HELL WAS IN AN UPROAR because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed. It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated. It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.... You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden! Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
- St. John Chrysostom,
Constantinople, circa 400 AD
WE WANT AND LOOK for an economic miracle; we want and pray for a medical miracle; we want and demand a political miracle, a social miracle, a personal miracle.... We expect and look for everything except the something more of Christ's Resurrection.
- Deacon Braunstein,
St. Anselm's Anglican Catholic Church, Sequim WA.
Apr 15, 2006
Apr 13, 2006
The new new skyscrapers.
America's rligious geography.
A new Loius Zukofsky anthology.
An illustrated history of color systems.
Religion, politics, and Ralph Reed's soul.
The paradoxical obituaries of Susan Sontag.
Responses to Susan Sontag's On Photography.
Jesus Christ Superstar and the gospel of Judas.
The silence of the penultimate comic strip panel.
Slavoj Zizek on Joyce and the symptom of Power.
Gargoyles from New York buildings destoryed in the '70s.
America's rligious geography.
A new Loius Zukofsky anthology.
An illustrated history of color systems.
Religion, politics, and Ralph Reed's soul.
The paradoxical obituaries of Susan Sontag.
Responses to Susan Sontag's On Photography.
Jesus Christ Superstar and the gospel of Judas.
The silence of the penultimate comic strip panel.
Slavoj Zizek on Joyce and the symptom of Power.
Gargoyles from New York buildings destoryed in the '70s.
Apr 12, 2006
Forgetting in circles
The man kept his fish in buckets. Oblong corrugated water trough buckets to water the dairy cows, hooked up to pipes from faucets from wells with a little orange floater device on top to keep adding water when the cows kept drinking so the troughs would always stay full. I'd never seen a floater devise like that except for the bulb in the back of a toliet hooked to the chain you'd have to wiggle if the water wouldn't stop, so I thought he'd stolen them out of the back of old toliets. It was the kind of thing he'd have done.
He'd come by in the late afternoon, big red mustache, blue bandana and music too loud from the flatbed, and I'd turn off my radio and walk over through the water-run dirt to let him know what I'd done and how much and he'd say what I needed to do or could do tomorrow. He climb up the wood fence running between the barn and the road, up on on the bottom rung by the faucet, and lean over to the water and feed the fish. There were catfish in there, swiming in circles grey at the bottom of the green water, feeling out the metal edges with their weird fish-scale whiskers.
Yeah, he'd say, I figured out a way to get good cheap fish and never have to fish again. He wouldn't say it every time but he thought it was brilliant so he'd say it a lot and what he'd done was go fishing once, in the river down at the bottom of the road, and then release them again into his troughs. So on a sunny Saturday when he wanted to fry a catfish he'd drive out to a trough and shoo the cows away and grab a couple and go back home and the whole process was quicker than a trip to the grocery store.
His kids kind of missed the fishing, though. Sometimes they'd put on old waders and get out poles and hooks and dig up worms or catch some snails or beg a chicken liver off their mom, and they'd walk down the fence line until they came to bucket they liked and they'd go fishing. They couldn't cast their lines, really, so they just lowered them in, ploped them straight down and then they'd sit there, on the fence or whatever, for a few minutes until a couple of catfish bit and then they'd walk home again, holding them over their shoulders by the gills.
He had trough-fish tanks spaced out all up one side of the interstate. When people drove by in the morning and when they drove back in the evening they'd be blinded by buckets reflecting the sun. They'd put their hands up to block the glare or wear sun glasses and pregnant cows'd look up at them with water dribbling down their lips and the fish would swim and swim in circles.
I don't know that the fish swam around in endless circles, but I imagined them that way. Fish are supposed to have really bad memories so they'd probably forget where they were, every couple of circles, and then get mad all over again. I imagined them as muttering and swearing at the little circle and having their hopes raised when it rained. Sometimes when it rained real hard the water would rise all the way to the metal edge and spill over, down the side in a corrugated wash, but I never saw it rain so much that a fish fell out of its bucket.
The man kept his fish in buckets. Oblong corrugated water trough buckets to water the dairy cows, hooked up to pipes from faucets from wells with a little orange floater device on top to keep adding water when the cows kept drinking so the troughs would always stay full. I'd never seen a floater devise like that except for the bulb in the back of a toliet hooked to the chain you'd have to wiggle if the water wouldn't stop, so I thought he'd stolen them out of the back of old toliets. It was the kind of thing he'd have done.
