The Greatest of Danes

I find it particularly amusing whenever someone reaches my site because of my “Preben Vang” tag. I have oft referred to Mr. Vang [while quoting him] as “my favorite Danish guy,” and so I thought I would take this opportunity to show why that is no meager compliment by providing a list of other Danish men who are worthy of considerable esteem, but still not as favored as our dear Preben Vang Jensen. (this also gives me an excuse to use the “Preben Vang” tag again.) ahem:

Søren Kierkegaard – philosopher – Christian. laid the groundwork for existential theology. He is my second-favorite Dane.
Niels Bohr – physicist – formulated the “Bohr model” of the atom, and got a prize – a nobel prize that is. (booyah!) A true personal hero.
A. Niels Bohr – physicist – son of Niels Bohr, shares most of his name. Won a nobel prize, just like his daddy, for work on subatomic particles. He was probably immensely disappointed with his own son, a person who is not famous for anything, so far as I can tell.
Hans Christian Andersen - Famed author of a lot of children’s stories which are frankly far too frightening for children.
Mads Mikkelsen – actor – He was the bad guy in the most recent Bond flick, Casino Royal. had a really great bleeding eye in that movie. totally Oscar-worthy, that eye.
Viggo Mortensen – actor – Probably best known for his role in Hidalgo. kidding. He was Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies. great with a broadsword because he’s Danish! (or half-Danish, at least)
Brigitte Nielsen – actress – She played the really intense Russian wife of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. She is such a good actress that I was totally convinced that she was Russian and not Danish.
Victor Borge – comedian, musician – Put this AmeriDane behind a piano, and he will make you laugh your socks off, my he rest in peace.
Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen – Explorer – Considered the “father of Eskimology”, which is possibly the coolest thing on this entire list. or at least it was until we get to…
Jørgen Jørgensen – Adventurer – Sailed to Iceland in 1809, a Danish colony at the time, and promptly declared the island to be an independant nation, and himself the ruler. He ruled Iceland for two months. Then Denmark took note and came and got him and sentenced him to a life in England.
Beowulf – Monster slayer – I have a tough time letting the Danes fully claim this guy when it’s clear from the epic poem that shares his name that he was a Geat which is probably more like proto-Danish or Swedish. But wikipedia said “Dane”, so I included him.
Hamlet – Shakespearean Sap – Danish prince in the play Hamlet, who ends his life in a tidy matricide/suicide combo. A quite famous character, mostly famous for his poetic babbling.

There you have it. Our Preben Vang, theology professor extraordinaire, tops them all.

Captain

always

how wonderful is it, the word “always”? for call
it luck or providence, but despite its meaning, its
sound makes no gesture toward the idea of time.

its beauty, for me, is not in its common use.
not in the sense of “the sun always rises”
[although that is a beautiful thing, to be sure]

but in the way that it lends itself, this “always”,
to the preservation of a moment -
a pure and solid something of time. and “always”,

tethering a moment to the shores of
existence, beyond which it would otherwise
pass with as much ease as every thoughtless

breath i have never known. (not even
forgotten; less than that. never remembered.)
all of that, but for “always”. for it is not

“all times.” few things are. it is the promise that:
in all the tunneling through this great
big block of “what is” that passes for space and

time, always i am thirteen years old, and i
am learning to play the guitar, my fingers
and voice both as wobbly as a day-old calf.

and always, i am where i am when my father
dies. and always, i am breathing one very last time
and not worrying about what i won’t remember next.

and here’s a question: do you think Jesus cried -
probably not on Sunday morning, but maybe on
Monday or Tuesday – because it was finally over

and it had been so hard? that always there is a
man, and he is alone and weeping outside a city
because he is the first to find any rest on this earth?

we are neither a past point in time, nor are we a
final result. we are the impossibility of transforming
every “always” to every other “always”, realized.

the russian doll

I finished Notes from the Underground, by old Fyodor a couple of weeks ago. I think I will need at least a year to absorb it (and even then, not completely), but so much of it resonated with so much of me (who I am and who I have been) that I don’t think it’s too early for reflections – even if they are no more than reflections upon myself.

“I am a sick man… I am a wicked man.”

I was sitting in a very very American coffee shop in the Middle East called Starbucks, perhapsyou’veheardthename? It is a strange thing when one, standing in a desert in North Africa, climbs a staircase planted in the middle of a sea of asphalt, and when his last foot finds that last step he is lifted high off the ground and set down only a few hours later on a different continent, wearing different clothes, reading different books, drinking different coffee. It is just curious enough to inspire the word “surreal”, even though the religion of being rational is a bit too dogmatic to allow such superstitions to linger too long upon the mind’s stage or the lips, even.

But, if just for a moment I could blaspheme, then I would tell you that the whole thing was surreality within surreality, nested to so many iterations that even now the rediscovery of every layer evokes amusement in me, like a child’s first encounter with Madame Matryoshka and the company she keeps.

