For the waste of our flesh,
For the ways of solitude,
For the weight of doubt,
For the waning of life,
Let us pray to the Lord.

That we be healed,
That we be held in Glory,
That we believe,
That we be alive,
Lord, hear our prayer.

As my life moves slowly in directions of maturity I find, just now, that I am hard pressed for better metaphors for this becoming than that offered by font faces. I am easing myself into a pleasant appreciation of serif-fonts, whose little wings help my weary eyes glide over the puddles of white that separate sign from sign. Perpetua is my favorite, its name ringing with constancy. It is a book-font, and books are so much more constant than all I do here. It’s a font that I don’t even have on my computer, and that lack is what will cause these words to remain Tahoma for now. (I apologize for leaving the metaphor undeveloped. Account it to indirections of maturity.)

When I began to write all this, I meant to write about silence. It should seem obvious why that topic did not lend itself to discussion. Here is the question I have posed to myself today, and to which I hope the answer will have no words:

Why do I assume to be able to interpret silence in others when I have not first understood or loved it in myself?

Today the tall sloping lawn in front of Blanchard Hall is most anything that you could find a mind for. (And most any mind that you could find a thing for.)

Robert Frost is lying propped up on his left elbow about halfway up the hill staring at the trees; on two stools T.S. Eliot is playing a game of chess with himself. Poe is hunched against a concrete memorial to a dead president with his dark umbrella open against the blue sky, and a handful of English majors with ironic tattoos are gathered around William Blake, all crying at at the beautiful things he is saying as he converses with a fir tree which he believes is an archangel.

Franz Wright is pacing in circles in a northern corner, Billy Collins is chuckling to himself as a creative writing class parades by, and C.S. Lewis is looking out from his office window high above it all with a pipe in one corner of his mouth and a half-smile in the other.

And I am there too, the unwitting subject of a poem, a plan, polemic, or pun, which is to say, less simply but all the same, that I am there too.

Hello, September sunshine. I have come, and I will be staying longer than you, probably.

I can imagine a day when I will learn to flick spiders away, rather than smashing them between my thumb and forefinger. I will even learn to live at peace with the sci-fi centipede creatures that dwell in this house and, occasionally, haunt my dreams.

sock ties, independent coffee roasteries, fava beans, basmati rice, curry curry curry, goat cheese, conjugations and declensions, train tickets, a bike path, live music, Nepali church.

waiting for an email that never comes, missing the last train out of Chicago, calling certain friends over and over, slicing vegetables in a new kitchen, visiting the same paintings every time.

my place in the universe “scarlessly closing like water.”

Plenty of things exist outside of my mind, including people. It’s just so much easier for me to deal with the versions of those things that only exist in my mind. Solipsism being the ultimate realization of sloth, to say nothing of greed, pride, etc.

When we hate something fallen, it remains fallen. When we love something fallen, we love it unto redemption. This is the power of Christ in us.

When I go into department stores downtown, I look through the clothing rack, examine the colors and patterns, run my fingers across the fabrics, take things off hangers and try them on, and then put them back and buy nothing. I am so glad that I did not do this with religion.

Caribou Coffee, on a street called Front, shelters me lately from the hot stickiness that rolled into town a few mornings ago and decided to stay for the summer, apparently.

“We’ll try to gatcha some eer condetionen in here for yeh” is my best attempt to write in the flat Chicago accent of my landlord, who informed me of this lacking amenity on Monday. I assured him that I wasn’t concerned, because I wasn’t. And amn’t.

Not knowing anyone in a city gives you an excellent reason to watch people, should you be the type of person who feels that one needs a reason for that. There’s a woman on a motorcycle at this intersection that I think could beat me up. I stretch and realize that this 24-year old t-shirt has some horrible pit-stains that I’ve been showing off like this all day, if anyone was watching.

When I ride my bike home, I usually practice riding with no hands. I often think about buying ice cream from a little shop along the way, but I haven’t yet. I’ll pass the clock tower, and campus, and the train station, and then I turn up a hill, and pass the ladies standing on an empty lot, protesting the unfair labor practices of a construction company. I wave. They wave.