He'd come by in the late afternoon, big red mustache, blue bandana and music too loud from the flatbed, and I'd turn off my radio and walk over through the water-run dirt to let him know what I'd done and how much and he'd say what I needed to do or could do tomorrow. He climb up the wood fence running between the barn and the road, up on on the bottom rung by the faucet, and lean over to the water and feed the fish. There were catfish in there, swiming in circles grey at the bottom of the green water, feeling out the metal edges with their weird fish-scale whiskers.
Yeah, he'd say, I figured out a way to get good cheap fish and never have to fish again. He wouldn't say it every time but he thought it was brilliant so he'd say it a lot and what he'd done was go fishing once, in the river down at the bottom of the road, and then release them again into his troughs. So on a sunny Saturday when he wanted to fry a catfish he'd drive out to a trough and shoo the cows away and grab a couple and go back home and the whole process was quicker than a trip to the grocery store.
His kids kind of missed the fishing, though. Sometimes they'd put on old waders and get out poles and hooks and dig up worms or catch some snails or beg a chicken liver off their mom, and they'd walk down the fence line until they came to bucket they liked and they'd go fishing. They couldn't cast their lines, really, so they just lowered them in, ploped them straight down and then they'd sit there, on the fence or whatever, for a few minutes until a couple of catfish bit and then they'd walk home again, holding them over their shoulders by the gills.
He had trough-fish tanks spaced out all up one side of the interstate. When people drove by in the morning and when they drove back in the evening they'd be blinded by buckets reflecting the sun. They'd put their hands up to block the glare or wear sun glasses and pregnant cows'd look up at them with water dribbling down their lips and the fish would swim and swim in circles.
I don't know that the fish swam around in endless circles, but I imagined them that way. Fish are supposed to have really bad memories so they'd probably forget where they were, every couple of circles, and then get mad all over again. I imagined them as muttering and swearing at the little circle and having their hopes raised when it rained. Sometimes when it rained real hard the water would rise all the way to the metal edge and spill over, down the side in a corrugated wash, but I never saw it rain so much that a fish fell out of its bucket.
Apr 7, 2006
Loser's game
The wall above the urinal was white, reflecting the fluorescent lights in yellow bars in an out-of-focus sheen. Every day it would go grimy, with water marks and palm prints and the fogs of breathing bodies, and every night the janitor would wipe it clean again. He'd mix a pine-sol solution that burned his hand until his skin dried and reddened and cracked around the knuckles, and he'd soak the rag and his hand and run the red rag in circles over the white wall until it was clean again.
In the middle of the white wall, at eye height above the urinal, eye height at least for me at 6' 3'', someone had started a game of tic-tac-toe. They'd scratched the lines with a pen knife or a pin and then went back over them, pushing ink into the tile's wounds. Four lines and nine boxes and in the middle box someone had carved and inked an X.
Someone made the first move in the game on the wall above the urinal, and waited. I don't know how long they've waited, when that first move was made, but they're still waiting. There's an X in the middle and that move is an invitation for a response, for a second move, for a reply. But the X stands alone. There are 255,168 possible moves in a game of tic-tac-toe, but on the white wall on a square tile in the men's room, there's only that one move. It's not a graffittied-up bathroom. The wall is blank but for the lights' reflections and that one move on that one game of tic-tac-toe.
I don't know how long it's been there. I don't know if maybe tomorrow the janitor will wipe it away, mix some stronger solution to work the tattoo out of that tile. But even if it's only been here a week or a day, there must have been scores of men looking at it. Dozens or hundreds passing through the bathroom in the back, the customers and the management and the busboys and the cooks and the waiters. And the janitor. Maybe the janitor has seen it more than anybody and maybe he doesn't wash it out partly because he's waiting to see where the second move will go.
The X is easier to cut, than the O, and maybe no one wants to embarrass themselves with an oblong octagon or diamond. But no one's even tried. All of the eight open squares are clean, empty. Maybe no one wants to lose. No one wants to accept an invitation to a game they can't win. So all of us pee and zip and flush, looking at that game and deciding not to play, not to lay down a mark.