For the man of the undergound was all at once himself, an earnest but bitter slave of intellect, and then also (one layer out) he is a satire of something earnest and bitter, and in both of these ways he was myself also, and he was sitting in Starbucks. Or else he was sleeping through days in his college dorm room for hours upon hours. And in the understanding of all of this – while I was both the bitter man and also the satirist – between them, I was also the young man who woke up 30 minutes earlier on Sunday mornings in order to walk across a sleepy college town to get to church, knowing that he needed all of that time in order lose all his sanity and gain it again before he took his place in that “dark winter pew” that was so infinite.

It is a comfort that when you see yourself at your worst, all typed-out and printed up, justified from left-to-right on the page; that when you are looking at yourself like that, that you are not only that person, but you are also another [if only ever so-slightly] better person who can hold a book and see it all.

I do not know where I am going with all this, except to say that if I ever was the man in the underground – this anti-hero and mouse – then I still am, somehow. But if I was ever more than this, then that I also am, too. And it is this latter one in which I rest. It is this latter one which will rise one day from the underground, incorruptible, Lord have mercy.

Captain

P.S. Based on a lot of reviews and also a good bit of reading about their translation technique and philosophy, I’ve come to view the translations of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky as probably the best choices out there for Russian literature (trans. into English) – or at least a good place to start. So, that’s my recommendation on which translation to read, which is a pretty important decision. If you happen to know more about Russian-English translations than I do (which can be easily accomplished) feel free to offer your own insights.

lists we live by

Have you ever been reading a favorite book (for the tenth time) or listening to a favorite cd (for the hundredth time) or doing something in that vein (for the nth time) and you get to that part of it that is probably your favorite part and the thought occurs to you, I’m not sure that anyone could possibly understand me, as a human being, unless they love this album [or book, or film].

I know, that sounds a bit dramatic (especially when I say ‘film’ instead of ‘movie’), but I’ve thought it before. Not about a lot of things, but there are a few. Here they are…

:The Short List:

Sufjan Steven’s music – Pretty much all of it (except for Enjoy Your Rabbit, and certain parts of A Sun Came and The Avalanche which I could take or leave). I’ve been unable to move on from his music, despite the pressure that is [or at least that i perceive to be] so real in the music scene to be constantly moving forward in search of the next great thing. Maybe it’s because I’ve invested so many of my own experiences in the music, and anything that is so invested-in cannot help but be dense with meaning. How else could I explain that simply the line “what the water wants is hurricanes” is like shorthand for the story of a year of my life. Sometimes I even find that the songs are a truer voice for the expression of my faith than anything I’ve ever sung in a church group.

Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, by Franz Wright – Chris Harrell first introduced me to this book. He had a habit of tagging poignant quotes (or lines of verse, or anything really) onto the end of his xanga posts, and one that repeatedly caught my eye was from this book. The line was this: “Thank You for keeping Your face hidden, I can hardly bear the beauty of this world.” It got my attention during a troubled time in my life. It was a time in which I began to doubt that I believed in anything. Not a time that I questioned things, mind you – that has been going on for years and years, and I think it will never stop – the questioning, i mean. But a time in which, although I strongly wished and desired to believe, I began to think that I quite simply didn’t and couldn’t any longer. This book was one of the greatest factors in the restoration [and transformation] of my faith. I’ve read it a hundred times, at least. Although Franz Wright’s other poetry is excellent and beautiful, I doubt that I will ever connect to any of it in the way that I have to this book.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien – the books, I mean – not that I’m bashing the movies, but I don’t really feel strongly about them. I’ve read this series six times now – the first time was in the seventh grade. I can’t help but think that they’ve been formative in my entire worldview. I don’t doubt that the way that I understand courage, loyalty, wisdom, beauty, and probably even good, evil, and mysticism has been shaped by these books, and I’m not ashamed of that at all. (I’ve read The Hobbit once and The Silmarillion twice. They’re both wonderful, too.)

:The Long List:

The Life Aquatic
Lost in Translation (film and soundtrack)
Til We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Everything Is Illuminated (film and soundtrack – still haven’t read the book yet)
The Transfiguration of Vincent, M. Ward
Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut (prerequisite reading: at least 2 other Vonnegut books)
“Concluding Unscientific Postscript”, by Søren Kierkegaard
(and now) the Arabic language

Of course, it’s silly of me to think that loving all of these are required for true understanding. It goes deeper than any of this (and all of it, too). But these are some of the things that I link my identity to, and I thought, eh, can’t hurt to just put it all out there and share a bit.

Captain

the bluest blues

audition pose for team zissou.

backdrop:
the Gulf of Obstacle,
Sinai Peninsula,
and
blue terrestrial atmosphere