I don’t know what I am becoming right now. Perhaps that’s always the hardest thing to discern. I know that my Greek notebook is peerlessly organized. [Seriously, it has no peer in this respect, I feel.] I think a lot about cheese. I write everything with a fountain pen. I drive much slower than the speed limit and hardly notice. There’s an uneasiness to my tranquility that I’ve caught out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head it’s only ever a bird or a flag or an old man waiting at a train station.

Light from Light,
we breathed in a sweetness
and beheld the Light,
true God from true God

thought passes like a shadow
side to side from morning to evening
shrinking and stretching and covering
and again from day to day
light to shadow, shadow from light

impressions wrought upon weary skin
by familiar stones

For the waste of our flesh,
For the ways of solitude,
For the weight of doubt,
For the waning of life,
Let us pray to the Lord.

That we be healed,
That we be held in Glory,
That we believe,
That we be alive,
Lord, hear our prayer.

The light shone in the darkness
And so we were shown the Light

On Thursdays, I have class at 12:45 pm, so I typically spend Thursday mornings sleeping late, wandering around my flat groggily, brewing coffee, and browsing headlines on the internet. I’ll usually shower sometime near noon, and then spend an excessive amount of time standing in front of the mirror twisting my mustache into various shapes and parting my beard in odd places. This last Thursday was no different from any before until I walked into my bedroom and opened the top drawer only to find that it had been commandeered during the night by a rat. He’d shredded the inside surface of the wood into hundreds of shavings which he’d managed to work into a large pile in the middle of my boxer shorts which begs the question, why do rats love my underwear so much?

About a month ago after I hulk-smashed a litter of rats, I went looking for a rat trap so as to catch the mother. All the shop owners I visited sought to sell me glue, which I declined to purchase since it would have required that I personally dispatch the captured rat – a task that I did not wish to perform again despite having proved myself so, ehh… capable. I finally inquired about a rat trap at the maghalaq on Street 60, and was assured, yes, they had one. One minute, please, while the shopkeeper rummaged through a pile to find it. He ducked behind the counter and reappeared with a cage. “Isn’t there anything else?” I asked. There was not. Luckily the trap worked, and in a couple of days I caught momma, took a rickshaw to the other side of town, and let her out in a ditch.

Then, as I’ve already told you, another rat began inhabiting my drawer on Thursday. Or two, actually, it seems to’ve been. I’ve spent the last couple of days entrenched in battle against these Rattus Norvegicus (as opposed to the much more terrible Rattus Rattus), but I have finally triumphed.

So, today I have undertaken the cleaning of my drawers and clothes. I purchased a bottle of Dettol — a substance of ambiguous composition which claims to be a disinfectant that is recommended by “doctors” and is approved by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. And, I have put all the boxers in to wash. Jason is determined to find rat poison to feed to the offender, and I’m not entirely against that, although we’ve looked for it in 3 stores now to no avail. Should more rats attempt to take up residence with us, I have decided that I am going to begin a trade in rat pelts. It is winter, after all, and a rat-skin coat is just the thing to keep one warm on the 70°F winter evenings that will soon be upon us.

I’ve heard that coffee won’t stain your teeth if you’ll put just a splash of milk in it. When I bared my teeth at the mirror this morning, the vision impressed me that I probably ought to test that theory, but while pouring coffee a few minutes later, I couldn’t bring myself to adulterate the brew. I tried not to think of the grizzle-haired, dirty-toothed face of animal predation that I am certain to acquire after a few more years of coffee drinking.

I pulled out a plate of cinnamon rolls from the fridge to go along with the coffee. I’d decided to make cinnamon rolls yesterday. The whole process had taken about 5 hours and had depended heavily upon the culinary advice of a lady in town whose cinnamon-roll-baking experience I inquired about in numerous phone calls beginning with, “Hey, one more question…” When the rolls were finally baked and glazed, I called her house, asking if she and her husband would like to sample the finished product. They said they’d be delighted, so I dropped by with a plate of rolls and a french press of decaf coffee, and we spent the evening talking and playing with their 3-month old baby girl. Sadie McLean is her name, and although she could smile, she seemed to prefer making spit bubbles with her tongue and jerking her wobbly head around, kicking her pink little feet.

The rolls had been warm and gooey then, but although they were cold this morning, they still tasted good. As I ate I read from Luke 1, and then practiced reciting Mary’s Song from memory a few times. “He has exalted those of humble estate.” I reflected on the promise of exaltation for the lowly and weak which the Gospel echoes over and over. A glance at my clock reminded me that I had language class in an hour, so I finished my reading, hopped through the shower, and hurried back into my room in a towel to get dressed.