The wall above the urinal was white, reflecting the fluorescent lights in yellow bars in an out-of-focus sheen. Every day it would go grimy, with water marks and palm prints and the fogs of breathing bodies, and every night the janitor would wipe it clean again. He'd mix a pine-sol solution that burned his hand until his skin dried and reddened and cracked around the knuckles, and he'd soak the rag and his hand and run the red rag in circles over the white wall until it was clean again.
In the middle of the white wall, at eye height above the urinal, eye height at least for me at 6' 3'', someone had started a game of tic-tac-toe. They'd scratched the lines with a pen knife or a pin and then went back over them, pushing ink into the tile's wounds. Four lines and nine boxes and in the middle box someone had carved and inked an X.
Someone made the first move in the game on the wall above the urinal, and waited. I don't know how long they've waited, when that first move was made, but they're still waiting. There's an X in the middle and that move is an invitation for a response, for a second move, for a reply. But the X stands alone. There are 255,168 possible moves in a game of tic-tac-toe, but on the white wall on a square tile in the men's room, there's only that one move. It's not a graffittied-up bathroom. The wall is blank but for the lights' reflections and that one move on that one game of tic-tac-toe.
I don't know how long it's been there. I don't know if maybe tomorrow the janitor will wipe it away, mix some stronger solution to work the tattoo out of that tile. But even if it's only been here a week or a day, there must have been scores of men looking at it. Dozens or hundreds passing through the bathroom in the back, the customers and the management and the busboys and the cooks and the waiters. And the janitor. Maybe the janitor has seen it more than anybody and maybe he doesn't wash it out partly because he's waiting to see where the second move will go.
The X is easier to cut, than the O, and maybe no one wants to embarrass themselves with an oblong octagon or diamond. But no one's even tried. All of the eight open squares are clean, empty. Maybe no one wants to lose. No one wants to accept an invitation to a game they can't win. So all of us pee and zip and flush, looking at that game and deciding not to play, not to lay down a mark.
Apr 6, 2006
Once I smacked my head so hard it knocked me down. Somehow, that fixed a problem with my teeth. Once I overdrew my bank account by 73 cents and, somehow, ended up paying $86. Those two stories sum up my luck.
I have been rejected by 3 graduate schools' philosophy programs - DePaul, Memphis, Emory - and the 4th, Oregon, through an error of paperwork that seems absurd, is considering my application for 2007.
I'm embarassed by the rejection. I hate how when I talk to people who think that it's obvious that I can and will go to grad school I will end up explaining & defending the schools' position that I suck. I hate the people who always thought I was stupid, for whatever reason, and how they'll think this proves something and how I think they might be right.
I'm still working on a plan B, the big problem being I can do anything as long as I make enough money to eat and pay loans. I have commitments to no person, place, or thing.
Apr 4, 2006
Caleb Foote, who believed that evil must be opposed by goodwill rather than by violence and who was sentenced to a year and six months inprisionment rather than serve as a noncombatant in WWII, who was a pacifist organizer, who spoke out against the Japanese-American internment camps, and who became a lawyer to defend outcasts, died on March 4 at the age of 88.
May he rest in peace.
May he rest in peace.
Whatever issue the gods happen to be floating
it will be a gamble and the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows before hand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not decieve a child until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that under the fist fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or berevement is not particularly important to the dark diceman
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
it will be a gamble and the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows before hand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not decieve a child until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that under the fist fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or berevement is not particularly important to the dark diceman
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Apr 2, 2006
Graveyard night
Graveyard, n. 1. A burial ground. 2. A place where worn-out or obsolete equipment or objects are kept. 3. The shift of the night between midnight and 8 a.m.
God divided the day and the night. To the day he gave the sun, for light, and he left the night with darkness and the cyclical shinings of the moon's rock reflection.
Men divided the day. They portioned it up into early morning and late morning, noon and afternoon and evening. They put the day into pieces and they named them and traded them and they owned them. But the night they left alone.
The night belonged to no one. It was dark and open. Into the night came the cats and the owls. Into the night came the skunks and raccoons and coyottes. And into the dark and undivided night came the graveyard people, the people who didn't own anything: the students and the criminals and the truckers and the cabbies, waitresses, janitors, cops and drunks, shelf stockers and crazy talkers and people trying to get home. There were names for these people: lunatics, insomniacs and vampires.
