how do you say? | كيف تقول؟

[ the meta-post: i'm attempting to make good on that promise to post more. because of that, i fear this entry is more a matter of stubbornness than inspiration. i wrote what i am thinking of, and wrote without great emotion or investment. i felt i owed you this disclaimer. ]

these days i find myself speaking a good deal more arabic than english. today, when i was in a rare english-speaking situation and had an idea that i wished to express, the first thought that came to my mind was “i wonder if I have enough vocabulary to express that idea”, and then i remembered that i speak english fairly well. or at least i used to.

and, well… you have probably all heard of something called “translation”, by which something [like a word] is converted from one medium [language A] to another [language B]. it is a myth. every vocal lilt, every hand motion, every cadence that underlines the final words of each american-english thought is utterly untranslatable. i hear a story, and i cannot even ask the questions which race through my american-english mind because arabic does not ask such questions. it wonders different things.

to speak another language is to think like another culture, adopt a different history, take a new name [and still never be fully a part of any culture but the one you were born into].

februaries

i fear i have written a post which only a very few will understand in part, and only i, myself will understand in full. but, if you read and if you find that you understand something [anything], then let me know. i fear that what you will read lacks unity, but these were my thoughts just as they came, and i hope that will be enough:

i have often taken space (or time) to verbalize my thinking about music and how it can function as shorthand for memories, how listening to a song can be the closest thing to re-experiencing a certain memory.

so i will try, briefly, to describe what it is like for me to hear the album Post-War by M. Ward, because it is what made me sit up in bed and pull my computer out and write.

["one."
the guitar strumming begins,
"one. one. one or two won't do..." ]

early february, 2007.

i have a new bedroom, and it is in virginia, and i am in it. the empty white walls are so bare i could almost believe that it’s impossible to fix anything to them. the carpet on the floor is the incredibly thin, cheap kind. dark grey-blueish-green. it is my mattress: i have been sleeping on floors for a year now.

the place is not sterilized like a hospital. it is chaste like a monastery – but not really sober. not stern like a the monasteries that populate our fiction. it is more like a monastery i once visited in Southern California.

the austerity reminds me of things i could not bring into the room. not a matter of prohibition, really, but more like trying to bring darkness into the light. it simply cannot come. i am on a journey that began a few years back in Los Angeles, thanks be to God.

the light will come in through the windows everyday. the light is so fresh here that it makes me doubt if light really comes in windows everyday elsewhere on earth.

i will spend a few days wondering, perplexed about what i am doing. most days, however, i will wonder what i could possibly have been doing up until now.

and now, remembering, i think of dear friends. the little things that i should never have said. some big things maybe i should have said. and the hurts that all these “should-haves” have caused in others, and how if i were to turn back the clock i would try something different, although i do not know what. [i made a lot of mistakes.] dark classrooms commandeered for movie-watching with dearest friends or other more clandestine activities. a surreal glimpse of the future: 72 angelic beings in their mid-twenties, just returned from the four corners of the earth [barefoot and carrying no staff, i imagine them], facing joblessness, plan-lessness, being-understood-lessness, all gathered in a huge room laughing at a russian dance because each one knows what it’s like to watch people doing things that seem ridiculous and have to pretend it’s the most natural thing in the world.

back in north africa, i think i am lucky that we humans are too small to see how very far from home we often are. i can see what is around me: a skyline over here, over there a long dry stretch of dust-meadow spread out all the way to the horizon, the hills that punctuate it here and there. but i am not able to see all the forests, the deserts, the oceans and coasts, and the miles and miles and miles between me and every other place that I ever considered home.

captain

consciousness, gaining

the greatest argument for the pure arbitrariness of our division of time is surely found in those fleeting moments of waking whose perceived length i can never seem to reconcile with the measurements of any clock. our comprehension of the word moment is a strange thing anyway, i suppose. it is nothing short of baffling that we are perfectly comfortable with the idea that what we experience in a moment is infinite – infinitesimal, precisely – but can hardly fathom the idea that a single moment should span some finite range of minutes, seconds, partics, fermonds [i am just making up words now, but notice how little difference it makes to the meaning of the sentence]. hardly fathomable that perhaps the thing which spans a time, times, and half a time is an unvaryingly composed instance of time as homogeneous as processed cheese.