I opened my top drawer and grabbed boxer shorts off the top of the stack and started backwards in surprise, dropping the shorts back into the drawer. I lifted them again slowly by a corner and peeked underneath at three little babies asleep, curled up in a pile of my boxer shorts, pink and hairless, with their little tails tucked under them. One of them lifted its face in distress at the light which had suddenly invaded its womb-like darkness, and I dropped the boxers back down. I walked into another room, where some of my laundry was drying on a line and found a pair of dry boxers and put them on. Clearly, a mother rat had crawled into my top drawer the night before and given birth. I dressed myself out of the other drawers, and then returned to my problem in the top one.

I quickly decided that I couldn’t let rats grow in my underwear drawer. Rats carry disease, I reasoned. I remember adding, absurdly, at the time, especially these third-world rats. I realized, though, that moving them was the same as killing them. I could scoop them up and put them in a corner somewhere where they would starve and die. I could place them outside where they’d be eaten – alive and painfully – by street dogs probably. I could kill them myself, quickly. I thought about Darwinism and how these babies and I were just competing for resources. I thought about how the street dogs wouldn’t feel squeamish about tearing them apart for a meal, if I put them outside, and how I probably wouldn’t have to witness the event.

I emptied the drawer item-by-item, careful to shake out everything and always on edge that the mother would leap out at me any second, but she never came. The babies squealed when I took their cushion from them, and they jerked their pink arms around with an infantile incoherence. I took a plastic bag, and with a dirty rag I lifted each one from the bottom of the wooden drawer and dropped it into the bag. They shrieked at the fall. I slipped their bag into yet another plastic bag. The dogs would have to eat something else. I tied off the bottom of the bags and for a moment considered letting them suffocate, but I knew it would take several minutes for them to die that way. I sat the doubled bag on the kitchen counter. Next to it was an industrial voltage-regulator box that weighed about ten pounds and had sides of smooth, flat metal. I lifted it over the sack. I needed to bring it down hard enough to kill them with one blow. I brought it hammering down upon the sack and heard a tiny squeal of life as I lifted it again and brought it down before even a second passed, and then again and again with so much force that I was sure I would break the box itself. The final blow burst the sack open and sent a little splatter of blood and entrails across the counter.

I sat the box down and tried to take a moment to just breathe and think, but I couldn’t because, real or imagined, there was a smell in the room now. Why hadn’t I thought about the bag bursting? It was bound to have a little air trapped in it, so of course it would burst. I pushed the biggest part of the mess into another plastic bag, and then used an old sponge to clean the rest of it. I wiped down the face of my coffee grinder and the side of the voltage-regulator. Blood splatters had already dried on the counter, so I had to scrub them off. I used soap and cleaned the area. I plugged the box in, and it still worked, although I’d thought for sure it was broken.

I hurried back into my room to gather my things, late for class now. My hands shook as I lifted my computer and put it into my bag, but I felt no emotion other than frustration at myself for not feeling something more. My Bible lay open to the epistle reading that had concluded my morning devotion, but I never glanced at it as I ran out the door. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

“He who digs a hole shall fall therein.”
It is the first proverb on everyone’s lips.
Perhaps because there are so many holes
in the pavement, the roofs, the borders,
the law. I sit across from a man who is
living his father’s life again, and contentedly.

Stray whiskers from his brillo pad mustache
wander lonely down the sides of his lips
toward the scruff on his chin. His North
African genealogy has failed to provide him
with the means of growing the full beard so
important for manhood, as says the East.

His tutelage exerts itself over such topics as
card games, the best place to buy a cell
phone charger, and shadiest sheesha bars.
He rocks back slightly, and his head bobs so
faintly that I imagine its rhythmic motion to be
imperceptible to all but me – himself included.

Now is that lull in the language lesson which
can only be diverted by a technique as
clever as stating the obvious: “It rained a lot
last night,” I say. “A lot,” he says. The head-
bobbing continues. I say, “There were large
holes full of water in the street this morning.”

