to please God, and if the lacking mystery-gambling desire is related to this, I have cause for concern. Thoughts?

Lists Are Easy Posts

I ravaged the used record shops while in Green Bay and emerged with the following:

Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump
The Presidents of the United States of America - S/T
Rooney - S/T
The Glands - S/T
Ok Go - S/T
The Apples in Stereo - Tone Soul Evolution
Ash - Free All Angels
The Polyphonic Spree - The Beginnings of...
The Polyphonic Spree - Together We're Heavy
Sondre Lerche - Two Way Monologue
Hollywood Sound Effects - Over 100!
Of Montreal - Satanic Panic in the Attic

An Iron Fist

I just witnessed something in the Post Office that sparked a little observation about part of my view of legalism:

It's busy here. Christmas always floods the Post Office, and I waited in line for about a half an hour to pick up a package. Usually when an employee finishes with a customer, they set up for the next one and say something like "Can I help the next person in line?" A man and woman walked up to the line before receiving this invitation, and the postman behind the counter jokingly said to the man "You know, I didn't call you up," with a smile and a wink.

The man motioned with his finger toward his ear a shook his head without saying a word. He was deaf, as was his companion. They proceeded to explain what they needed done through writing and everything appeared to go smoothly.

What struck me was this: Had something like this happened to me at Kanakuk, or even worse, the Kenworthy, there would have been a rule imposed immediately against joking around with customers. The attitude would be, "Now that this has happened once, it's going to happen again and it's a horrible thing. The only way to be safe is to surround ourselves in rules, and that through them we can ward off any and all complications." There's no trust put in one's own judgment or dealing with situations as they arise. Employers (at my level anyway) seem to want robots, not organic beings that can adapt and shift to a situation. We need to have all the possibilities and scenarios uploaded into our brains so that when sensory input comes our way, we just run it through the matrix of "What does the manuel say?"

England

I finally got around to scanning some of my pictures from England. Here's also Jessica's, and Tori's. Enjoy.

Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer. Too bad he's never cried.

Highlights

I read three things today. A short piece of new fiction out of Harper's, a list of Chuck Norris's characteristics, and an article by Stanley Fish on Intelligent Design. I'll try to hit the high points:

When Chuck Norris's wife burned the turkey one Thanksgiving, Chuck said, "Don't worry about it honey," and went into his backyard. He came back five minutes later with a live turkey, ate it whole, and when he threw it up a few seconds later it was fully cooked and came with cranberry sauce. When his wife asked him how he had done it, he gave her a roundhouse kick to the face and said, "Never question Chuck Norris."

That is all.

Marvell on Righteousness

Here's about what I'll turn in tomorrow, same requirements as Shakespeare, "why is literature important to you." Tell me what you think, and I'll tell you what I think.

I have the pleasure of working at a wonderful place known as Kanakuk Colorado in the summers. Kanakuk (K-Co) is a Missouri based Christian camp that specializes in all things outdoorsy and popular in the west, like rafting, backpacking, rock climbing, and mountain biking. Being a Christian camp, and especially one who’s funding comes from the Bible-belt, there are rules, both for the staff and for the kids that we minister to. Most are well and good and Biblically based and backed. Some however, fall into the category of “things that Christians don’t do” theology. In reading through Andrew Marvell’s dialogue poems I noticed a similar strain, specifically the accepted idea that the body is the Mr. Hyde in the relationship between it and the soul. It had me realize that I’ve always seen these Christian assumptions as new developments, but here we apparently have an example hundreds of years old. The idea of imposed morality in a Christian setting without solid scriptural backing has perplexed me ever since joining the Kanakuk ranks, and in Marvell I see some possible explanation in light of his prose work The Rehearsal Transposed, and through a more careful reading of his dialogues.

My main problem is this: artists have the ability to make ideas/philosophies/words more memorable and accessible, and therefore have a greater responsibility to be truthful with their work. Much of the “youth group theology” around today comes from kids getting their morals from Christian rock and life-application Bible studies. I personally think those two avenues of pursuing truth have some major problems, but aren’t bad in and of themselves. The problem is not always in the end result or the rule that’s being followed but the source of it. As a believer, you lose your footing by taking on other standards of good apart from God. This doesn’t mean that everything you do will be sin or evil, but it does mean that you’ve placed your faith in something else, some other authority of right and wrong.