{
you know, you’d write better if you weren’t so pretentious.
[but i thought the line about the cheese broke the pretense?]
i’m not sure that it did; you laid it on pretty thick just now.
}

i wake up the precise moment that i hear my alarm this morning – a piece of processed cheese which most clocks in this time zone would label as the period of time between 6:30 and 6:44. if math is the universal language, then i minored in language in college. given the fact, however, that i am not even fluent in english for the first 20 minutes I’m awake, upon my rising i am able only to deduce (by the subtraction property of equality) that i have slept either 3, 4, or zero hours. (it was 3, i would later learn.)

oil. i believe the chemical definition of an oil is “a hydrophobic, often viscous liquid which will find its way from your hair and skin into your eyes in the morning, causing you incredible discomfort.” i plod towards the shower, my soles assiduous in acquiring a gritty coating from the fine layer of dust covering the cheap ceramic tile. i plod back to my room to retrieve my towel which i left behind. i plod back to the shower, with a bit more plod in my step this time. i lift the shower lever, and a tiny stream of water trickles out of the pores of the nozzle, arches its back for a moment in an attempt to free itself from the surface, and then wearily abandons the effort and slides down the side of the spout. i lower the shower lever. i am still not yet fluent in english, so i am content to merely curse the showerhead with a stare before staggering out of the bathroom, out of my apartment, out of my building and to the motorized water pump which i switch on and off and jiggle a few times with a sense of purpose, and then walk back into my building, my apartment, my bathroom.

somewhere in the mysteriously purposeful jiggling i must have re-routed a pipe because the water which now comes flowing abundantly from my shower seems to have glacial origins. upon stepping into its stream i have a mystical experience which might possibly be described as the opposite of a moment: it is an infinitely long period of time, mystifyingly contained within the finite period of time which most clocks in this time zone would label as the span of minutes between 6:53 and 7:01. epochs pass before my eyes. i watch milliseconds being born like children, watch children become men, watch men grow old, watch old men wither and pass away, and in all of this i age very little since my body is preserved in perfect cryogenic hibernation by the indescribable coldness that i am using to rinse the soap off my body.

when the final sud is banished, i reach for the lever and turn off the water [my hand seems to move through the air for eras, ages, hadrochs, megazons], the enchantment is lifted, and without the sound of running water i notice that the noise of my own breathing has become comically loud, as if my body had been trying to get my attention the entire duration of the shower by constricting my vocal chords into a wheeze of despair. but as i say, it is comical – it is the first thing which seems to be so this morning. i scuttle into my room after drying off. [note that i have a variety of ways of moving back and forth between my room and the bathroom, scuttling and plodding being but two. because of my disproportionately small bladder, this almost hourly pilgrimidge is a sacred rite which i have perfected.]

i pick out a sampling of clothes which i think will make my dashing 23-year old frame look the most like an elderly gentleman’s and settle into my chair in the corner. today it is luke 10. i remain mostly unmoved until the story of martha and mary, during which a surrender takes place, and i must re-read until i am mary and i am sitting at the Lord’s feet and longing because i am martha also. contemplation. and i light a candle and then more contemplation and something about time that is simpler than words can express and greater than the infinites which have visited my consciousness thus far. and now is when i pray for brothers and sisters and the world. and myself. and now “Our Father… for Thine,” i look up into the face which is a moment (or the opposite of it), and He is robed in blue, and in his hand he holds a Book encrusted with jewels which seem to jump off the paper with the flicker of the candle,

“is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever and ever. Amen“

“Who walked between the violet and the violet”

from dust you were formed…

It’s becoming increasingly popular among young Baptists (a population segment which I claim membership in) to observe the holy season of Lent in some way. While it might be a stretch to say that Lent observation among us is common, I’d say that it’s noticeably less and less uncommon every year. A couple of years ago while attending a Baptist university, the conversation of whether to give up something for Lent or even what to give up for Lent was one that I heard or took part in frequently. A few of us even got up the nerve to drive across town just to let the Methodists smear ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

Lent is a fast; its observation is an act of community – the local presence and the greater one. The Lenten fast is different; it is a fast of preparation. It is akin to the solemnity that is felt during the Lord’s Supper as we sit in contemplation of the sacrifice – filing down the aisles or holding the bread, holding the cup; it is a contemplation which prepares for and leads to the celebration. In communion our celebration is a feast of eating and drinking together; with Lent, the celebration is Easter, the resurrection of the Son of God. With Easter as with the Lord’s Supper, the meaning of the celebration is most fully understood when we prepare for it in solemnity; when we sit solemnly through the darkness of Good Friday to rise with shouts of joy upon Easter Sunday.