“Yes.” He says, continuing to nod, wearing
the vague smile of a partygoer who expects
entertainment to begin at any moment.
When I fail to provide, he seizes upon one
of my words, and with an unflinching lack of
subtlety, he shares a proverb from memory:

“The person who digs a hole for his friend
to fall in, after a while he will forget that he
dug it and when he’s walking, he’ll fall into
it, himself.” I feel my breathing grow heavier
in the tiniest shade of a chest-swell, like a
secret sigh. “Yes,” I say, my head bobs a bit.

I.

What bare feet meet in the tangled beard of bermuda grass,
In the squirrels standing farcically solemn, targeting metatarsi
By the strategic strewing of acorns, in the stabbing jabs of twigs,
Is an imperative to live forever. A fey invocation in the wind howls,
“Let us curl our phalanges for the digitus landings of soft dewey skin
On the shaley shoulders of the river!”

I clamber, rambling, the knees of my jeans in shambles
Up the tradesman’s path, past the lookout point, and
Down the thieves gully to the arching beech whose
Insouciant stance allowed a barefoot adept to ascend.
Twenty-one and foot-naked, perched in his old arms
I hear the desultory susurrus of the tree-beetles
And sip six-dollar whiskey from my hip-flask
Like a Mexican cowboy about to cross the Rio Grande, pardner.

And then slip steadily like a drop of sweat
Down the forehead of a mountain to the browridge,
Where a courageous tree shoots out acutely, above the river.
This nook with a grandiose look over land, river, and life.
Lately discovered by a xenophile craving exile.
I am an imp! (momentarily) A hairy, heathen sprite of the mountain
Dancing now in and out of a cloud of Latakia smoke
And reading old English versions of Persian poetry to
The mice and the sparrows and the baby snakes.

“What does the sun say, if not that it shall cover its nakedness with blinding spite?
What does the moon say, if not that it shall clothe itself in both darkness and in light?”

II.

I should have been an angel, but for the mud cakes tressing my hair.
For there on the hill between striving and rest, I climbed a heavenly stair
And panoplied in light ranked the pantheon sons of great might,
Promethian purposes pale standing bare and exposed in their sight,
So I returned.

There is ever a loneliness along the trail that skirts the tree line.
The trees are inebriated for the air there is thick as red wine.
I break into the river, ginger – for the stones hurt the bones in my feet
There is a laughter in the splash of the brook that is young and honest and sweet,
But it is leaving me.

The sunlight sparkles off slime on the half-sunken trunk of an oak
I stand bare in the waste-deep river that flows around me like a dark cloak.
I look around as the water drowns an ever greater part of the land,
When they let the dam out, I think I will not be able to stand.
Will I float on forever? –

As cresting stream becomes estuary,
          ever eastward in the aestival wind?
Will I reach the sea? — find myself barefoot
          in the brackish mountains of waves, moaning?

I will float with mordant mutterings upon my salt-split sanguine lips.

III.

In the opening and closing of eyes comes an all-ness
Like a realization that even the cloudless sky is full of something
The becoming-ness which confesses,
“What may be unfinished is not thus incomplete! O palimpsest,
Bear your pallor away from the shrouding aesthetic of pain!”

And I, stumbling softly, on the oft water-tumbled
Cobblestones of the crumbling riverbed, hands plunging under,
Halting my lunging form, sending missiles of water into my eyes
That blur the burn of the solar star into something suddenly so un-maleficent
That I behold her, rapt, as a beautiful woman on a far stage, her warmth, a
Weeping soprano strain, sailing through the sleeping darkness.

What ambles ashore wears the same bare-legged hide of a man,
Has swallowed a mystery which will burn like the ancient Temple fire. You can
See it in his face, lambent and waxing but yet weak.
It is the light of the hope that he will find the white garments he seeks,
To clothe him.

Ambivalence is unbecoming of an artist. Perhaps that is why so many artists are religious – religiously religious or religiously agnostic or Epicurean or whatever category might come along tomorrow. For the artist, what is is vital; what is not vital is not. Even the artist who finds beauty in the mundane finds the mundane extraordinary because he has found it – because it is, and he is an artist.

We have been taught that art must have a medium and an audience, taking for granted, perhaps, that art must have an artist and that the artist must have something beyond himself which he can experience and love. Perhaps we have taken for granted that it is the artist’s sense of urgency for what is that makes her an artist and thereby determines her medium, and creates out of her fellow artists an audience.