They didn't own the night. They didn't know how to own it or what that would mean. They looked out their windows and saw their own faces.
They talked more softly than the day people, trusted their eyes less and listened more closely. They listened for the birds that bark before the morning comes. They had clammy skin and horse voices and sandy eyeballs and when the sun rose to reassert itself and its day, they were watching for it, watching their faces fade from the window.
Graveyard, n. 1. A burial ground. 2. A place where worn-out or obsolete equipment or objects are kept. 3. The shift of the night between midnight and 8 a.m.
God divided the day and the night. To the day he gave the sun, for light, and he left the night with darkness and the cyclical shinings of the moon's rock reflection.
Men divided the day. They portioned it up into early morning and late morning, noon and afternoon and evening. They put the day into pieces and they named them and traded them and they owned them. But the night they left alone.
The night belonged to no one. It was dark and open. Into the night came the cats and the owls. Into the night came the skunks and raccoons and coyottes. And into the dark and undivided night came the graveyard people, the people who didn't own anything: the students and the criminals and the truckers and the cabbies, waitresses, janitors, cops and drunks, shelf stockers and crazy talkers and people trying to get home. There were names for these people: lunatics, insomniacs and vampires.
They didn't own the night. They didn't know how to own it or what that would mean. They looked out their windows and saw their own faces.
They talked more softly than the day people, trusted their eyes less and listened more closely. They listened for the birds that bark before the morning comes. They had clammy skin and horse voices and sandy eyeballs and when the sun rose to reassert itself and its day, they were watching for it, watching their faces fade from the window.
Mar 27, 2006
The 10 o'clock clock
This clock is too big, he thought when he hung it on the wall. He let it settle and center on the nail and stepped back. It looked like a statement, which wasn't what he was going for. It looked like a statement about the over bearance of time or the tyranny of history, which wasn't what he wanted. It took up the whole wall about the couch and it was the only thing he could see from the doorway, like the whole room was redirected so it was pointing out the time.
It hadn't looked that big in the store, because the store was big and well lit and even the whole aisle of clocks looked small beneath the opening of the box store ceiling. The aisle was arranged by size, with the upright grandfathers on one end and down to the paste-up car clocks on the other. First he'd looked at the maritime clocks, the ship captain's clock and the pirate's clock with the thumb screwed faces and the petered hands pointing to numbers spread out in Xs, Vs, and Is. He would have bought one of those, with their wood frames worm scarred and burn marked, but he couldn't afford it. So he moved past the grandfathers and the maritimes and down to this one, a mid-aisle clock. He just hadn't seen it was this big.
This one had a slight silver frame and a circle of dots dotting minutes and it had the hours in Arabic numerals. The face was white and the hands were black tapered arrows. He thought he could return it but maybe he'd get used to it, maybe it'd blend into the room with time.
He hadn't remembered to buy batteries, hadn't thought about batteries not being included. There weren't any batteries in the closet with the orange extension cord, or in the kitchen drawer with the garbage bags and twist ties, or on the desk with the stamps and the paper clips and staples. Finally he found some to steal in the remote controlling the DVD player, copper colored double As, and when he slipped them in the black box on the back, pulling back those springs and putting the plus to plus and the minus to minus, the clock began to tick.
He could only hear it when it was quiet, when the radio was off and the train wasn't whistling and the coffee wasn't gurgling. When it was quiet the clock went ticking. Tick, said the clock, tick tick tick. It ticked when he woke up at night and when he came home in the evenings and it wasn't threatening. That surprised him, because he'd always thought the noise that time made was threatening. It didn't sound though like something running out or marking off. It was calm and peaceful and slow, and he began to forgive the clock its size and to settle for the its dotted noises.
It went on like that for a week and then another and then four. And then one morning or maybe afternoon the hands stopped turning. Both of them were hanging down, limp like. The minute hand was trying. It would tick and lift from 30 to 31 and then it would fall down again. It was like that for an hour, the minute hand grunting in failed sit-ups and the hour hand just like it was dead. The battery was dead, he figured, or half dead, leaked down until it couldn't lift for another round. He reset it. He probably should have stopped right there and gone down to the gas station or something and bought new batteries, but he didn't. He just reset it on the right time.