But beyond these reflections upon the season, I hope I may give a challenge. What if this year we each chose to lay down something which could not be compensated for? What if keeping the fast forced us to feel excluded, embarrassed, and unsuccessful sometimes? Maybe it’s something worth rescheduling your day around. Maybe no one from your local community will join you, leaving you feeling all alone in your fast. If you find yourself in that situation, take time to contemplate the One who was more alone than you or I can understand – the Trinitarian Son forsaken by Trinitarian Father (a mystery so strong I have that failed in describing it otherwise, despite my attempts) – and even that contemplation will accomplish its purpose in you. This season, let us be poor in spirit; let us mourn; let us hunger and thirst.

…and to dust you shall return[...]

and let us remember all of these things – all of these first-halves of a promise – so that when the time comes we may break from our solemnity prepared, saying “though we are sown perishable, [...] imperishable!” Forgive me if I wait until March 23rd [this year] to fill in that ellipsis. I will mean it more at that time, I think.

things for propping up table legs

It is a terrible habit of mine to be constantly reading no less than three books at a time. And then, of course, there are one or two books which I am always reading and am never sure if I ought to count them or not. On top of this, my reading habits have become erratic [which makes the word "habits" a misnomer, i suppose], so that when I list what I am currently “reading” I am more describing a dusty stack of bookmarked volumes rather than anything which I have actually read in [oh,] the last three weeks.

That said, I’d love to share what I’m reading these days.

Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers by Christopher A. Hall is an introduction to the Fathers. It discusses the discipline of Patristic study and surveys the works of Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianus, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. I’ve not gotten far into this book, but it seems to be mostly just brushing the surface on a lot of things – a true introduction. Hopefully it will give me a good idea of the general shape of the works of the Fathers, and if I so desire, I can read more in-depth elsewhere.

Walking to Martha’s Vineyard by Franz Wright is the 2004 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and has been one of my dearest companions for three years now. I first picked it up on the recommendation of Christopher Harrell in my junior year of college, and I have read it probably 30 times or more since then. Wright’s picture of faith is beautiful, untidy, sometimes disturbing, but always honest. I came to this book at a time of great doubt. Though few answers are to be found within its pages, I cannot describe the strength that it has lent to my faith over the last few years.

Lilith by George MacDonald is a book which I read a few months back and liked well enough to start again a week ago or so. MacDonald was an Anglican pastor in the 1800’s whose writing has influenced everyone from Mark Twain to C.S. Lewis. Lilith is the story of a man’s journey in a world of fantasy. Or perhaps, better, it is the story of every man’s journey in this world. More than allegory and less than theology, it is a beautiful story of the triumph of the new Adam and hope for the resurrection.

Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright is the second volume in Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series. The first volume, which I finished a couple of months back, deals with the historical situation of 1st century Judaism – the context of the ministry of Jesus and the birth of Christianity. In this second volume, Wright mounts a simple, internally consistent, and often innovative argument for the historicity of the Jesus of orthodox Christianity. Wright truly engages the intellect of the person of faith and anyone else who will commit to some serious investigation of the Bible and the history which surrounds it.

I recently finished the young adult series His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I really did find them enjoyable and entertaining, but they’re not the devastatingly clever works of fiction that I’d been told to expect. At their worst moments, I found them as annoyingly didactic as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Not, of course, to say that Narnia isn’t guilty of the same thing, but perhaps it is guilty in a much less chip-on-your-shoulder kind of way. I would say that the series’ greatest contribution to the corpus of reading material for young adults is that it introduces teens to quite a few important philosophical questions. It would be of much greater value, however, if it had abstained from answering those questions as well, thus prompting critical thought rather than [what I see as one probable outcome:] smug, pseudo-intellectual atheism. Oh well. Give the books a read. See what you think.

I realize that only a handful of people come here or subscribe, and probably fewer actually read, but I have committed to write more, regardless, and this was an attempt at venturing beyond the mere introspection which characterizes so many of my posts. I apologize for the length of my ramblings, though.

Captain