An artist is an artist-in-medium, that is, for example, an artist is a painter or a photographer, only because the medium is just as real and vital as anything else which has made him an artist. A painter is an artist not only when what she sees is vital to her, but when the canvas and brush and paint are to her beautiful things in themselves. Likewise, the medium cannot make an artist-in-medium. A photographer is not an artist for simply taking pictures of beautiful things. With the photograph, he makes something distinct from either object or image because the art-in-medium is as vital to him as object or medium alone. Thus, what he makes can transform object into subject because the photograph, itself, is.

An artist, in the ideal, does not find an audience. Rather, she makes an audience by her art, which demonstrates (or is the demonstration of) the vitality of her experience, and in this act is found perhaps the greatest value (or peril) in art as an agent of transformation. For art which is novel or innovative even to the slightest degree does not have an audience when it is first created. Rather, it is a drama between the artist and an audience which exists only in his mind. And we, seeing the drama are offered a choice: Will we become his audience? It seems an undemanding choice, but it may not be. For in entering the audience, we become not only audience in name, but in truth. We are changed into people who are, in truth, able to be the audience and thereby able to enjoy and love the art. The art does not become something different for us when we love it; rather we become something different in order to love it. Any “art” which lacks such a capacity to affect change is not truly art.

Experiencing art, then, is an exercise in being and becoming, and both of those with the great, inescapable compulsion which is demanded by our existence. I hope always to be mindful of its power to affect transformation so that my transformation will always lead onward toward that great goal which is the Resurrection of my flesh, the Redemption of my mind, of all things.

The last two mornings, I woke to the creaking of a mattress and the sound of skin sliding across cotton sheets. My back, by a miscellany of nebulous aches and shooting pains, decries the unfamiliarity of the mattress I’ve been sleeping on in this room-across-town that I’m sharing with my brothers, whose early movements are my alarm. A text message this morning from my “higher-ups” read, “no one leaves the house today ” – a mandate which was followed in spirit rather than letter.

Reports home tend to include the sentence “I’m fine,” surrounded by a lot of obscure phrases about what I know or don’t know about the political situation that has undoubtedly been analyzed to death by news anchors who are paid to string words they haven’t thought about into sentences they don’t fully understand. And who could understand it, anyway? Perhaps the best ones at least know what it is that they don’t know.

Once every few hours a phone call comes in from some source outside, and the caller’s information is passed around to all of the inhabitants (we are not alone, my brothers and I). The seven-foot walls of this little sanctuary are our primary protection from the activities in the streets, which so far have included an eager vegetable vendor and the mechanics who eat breakfast at the bean stand on the corner. Gut-wrenching drama, it is not.

The phone calls tell us mostly the types of things we could guess on our own: sometime today, there will be a march downtown, and probably chanting. Or: Government officials are going to have a meeting. Yes, I bet they will. The calls tell us most when they tell us nothing because it means that nothing has happened yet, and as the hours roll by I find myself expecting something more like a glacier than an avalanche. Still, speculations of any kind are fairly worthless right now – at least any of the speculations that I could make. The most hopeful news is that the best possible outcomes still seem just as likely as anything else.

I tend to see all of the suffering – the starvation, disease, and destitution of this place – in one of two ways. The first says that no Ending could ever be good enough to make reparation for the suffering of these little ones. The second says that there must be such an Ending for their suffering demands it. It is by the great Hope of this second perspective that I find myself so often with my eyes closed, measuring out my breathing like the long strides of a distance runner, and praying, finally, words which were holy long before I knew them. He has filled the hungry with good things.

Captain

Something about coffee. Something about it that makes even bad coffee better than no coffee. “Caffeine”, some would say, but it’s not that, really. I’m lying in my bed at midnight, sipping coffee in spite of the caffeine – certainly not because of it. I’m not sure what it is. I could say “flavor”, and I think that’s closer, but not exactly it. It’s the flavor that brings to mind so many things. Its taste brings to mind a shape – roundness, I think, or close to it. Somehow in that smokey bitterness, there is also … not the sum of … but, i don’t know, the memory of all things that have happened since I became a “drinker”. And then, of course, there is the smell which is so akin to the flavor. And there is also the feel of the freshly roasted beans, slick with oil. And what is coffee, anyway? Perhaps you could call it drink… but no one could ever call it food, as you might could call most other drinks.