I’d like to begin by looking at Marvell’s Dialogue Between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure, with the help of Thomas Wheeler’s book Andrew Marvell Revisited. Wheeler notes that in the dialogue, the Soul is confined to speaking in only eight syllable couplets, while the Pleasure is allowed a variety of line lengths, rhyme schemes and eight more lines than the body. This portrays an image of the soul being stuffy, organized, and stiff, while the Pleasure comes off as free and refreshing. He also points out that nothing which Pleasure offers is “sin,” but it seems that the Soul sees them as opportunities for it. Wheeler then offers that perhaps this isn’t a Christian poem to be read in Christian context. I would argue that the same way I’d deal with a pastor writing an allegorical piece of fiction without using the word Jesus; given Marvell’s history and previous writing, it doesn’t make much sense to separate them from this poem, especially since it deals with spiritual matters. If it were a poem about spelunking, I might be more inclined to take it at face value without thinking of the Christian parallel. Wheeler then makes a great point that the poem seems to be nearer to Platonism than Christianity. I would agree, in that so far the Soul seems to be resisting Pleasure for no good reason other than an assumption that anything that feels good is bad.

I think that Wheeler is spot on about nothing the Pleasure offering being sin. It’s important to note that because of how the Soul reacts, as if it were not just bad but a blockade between it and heaven. So thus far we have the Soul “valiantly” standing up to the Pleasures of the world, cheered on by the Chorus character. It’s interesting that this is pretty common to most of us, the idea that the Soul’s job is to ward off the evil of Pleasure with abstinence from it. Here we run into the problem of assumption, relating back to the idea of accepted Christian behavior. A close look at instruction in the Bible doesn’t tell us in fact, to abstain from good things. We have a desire for the opposite sex, there’s marriage. There are good things to eat and drink here, and we have tastebuds and appetites that can be excited and satiated. It seems more that God has given a right way for desire to be fulfilled, and the people who fulfill them other ways give the desire a bad name. Drunkards make the beer look evil. Promiscuous fraternity brothers make sexual desire look like a dirty thing. Sadly, often the response of believers is to nix anything that the world has made look bad.

Why is this? Marvell addresses the topic in The Rehearsal Transposed, by saying that people’s own consciences are often their best judges, and one who has the Law on his side feels even better. Isabel MacCaffrey, in her Notes on Marvell’s Poetry, made a wonderful point on this, recognizing that Marvell knew that conscience without any law is helpless, but that men are also much more comfortable with just a set of laws to follow. Legalism, following a list of do’s and don’ts has the positive effect of apparent goodness on the outside, without the soul-scouring required of real righteousness. Thus my problem with Kanakuk.

In Marvell’s other dialogue, Between Soul and Body, Marvell seems to take a different approach in representing the two speakers. Both Soul and Body speak in eight syllable couplets, instead of giving one a more distinct voice. In this poem we get more of a unique view of the bond between the two. Both have very visual arguments against each other, the Soul viewing the Body as a dungeon, and the Body seeing the Soul as a disease. It helps to mention that the medieval church didn’t wholly understand what was meant in the New Testament as “flesh” and “spirit.” From the Greek, they understood them to be terms designating two parts of a man – the higher and lower natures. We can see this in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians where he compares individual members of the church as parts of the body, and acknowledges that there are parts and functions that deserve and receive more or less honor (1 Cor. 12:22-24). The church however took this to mean that things like sex, eating, and working belonged to the “lower” nature, while pious acts like prayer, fasting, and celibacy belonged to the higher. So here we see a bit of the history of the typical “physical things are bad” mindset, the faults of which I’ll address soon.

Marvell goes on in Rehearsal to comment directly on this idea of the responsibility of the artist; “How wretchedly, the one, to uphold his fiction, must incite princes to persecution and tyranny, degrade grace to morality, debauch conscience against its own principles, distort and misinterpret the Scripture, fill the whole world with blood, execution, and massacre; while the other needs and requires no more but a peaceable and unprejudicat soul, and the native simplicity of a Christian spirit!” Marvell is asserting here that it’s a sham to twist your words around truth for the sake of a story, and that relying on the truth of Christ will produce the better work in the end.