The hands set off again, moving around. They were moving slow but moving. It took two days to go around again. At the bottom of the turn they paused to rest and took a break for half a day. Then they got up again and went up the other side when they stopped for good. The hour was 10 and the minute was 53, or that's what the hands said.
It was a long weekend, when they stopped, the first long weekend he'd had in a long time, and when he came in that's the time he thought it was: 10:53. H slept without the alarm that night and woke up to a Saturday-lawn mower and that's the time he thought it was then too: 10:53. It was 10:53 for a few days when he noticed. He made himself a mental note to buy new batteries, the third note he'd made and he forgot this one too. He forgot for a week and then another and then he started to call his house the 10 o'clock house with the 10 o'clock clock.
That was how he'd felt about it anyway. When he got to his place, with the lights half on and the radio playing unresolving jazz, it was like time had stopped worrying about itself, stopped taking itself so seriously. It got so he'd smile at the clock every 10 o'clock morning and relax every 10 o'clock night. He could leave the door open to the dusk letting in moths and dragonflies and sit on the steps and be comfortable there. And even though it wasn't true it felt like it was the first time he'd ever been comfortable.
Sometime after that, after he knew he wasn't going to buy batteries at all, his friends were over. He was sitting on the couch and someone was sitting on the other end and someone was sitting on the side table and another couple were sitting on the floor, and they were talking. They were laughing and talking about doing something, maybe seeing a movie, and someone saw the clock, noticed how the whole room was pointing out the time, and asked Is it really that early? So he had to explain, how he hadn't fixed it because it made the place feel, he felt, he said, under a special dispensation of time. They said was a good time, that time, never too early and never too late and they laughed about it about how good a clock it was, his big dead clock.
This clock is too big, he thought when he hung it on the wall. He let it settle and center on the nail and stepped back. It looked like a statement, which wasn't what he was going for. It looked like a statement about the over bearance of time or the tyranny of history, which wasn't what he wanted. It took up the whole wall about the couch and it was the only thing he could see from the doorway, like the whole room was redirected so it was pointing out the time.
It hadn't looked that big in the store, because the store was big and well lit and even the whole aisle of clocks looked small beneath the opening of the box store ceiling. The aisle was arranged by size, with the upright grandfathers on one end and down to the paste-up car clocks on the other. First he'd looked at the maritime clocks, the ship captain's clock and the pirate's clock with the thumb screwed faces and the petered hands pointing to numbers spread out in Xs, Vs, and Is. He would have bought one of those, with their wood frames worm scarred and burn marked, but he couldn't afford it. So he moved past the grandfathers and the maritimes and down to this one, a mid-aisle clock. He just hadn't seen it was this big.
This one had a slight silver frame and a circle of dots dotting minutes and it had the hours in Arabic numerals. The face was white and the hands were black tapered arrows. He thought he could return it but maybe he'd get used to it, maybe it'd blend into the room with time.
He hadn't remembered to buy batteries, hadn't thought about batteries not being included. There weren't any batteries in the closet with the orange extension cord, or in the kitchen drawer with the garbage bags and twist ties, or on the desk with the stamps and the paper clips and staples. Finally he found some to steal in the remote controlling the DVD player, copper colored double As, and when he slipped them in the black box on the back, pulling back those springs and putting the plus to plus and the minus to minus, the clock began to tick.
He could only hear it when it was quiet, when the radio was off and the train wasn't whistling and the coffee wasn't gurgling. When it was quiet the clock went ticking. Tick, said the clock, tick tick tick. It ticked when he woke up at night and when he came home in the evenings and it wasn't threatening. That surprised him, because he'd always thought the noise that time made was threatening. It didn't sound though like something running out or marking off. It was calm and peaceful and slow, and he began to forgive the clock its size and to settle for the its dotted noises.
It went on like that for a week and then another and then four. And then one morning or maybe afternoon the hands stopped turning. Both of them were hanging down, limp like. The minute hand was trying. It would tick and lift from 30 to 31 and then it would fall down again. It was like that for an hour, the minute hand grunting in failed sit-ups and the hour hand just like it was dead. The battery was dead, he figured, or half dead, leaked down until it couldn't lift for another round. He reset it. He probably should have stopped right there and gone down to the gas station or something and bought new batteries, but he didn't. He just reset it on the right time.