It is a perfect lesson in cultural presuppositions, over here. You know, those things which are so perfectly natural to us that they are invisible? Most people over here drink coffee in the Arabic fashion – quite strong, with plenty of sugar and sometimes cardamom and ginger. I have a certain comedy routine here. A well-worn shtick, by now.

“I drink a lot of coffee,” I say, “but I drink American coffee,” by which I mean that I drink it black and often stretched relatively thin with water as is true of drip-coffee.

“Yes, yes,” they say, agreeing, but without the foggiest notion of what is meant by “American coffee”, as if I had told them that I drink “American milk”.

I say, “American coffee doesn’t have anything in it.”

“Ah, yes,” they reply. They still don’t understand. They think they do, but they don’t.

Then I say, “No ginger, no cardamum, not even any sugar.”

This is when they say “What? No sugar?!”

And some laughter ensues. Usually I am told that I am insane.

You see, sugar is as presupposed to be in coffee as water is. As a matter of fact, they sweeten fruit juices with sugar, here. I have tried, on multiple occasions, to explain why this is utterly unnecessary, utterly unhealthy, and utterly ridiculous. My pleas are usually met with laughter – surely I can’t be serious. Apple juice is far tastier with a heap of sugar added to it.

“Bllleugghhehshgshgahlllkh!” This is the sound that I make at the thought of Apple juice with a heap of sugar added to it.

But, back to coffee. Well, actually, I don’t have much else to say about it. I’m drinking it, though. Right now. With no sugar in it. It tastes like America. Like dearest friends that I feel like I am only always saying goodbye to. Or, like hanging out with girls and feeling possibility hovering in the air. It is early-morning reverence and it is also staying up too late. It is celebrating, but it is also coping, and lately it is more of the latter. But, perhaps I have no palate for sweeter things.

Captain

There’s a sound on my cell phone called “Notify”, and it sounds like this:

be-be-be-beeeep, be-be-be-beeeep, be-be-be-beeeep

and so on.

It’s the sound I hear when my phone alarm goes off. I hear it this morning at 6:00AM. And then I hear it again at 6:08. And again at 6:15. I know those aren’t equidistant times, but my phone alarm runs on a series of incredibly complex algorithms that I can’t take the time to explain right now.

If you’re wondering, does he usually wake up at a 6- time?, the answer is no, and this explains to some extent why, upon rising, I stand as still as a statue for about 85 seconds, staring at the wad of linen which was my bedsheet. Near the end of that period, it dawns on me first that I exist, and then a bit later that I am awake, and then a bit later that I am standing up and staring at my bed. That is when I finally move.

I walk to the kitchen counter and proceed to pour whole coffee beans into my french press. I look, blinking, at the press in my hand, realizing that whole beans don’t go in there but not quite remembering where I should have put them. Of course, the grinder.

Speeding ahead, a shower and pot of coffee later, I pull the wooden stool in my bedroom up to my computer and wait on my Skype appointment. There’s ever so much dot-dot-dotting in life. It’s that time between the last thing that was noteworthy and the next thing that you think will be. I spend this time staring out the window. Well, actually, first I stare at the window. The glass is so dirty that in my mind I begin planning a stunt where halfway through my Skype chat I will turn my computer around so that my audience can see how dirty my window is and then more fully appreciate how difficult my life is. “You’re lucky that in America you have such clean windows,” I’ll say, my eyebrows raised and my head nodding instructively.

I can see people passing on the road, although the wall that encloses my yard obscures all but their shoulders and heads. Pedestrians are few in number, this time of day. A white woman shuffles along, struggling with a leash and lifting it up as high as her head, which is tilted backwards – the apical manifestation of a fight for leverage against a struggling pet. She lurches along. I laugh at the mental picture of her pedigreed hound striving to break loose and run free with the pack of vagrant street dogs that occasionally loiters in the neighborhood. I wonder what the nationals here must think of a pet dog on a leash. I try to imagine someone in Arkansas walking a pet raccoon on a leash. Something like that, I think: conceivable, but odd.