So is someone “distorting and misinterpreting Scripture” when they take this stance? Wheeler suggests again in his commentary of A Dialogue Between Soul and Body that the arguments aren’t presented in Christian terms, that the Body’s accusations actually reverse the traditional Christian contrast between flesh and spirit. Marvell’s Body here accuses the Soul of allowing it to sin. Wheeler then said that this abandonment of tradition freed Marvell to make this contest original and open. I think he’s right, but maybe not in the same way he thinks he is. A quick glance at some more notes from Paul reveal that there are two bodies, the earthly and the heavenly. He goes on to say how the earthly body is sown in dishonor and raised to a heavenly one in glory (1 Cor. 15:40-44). One is needed for the other to come about. There seems to be less of a competition and more of a mutually reliant relationship.

It would be wrong of me to leave out one of the more misquoted verses in the Bible that relates to this discussion. 1 Cor. 6:19 asks the believers at Corinth if they’re aware that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and has been the ammunition of many a nervous mother smelling cigarette smoke or beer on her son’s jacket. A little context reveals that Paul is discussing sexual purity, not the evils of alcohol. But in regards to our discussion of the relationship between the body and soul, it seems worth noting that, unlike other religions where the god dwells in temples and mountains, Christians claim that their bodies are the housing of one aspect of the Trinity. How can men make the claim that the body is some worthless piece of meat, dragging the virtuous soul into sin when part of our God lives in it?

I would argue that Marvell’s dialogues are in fact a knock on this thinking and, and not advocating it at all. He seems to share my distaste for invented theology as well, and even goes so far as to say that it incites “blood, execution, and massacre.” In light of his writing on the subject in The Rehearsal Transposed, and his literary history, it follows that when the chorus speaks in the end “Triumph, triumph, victorious soul!/The world has not one pleasure more:” that Marvell’s attitude was one of “Good for you soul, you managed to beat back all of the pleasures of life. But….that’s not what they were there for.”

Stagnant

Last Geography 100 class today. I'd like to say that I've learned a lot about the natural world. That I've discovered things about weather and physical features of the planet that I didn't know before and can add to my understanding of the planet.

More importantly, I'd like to be able to say that I learned a lot about patience, and looking for the good in things. It'd be great to look back at how I felt sitting through this class in September and see a great contrast with today. I'd like to see growth and understanding in this area of my life. But I can't say any of this. I'm just as frustrated, irritated, and bored now as I was in a 100 level class five years ago. It's no great wisdom to point out the faults in entry level state school courses. It's easy as cheese. What's hard (and probably more beneficial to myself and others) is to find the good in these situations. I don't mean to pretend that it's intellectually stimulating and faultless, but to dwell on the negative doesn't do anyone any good.

I still maintain that the instructor is poor and the class worse. But life isn't a bowl of peaches, and if something like climographs and a drab teacher can get under my skin, I'm in sad shape for the real issues of Life.

On Deck

So what I'm working on next is going to be much more rushed and unfortunately might not have the same depth of "I've been wracked by this, like a WEEK ago" as my last essay....but hey, I can only have so many near breakdowns for the sake of decent writing in a month.

What I'm doing is discussing the assumed rules/laws/restrictions placed on us by Christian art and media. And by Christian I mean to include "Christian influenced," since much of the paper will be trying to show the fault in these suppositions. I'm focusing on Andrew Marvell's two dialogue poems, "A Dialogue Between Soul and Body," and "A Dialogue Between Soul and Created Pleasure." Both speak pretty strongly against pleasure being good at all, and emphasizing the body's wickedness and the soul's virtue.

Part of my thesis is the responsibility of artists to accurately portray theology. Ideas like abstaining from anything that feels or tastes or smells good because it's "worldly" are pretty prevalent in art. I think it's important for artists to be correct largely on the principle that a good, catchy song sticks in your head and well written passages come to mind time and time again; the artist can present truth in a more accessible or maybe personnal way and if someone is wielding that kind of clout, I'd like them to be doing truth justice. I'll be in Corinthians a bit again for this essay as well.

Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome, as always. Oh and it's due on Wednesday, so make it snappy.

Mo Shakes FINISHED

This is basically what I turned in, tell me if your opinions changed:

Recently, a lot has been brought to my attention concerning my position in relation to other people. Not so much of a hierarchical question, more to the point of my level of chosen contact with others. I’ve been dubbed many things by many different people; hippy, religious, quiet, wise, reclusive, foolish, outdoorsy, and bohemian to name a few. No one has ever called me, nor do I suppose anyone has ever thought of it, social. It’s something that I think has been developed by years of habit, and choices in my lifestyle that are conducive to solitude. Until lately I had really not thought too much of it, and sometimes even enjoyed having the image. There’s something mysterious and stoic about the “alone” guy, he who goes out into this world and battles out life’s troubles by his own resolve. Mysterious and stoic maybe, but probably not right. Through the course of much reading and listening to those wiser than me speak, I began to have some doubts about this style of life. Two elements of my disposition, self-seclusion and suspended desire, came up again and again in everything from poetry to bible study to conversations with friends. One of the most notable pieces that sparked this thinking was Shakespeare’s 12^th Night, specifically the relationship between Orsino and Olivia.