The hands set off again, moving around. They were moving slow but moving. It took two days to go around again. At the bottom of the turn they paused to rest and took a break for half a day. Then they got up again and went up the other side when they stopped for good. The hour was 10 and the minute was 53, or that's what the hands said.
It was a long weekend, when they stopped, the first long weekend he'd had in a long time, and when he came in that's the time he thought it was: 10:53. H slept without the alarm that night and woke up to a Saturday-lawn mower and that's the time he thought it was then too: 10:53. It was 10:53 for a few days when he noticed. He made himself a mental note to buy new batteries, the third note he'd made and he forgot this one too. He forgot for a week and then another and then he started to call his house the 10 o'clock house with the 10 o'clock clock.
That was how he'd felt about it anyway. When he got to his place, with the lights half on and the radio playing unresolving jazz, it was like time had stopped worrying about itself, stopped taking itself so seriously. It got so he'd smile at the clock every 10 o'clock morning and relax every 10 o'clock night. He could leave the door open to the dusk letting in moths and dragonflies and sit on the steps and be comfortable there. And even though it wasn't true it felt like it was the first time he'd ever been comfortable.
Sometime after that, after he knew he wasn't going to buy batteries at all, his friends were over. He was sitting on the couch and someone was sitting on the other end and someone was sitting on the side table and another couple were sitting on the floor, and they were talking. They were laughing and talking about doing something, maybe seeing a movie, and someone saw the clock, noticed how the whole room was pointing out the time, and asked Is it really that early? So he had to explain, how he hadn't fixed it because it made the place feel, he felt, he said, under a special dispensation of time. They said was a good time, that time, never too early and never too late and they laughed about it about how good a clock it was, his big dead clock.
Mar 25, 2006
'Every day do something that won't compute'
and other excursions into neo-Ludditism
Nietzsche's typewriter, the first owned by a philosopher.
Thomas Pynchon's "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
Jacques Ellul's "Man in the Technological System."
Mark Twain's typewriter.
Review of J.C. Hertz's "Hacker in the Rye."
Review of Friedrich Kittler's "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter."
Donna Haraway's cyborg-feminism.
Andrew Kimbrell's "Techno-topia."
Peter Kreeft on the non-political aesthetic.
Inventor of the first encyclopedic effort to index the internet dies.
An interview with a self-proclaimed Luddite.
Wendell Berry's "Mad Farmer Liberation Front."
and other excursions into neo-Ludditism
Nietzsche's typewriter, the first owned by a philosopher.
Thomas Pynchon's "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
Jacques Ellul's "Man in the Technological System."
Mark Twain's typewriter.
Review of J.C. Hertz's "Hacker in the Rye."
Review of Friedrich Kittler's "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter."
Donna Haraway's cyborg-feminism.
Andrew Kimbrell's "Techno-topia."
Peter Kreeft on the non-political aesthetic.
Inventor of the first encyclopedic effort to index the internet dies.
An interview with a self-proclaimed Luddite.
Wendell Berry's "Mad Farmer Liberation Front."
"This is what's wrong with the world. Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."
- Tom Waits
"Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. Out of this contempt of work arose the idea of a nigger: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making niggers of people, we have ended by making a nigger of the world."Neo-Luddite: One who raises the technology question, who wants to consider the effects of a technology before adopting it, who does not think that technology is necessarily amoral. One who wants to stay put and live in relationship to a place, who values work, "un-useful" beauty, economically unprofitable activities, and simplicity. One who worries about being explotative, structural violence, materialism, dehumanization, and social decay. Neo-Luddites are often critizied for being anti-technology, anti-progressive, nostalgic, idealisitic, and anti-future. Neo-Luddites are on neither the right nor the left of the polical spectrum.
- Wendell Berry
Mar 22, 2006
Unless I see
I don't know why, but I didn't believe them. It wasn't that I thought they were lying or that there was some sort of conspiracy. It just seemed so fantastic. So mysterious and unfathomable.