My skype appointment never happens. I can’t say for sure why, but what I do know is that America is very far away, and I think that has something to do with it.

i’ve added a new section to the site, meditations. i hope it will be a prolific endeavor, but i also know my penchant for phases.

that oddity about my mind which connects holiness with order has made me inclined to exclude these new entries from this main stream of my blog so that they may be kept together and set apart. i hope that perhaps you will feel it worth your time, once in a while, to make the pilgrimage all the way over here from your RSS readers.

also, you may notice that i’ve given the design a modest revision. just trying to spice things up for you 3 people who read my site!

love,
captain s.

waking is a profane experience. there is the way that dreams linger on the sidewalk, impiously, like actors hanging around the backdoor of a theater after the night’s performance. chances are good that if you hated the show, you’ll run into the players afterwards; you’ll do your best to skirt the most obvious issue until you can manage to excuse yourself with other business. if you loved it, you’ll exit the theater to find that the characters you enjoyed so much were left on the stage, in the scripts, the costumes, and you’ll detect the twistings of a corporate sneer among mouths of the troupe huddled outside the exit, sharing a cigarette – alright, a metaphysical cigarette. somehow, they know; they know that you expected something dreamlike to walk out of the back of the theatre and linger in the waking world.

waking is a mystical experience. there is the mystery of seeing oneself in a mirror while only barely awake. i cannot count the times that i have stared into the eyes of the only human being that i have ever really understood, and found myself wondering what is to be done with him – this great, hairy child of all my troubles. i suppose we will wash his face, clean his teeth, arrange his hair; we will turn his head from side to side to see how he looks in profile. but what, really, is to be done with him? look at how serious he seems, staring back. we know what he is thinking: “you must try. you must try.” what is to do be done with him? perhaps we will know tomorrow. he steps back behind a curtain; present, but hidden once more.

waking is a holy experience. it is rebirth; rising; washing; praying; breaking bread; the endless ritual of it. so it seems, at least. our years are numbered, for we count our years, but not our days. that we do not count each one renders the total uncountable. and the solemn observance that brings me from bedroom to bathroom to bedroom to kitchen, that liturgical choreography that has no rubric, yet is catholic in its application to my mornings. always, rubbing my hand over the oily whiskers on my cheek. always, pouring a glass of cold water and then pouring another. and always, looking at the little prayer book in the pine bookshelf and battling the urge to simply ignore it.

and that is when, always, i think of los angeles. three years ago and in january i was on an airplane, and i have perhaps never been so far away from earth as i was then. a few changes of clothes and two c.s. lewis books stuffed into a backpack. it was a careless attempt at piety that i left my vonnegut at home. when people ask me “how do you know that God exists?” (and they do, so many people! so many times!) the most honest answer that I could ever give is to tell them that i met Him unexpectedly in los angeles. that i was a bit embarrassed at the time because of some of the things i’d been saying about Him. and that i assume He is everywhere, but there is a certain sense in which I know He is in los angeles. and that He is the reason that i never chose, finally, to stop waking.

what if being born again is really about being born again and again and sometimes even violently again?

there was a time, when most of the things that i built my life around were still largely unexamined.

[ i'm thinking about writing a series of posts that begin like that. ]

so, this is about music. and exactly about a playlist that i put together last night. and what it means. “pre-enlightenment bliss” was its name, the playlist. because it’s from a very different time.

do you remember napster? well, they shut it down before this story really takes off. but then kazaa came, and that was when i really hit my stride in illegally downloading music. kazaa let me download all my favorite songs, free of charge. it would be quite a few years – 5 or 6 – until i began to value complete albums. at this time, though, all my 8th grade self cared about was this song. this one song that was going to take hours to download at 3 kb/sec. ( “dad, can we please get a cable modem?” )

but it was a good time. it was a time when i still relied on the radio for my musical education [ which is still the most american way to discover your musical tastes ]. it was a time when the best songs were the ones that could be sung over and over again on all those hot, humid summer days in arkansas that seemed to come over and over and over again. or else they could be learned by beginning guitar players in one sitting.

we sang them on the long cross-country runs. we sang them on the short walks from 8th street to the Big Red burger joint. we played them to impress girls. we burned them onto cd’s in nearly infinite combinations and permutations. we wrote their lyrics in emails. we tried to perform them exactly the way they sounded on the recordings. and we turned the radio up when they came on. at some point later, music would acquire for me something like a holiness. but, that was after these songs came – most of them, at least. perhaps that is why i spend so much time now, canonizing these old friends.