In the story, Olivia has just lost her brother to death. Orsino has been pursuing her for some time in the form of messengers carrying his declarations of “love,” which Olivia wants nothing to do with. In his book A Theatre of Envy, Rene Girard presents some plausible explanations for Olivia’s aversion to him. Girard supposes that Olivia is in a situation in which everyone immediately around her admires her greatly. The only variable in this is Toby, who, if he doesn’t admire her, is at least dependent on her like everyone else in her household. This constant adoration has put her in a state of aloofness that she now poo poos another person trying to praise her and gain attention, like Orsino.

I think that view is valid, but I think there’s more at work in Olivia’s self-solitude. Her brother has just died, and according to her she was very close to him and misses him quite a bit. We see this early on from Valentine’s statement that she will “water once a day her chamber round with eye-offending brine – all this to season a brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh and lasting in her sad remembrance.” (I.i. 28-31). Not only will she mourn her brother with tears, but she refuses to let anyone see her face or marry for seven years. She’s experienced something that many of us have, losing someone close to us, and something that Augustine addressed in his Confessions. Having just lost a dear friend, he recalls the shocking face of temporality of this world. “I thought that since death had consumed him, it was suddenly going to engulf all humanity,” he says. He’s realized what happens when you give your love to something ephemeral; you risk losing it at any time. I believe that this was an important motive in Olivia’s motivation for withdrawing herself. Basically, I’ve been hurt by attachment, so none of that intimacy stuff for me thank you very much.

Olivia’s reasons for seclusion have a much more familiar root than Orsino’s. However, his attitude and actions in this story were far closer to home for myself than Olivia’s. Again, Girard has something worth noting on his behavior as well. He comments that Orsino is mostly attracted to Olivia because of her indifference, her stand-offishness. Fine, that’s possible, the “playing hard-to-get” view fits here, but it doesn’t take us anywhere new or interesting in our dissection of desire. Everyone’s heard it before. Girard, however also suggests that Orsino has come across a woman who for the first time has the upper hand in a relationship with him. He also implies that Orsino has probably been pretty popular with the ladies before this incident. Taking that to the next level, it’s reasonable to assume that if he’s currently single, the past relationships haven’t worked out to his liking. He has probably experienced distress of his own from relationships, even if he was the controlling figure in the past. In Olivia, he’s found someone that is almost guaranteed not to fall for him, assuming that she’s serious about the seven years of solitude. Orsino seems to have put himself into this spot of suspended desire, of wanting something forever because it can’t be obtained.

Before I bring this back to my own experiences, I think we need to define what we mean by love and desire. For this I turn to the wisdom of Mr. Clive Staples Lewis’s The Four Loves in which he breaks down our word love into four distinct emotions, and how they manifest and are expressed as a Christian. Affection, the tendency towards liking out of familiarity, is what we feel for our crusty old doorman who’s always been there. Friendship, we feel when we encounter someone else who’s focused on the same things we are and can enjoy similar interests together. Eros, when we are focused on each other, and Charity is the Greek word agape for love, which is specifically the type of love that God shows for us and what we’re supposed to model to others. For our purposes, we’ll be focusing mostly on Eros and Charity.

These ideas and definitions of love and how it should be lived out were what struck me in my own life. The catalyst for all of it was, like many things in life, a girl. Sparing my reader the trite details, I basically found myself in a situation where I didn’t know what to do or how to proceed and needed counsel. What was interesting (only in hindsight) was that every time I thought about my situation, my instinct was not to seek advice or assistance from a friend or teacher, but instead to keep everything to myself and not utter a word of it to anyone. My desire was to figure it out myself, just me and God, no one else needed to hear about it.