I'd said Do raisins grow on trees or bushes? and they'd laughed and told me raisins came from grapes. I don't remember who it was that told me, if it was Dad or Mom or the neighbor kids down the hill. I checked with all of them though and everyone confirmed it and seemed amused, amused that I needed to know and that I didn't believe it. It just seemed so strange, that somehow those green- and red-skinned grapes could shrivel in the sun into this, into raisins. It didn't makes sense to me that the words on the raisin package saying sun kissed didn't mean kiss the way the sun kissed my face in the morning, didn't mean the evening sun falling through the pine trees, didn't mean sun as warmth or light or as a place to play, but meant something leaching and wrinkling and blackening.
I'd seen kittens and calves and lambs, being born. I'd seen tomatoes and pumpkins and squash and corn, ripening and changing colors. I'd seen the blowing seeds of trees and grasses. I'd seen fire eat and vultures eat and I understood how rain fell and evaporated and fell again. But none of that was like this. I understood cornbread and tomato sauce and grape juice, but I didn't see how a raisin could be a grape.
The next time I ate grapes I bit them in half. I bit them splitting them the short way and the long way. I peeled the skin off with my teeth. I looked at the split grapes and the skinned grapes and looked but couldn't see it. I smashed one, pushing down with my thumb until the skin popped and the flesh exploded into a grape mush spatter. Every grape I ate, I'd look at it first. As if with this one I'd see something I'm missed every time before, but there wasn't any way to see it. There wasn't any sign. The grape kept a secret and everyone knew it, and even though I now knew the secret too, I couldn't see it.
The grape to me became an artifact of mystery. I dedicated some section of my mind to thinking about grapes, and how it was they became raisins. I worked around it and around it and around trying to figure out what it meant, what it was, how it worked. Of all the mysteries of life, this was the one that seized my 4-year-old mind, that seemed to me like a key, like it was important to figure out.
I finally took one, in a test, and left it outside in the sun. I set it on the edge of my pebble box in the morning on a Saturday. It was a sunny day in the summer and I thought I'd watch it - catch it in the change, witness the alteration, the transfiguring metamorphosis of grape becoming raisin.
I was still there when Dad called me. Danny, he yelled from the porch before he saw me by the tree by the box. I could have been out back in the woods, or down the hill at the neighbors, or over by the pasture looking at slobber-nosed sheep through the fence. But I was by the pebble box, sitting there on the ground Indian style looking at a grape. He said to come in and get my shoes because we were going to town. I couldn't go, I said. He didn't laugh, but raised his eyebrows. When my dad raises his eyebrows it scares people. Why? he said and the look on his face was that he asked just to know what strange idea was so important to me that I'd thought to say no, I couldn't go. I didn't want to tell him about the test. I wanted to wait and show him the raisin that had happened while I watched and tell him about watching it. He looked at me. I looked at his feet. Well, I said, I want to see a grape turn into a raisin.
We didn't get back until it was dark and I didn't go out to see what had happened until the next morning. At first it wasn't there. I thought maybe a bird had taken it, or someone had walked by and decided to eat it, or that it had blackened and shriveled to nothing. Then I found it, rolled off the box and laying in the dirt at the roots of the grass. It was still a grape, green and gone soft with brown bruise spots. I looked at it, held it up and looked at it and couldn't see it. There was nothing, no change, no turn, no transformation. I knew it could be a raisin, I just didn't know how or how to look. I didn't know if I wasn't old enough or smart enough or wasn't looking in some secret way. I just knew I was blind to it, that I didn't have the power to see what was there to see.
So I ate it. It was a little sour and my face puckered, but I ate it. Then I forgot about it, accepted it and let all the worry go, and I went back inside to get ready for church.
I don't know why, but I didn't believe them. It wasn't that I thought they were lying or that there was some sort of conspiracy. It just seemed so fantastic. So mysterious and unfathomable.
I'd said Do raisins grow on trees or bushes? and they'd laughed and told me raisins came from grapes. I don't remember who it was that told me, if it was Dad or Mom or the neighbor kids down the hill. I checked with all of them though and everyone confirmed it and seemed amused, amused that I needed to know and that I didn't believe it. It just seemed so strange, that somehow those green- and red-skinned grapes could shrivel in the sun into this, into raisins. It didn't makes sense to me that the words on the raisin package saying sun kissed didn't mean kiss the way the sun kissed my face in the morning, didn't mean the evening sun falling through the pine trees, didn't mean sun as warmth or light or as a place to play, but meant something leaching and wrinkling and blackening.