it’s amazing how i remember so many of these songs in exact places, exact times – memories which are approaching the 10-year old mark with disquieting speed. stay together for the kids is in the galbo’s basement and we’re making a music video with brooms instead of guitars, pots and pans instead of drums… and a special effects department that includes a box fan, confetti, and camera-shaking. and a lot of sincerity, in spite of all the irony we could muster. black balloon is in a dark bedroom in mayflower arkansas, watching a dear friend write a heartfelt letter – there it is again, the sincerity. sweetness is sitting in a trailer next to a fireworks tent, trying to understand what it will mean to graduate; to go to college. grey sky morning is the drive from my house to tucker coliseum, wearing my cap and gown and sitting in the parking lot so that it will have time to finish.

there’s more i could say, but i think i’ve indulged myself enough. here’s the playlist:

All the Small Things – Blink 182
Stay Together for the Kids – Blink 182
First Date – Blink 182
Yellow – Coldplay
Trouble – Coldplay
The Way – Fastball
Everlong – Foo Fighters
Hemorrhage (In My Hands) – Fuel
Broadway – Goo Goo Dolls
Slide – Goo Goo Dolls
Black Balloon – Goo Goo Dolls
Basket Case – Green Day
Time of Your Life – Green Day
Sweetness – Jimmy Eat World
3am – Matchbox Twenty
Wonderwall – Oasis
Champagne Supernova – Oasis
Don’t Go Away – Oasis
Sadie Hawkins Dance – Relient K
Closing Time – Semisonic
Good Souls – Starsailor
Last Nite – The Strokes
Fat Lip – Sum 41
Still Waiting – Sum 41
Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning) – Vertical Horizon

Cap’n

Today I asked my language teacher concerning the recent rebel attack whether or not he thought there would be more to come in the future. “Only God knows,” he said. I told him what I’d heard: that the leader had continued to threaten that there were attacks to come. I asked him what he thought of that. He considered it for a moment, and then responded that many of the rebels had been killed, and that probably they would not be able to attack again for a long time – “ten years, maybe,” he said. “Ten years,” he repeated, “and people live; people die.”

I repeated that last phrase with a question in my voice.

“Yes. People live; people die. Do you understand this?” he asked me.

“I understand the words, but I don’t know what you intend by them,” I told him.

He sort of sighed, and his eyes flicked up and to the right as if searching the ceiling for the perfect explanation – an expression I’ve both seen and worn countless times while searching for the holy grail of Translation. “It is like…” he began haltingly, “a long time. You know, maybe they will not attack again for 10 years, and people live; people die. Or,” he continued, perhaps realizing that he’d managed to plant the meaning in my head – perhaps realizing that it was beginning to grow and take shape and become an Idea, “for example, how long until you return to America?”

“Maybe 10 months or so,” I said.

“Ah! 10 months!” he said, and then with a sigh and a smile for bringing the meaning to its harvest, “10 months, people live; people die.”

And then we sealed our understanding with a look and moved on.

But I suppose that I did not move on. I have been mining that expression for its truth since the moment that I more or less comprehended it. It is so hard to quantify the broad discursive investment of ideas. Or to determine between the Idea and the Culture which is the investor and which the investment.

Perhaps the most striking thing about it was not the meaning of the expression, but how the complete lack of an explanation still somehow formed a mutual meaning between us. And how even now as I think about it, I can see a man mixing beans and bread and vegetables with his hands in a breakfast pot at ten in the morning, and I can see boys selling cold hibiscus tea out of a large thermos; Nokia phone chargers for sale, laid out on a blanket near the suuq. I can see children in the village running, spreading the news that a white man is walking the streets, and I can see the smile on my Baggara friend’s face as he welcomes me into his mud home. I can see his old, African-Arab mother chopping vegetables and stirring lentils, and I can imagine her looking up from the pot when my and her son’s conversation piques her interest. And then I can imagine what she says when she finally chooses to add to the conversation – a story from her childhood village, maybe, or her fears for the near future if things do not change. And then, although it’s not ever happened like this, I can imagine that her eyes fall again to the vegetables and lentils and with a note of finality – resigned or maybe dismissive – she adds, “but, people live; people die.” And if I can explain the expression at all, then I think that this is something like the meaning of it.

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

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.