So what’s wrong with that? Plenty, as I was being taught through many writers and teachers. One of the first points that caused me to question this attitude came from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. In the 12^th chapter he compares the body of believers to a human body, and likewise individuals being the hands, toes, livers, and nails that individually have their own, irreplaceable purpose, but function for the benefit of all. My pastor, in reading through this made the comment that this is a way that God designed us to draw together. The reason we have different gifts is to fulfill needs in other people. In order to receive some benefit or knowledge, we have to seek it from another person, thus bringing us together. It helps to think of it like pieces of a puzzle: there are pieces out there that have a void right where and in the same shape that we have a protrusion. This is a point where I think Orsino would have done better to realize that what he was offering Olivia wasn’t what she lacked.

Lewis continued this denunciation of solitude in his chapter on Charity, by pointing out the flaws of that thinking that were eerily familiar to me. He too commented on Augustine’s sense of sadness from losing something, and admits that it makes good sense to not “put your goods in a leaky vessel.” His statement of “Of all arguments against love, none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering,’” hit me square in the chest. What came next was even worse. He grants that to love is to be vulnerable and have your heart wrung and possibly shattered. To be sure of keeping it intact, wrap it up in little hobbies and habits, keep all attachments at bay, and lock it up safely. But locked away, he says, it will become an unbreakable, unlovable thing. So now, realizing my tendency towards autonomy, and having these four pieces of literature picking me apart, I needed to examine myself.

First, this idea of self-withdrawal: why do some of us yearn for it? My thought is that there is a longing in us for some kind of peace. I would argue that everyone wants it, but that some people have such a wrong idea about how to bring it about that it appears as though they love chaos and misery. The connection between peace and self-withdrawal is that involvement with others can complicate peace. It’s much simpler to keep your kingdom organized and trouble free when it’s just you roaming about. As soon as other agents enter in, there’s compromise, submission, communication, and all sorts of other things that never existed before. We can apply this thinking to both Olivia and Orsino’s actions, in that they’ve both experienced how loving others can hinder your own efforts in achieving peace. The problem with this is that our very design demands that we interact, to benefit and be benefited.

With regards to suspended desire, I’m speaking of Orsino’s state in the story.

What stood out to me was the fact that I have put myself in these situations of hopeless desire, a want that I probably deep down knew could not be fulfilled. Or even one that I knew I should have but wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of quite yet. By placing myself in Orsino’s situation, I make it look as though I am in fact pursuing this good thing. But both of us seem to craft situations that deep down we know will fail. It’s a cover up.

Girard puts it quite well with “Since desire dies of its own fulfillment, the road to eternal desire can only lie in the selection of a forever inaccessible object.” I agree on the level that desire doesn’t survive in its original state after fulfillment. Desire is there to motivate us towards what we think will produce happiness. Orsino’s case of desiring desire itself is like falling in love with a sign pointing towards the city instead of what the sign represents. And the results are similar to intentional seclusion, which I think is what suspended desire really is, just wrapped up in a more complicated garment. The other drawback is mentioned in Harold Jenkins’s 1959 essay on the play in which he notes that Orsino is described as being skittish and unfocused in everything save his devotion to love. It’s a case of being swept up in the moment and not experiencing what’s actually happening around you. It’s comparable to someone traveling overseas for the first time, and being so enamored with the “idea” of traveling and Rome, that they completely miss out on what’s in front of them. This, I think points to the folly of desiring desire; while it is a good thing, lingering on it causes us to miss what’s really important, in Orsino’s case an actual relationship.

Some other study of my own yielded some interesting history of this idea of suspended desire. Up until the middle of the fourth century there was a practice in the early church in which man and woman were “spiritually married,” lived in the same house and shared a bed, but abstained from sexually relations. The women who were involved with this were known as subintroductae. Paul actually speaks to this in 1 Corinthians 7:36-38, telling men that if they are unable to restrain themselves, there’s no sin in marrying. What I noticed more than anything was this need to put ourselves in near impossible situations, against all odds. It’s not a new idea apparently.

In the scope of human experience, few things seem to be as meaningful as our relationships with other people. Ever since we’ve been able to create, our artistic expression has been almost exclusively relating to how we interact with others. One reason for this is our innate interest in each other. Stories without personal conflict, paintings of rocks, and songs about metaphysics just don’t press our buttons the way a love story or tragedy can. What’s more important is that art that deals with relationships can speak to us directly with regard to our own interactions with others. It’s much more difficult to pluck something relevant to your dealings with another person from a nature documentary than it is from Macbeth. The overarching feeling I had over the last three weeks was the idea that so many people from different walks of life and times were commenting on something that is pertinent to me here and now. The fact that I wasn’t originally looking for an answer to anything in particular and that these writers stirred up the realization of fault in me was extremely powerful.