I'd seen kittens and calves and lambs, being born. I'd seen tomatoes and pumpkins and squash and corn, ripening and changing colors. I'd seen the blowing seeds of trees and grasses. I'd seen fire eat and vultures eat and I understood how rain fell and evaporated and fell again. But none of that was like this. I understood cornbread and tomato sauce and grape juice, but I didn't see how a raisin could be a grape.
The next time I ate grapes I bit them in half. I bit them splitting them the short way and the long way. I peeled the skin off with my teeth. I looked at the split grapes and the skinned grapes and looked but couldn't see it. I smashed one, pushing down with my thumb until the skin popped and the flesh exploded into a grape mush spatter. Every grape I ate, I'd look at it first. As if with this one I'd see something I'm missed every time before, but there wasn't any way to see it. There wasn't any sign. The grape kept a secret and everyone knew it, and even though I now knew the secret too, I couldn't see it.
The grape to me became an artifact of mystery. I dedicated some section of my mind to thinking about grapes, and how it was they became raisins. I worked around it and around it and around trying to figure out what it meant, what it was, how it worked. Of all the mysteries of life, this was the one that seized my 4-year-old mind, that seemed to me like a key, like it was important to figure out.
I finally took one, in a test, and left it outside in the sun. I set it on the edge of my pebble box in the morning on a Saturday. It was a sunny day in the summer and I thought I'd watch it - catch it in the change, witness the alteration, the transfiguring metamorphosis of grape becoming raisin.
I was still there when Dad called me. Danny, he yelled from the porch before he saw me by the tree by the box. I could have been out back in the woods, or down the hill at the neighbors, or over by the pasture looking at slobber-nosed sheep through the fence. But I was by the pebble box, sitting there on the ground Indian style looking at a grape. He said to come in and get my shoes because we were going to town. I couldn't go, I said. He didn't laugh, but raised his eyebrows. When my dad raises his eyebrows it scares people. Why? he said and the look on his face was that he asked just to know what strange idea was so important to me that I'd thought to say no, I couldn't go. I didn't want to tell him about the test. I wanted to wait and show him the raisin that had happened while I watched and tell him about watching it. He looked at me. I looked at his feet. Well, I said, I want to see a grape turn into a raisin.
We didn't get back until it was dark and I didn't go out to see what had happened until the next morning. At first it wasn't there. I thought maybe a bird had taken it, or someone had walked by and decided to eat it, or that it had blackened and shriveled to nothing. Then I found it, rolled off the box and laying in the dirt at the roots of the grass. It was still a grape, green and gone soft with brown bruise spots. I looked at it, held it up and looked at it and couldn't see it. There was nothing, no change, no turn, no transformation. I knew it could be a raisin, I just didn't know how or how to look. I didn't know if I wasn't old enough or smart enough or wasn't looking in some secret way. I just knew I was blind to it, that I didn't have the power to see what was there to see.
So I ate it. It was a little sour and my face puckered, but I ate it. Then I forgot about it, accepted it and let all the worry go, and I went back inside to get ready for church.
Mar 21, 2006
Carried faith
Jesus in Time Magazine.
The picture of megachurch, 1, 2,
Megachurch design.
Anglican Diaconate ordination.
Holy Ghost people.
American Muslim Iman.
Evolution of credulity.
Jesus in Time Magazine.
The picture of megachurch, 1, 2,
Megachurch design.
Anglican Diaconate ordination.
Holy Ghost people.
American Muslim Iman.
Evolution of credulity.
Mar 20, 2006
The utopians and the road to the tree
They had heard of it, the tree. People had told them. They would tell people they were going up into the mountains. They'd tell people that they were going to start a utopian community, to start the beginnings of a new world up in the mountains where this tract of land was laid out in a triangle between three rivers. They'd tell people about the book that they'd read, and the idea that they'd heard, and how now they were going.
The people would pause, with nothing to say, and then they'd say about the tree, a big tree.
They'd heard about the tree as a rumor left behind, an inconsequential fact, a point of trivia. When the people mentioned the tree they'd think the people didn't get it, didn't see the vision, didn't hear the voice calling them up into the wilderness. The people would say big tree and it would remind them again of the way they felt displaced from this world, how everything was so wrong but that here was the hope of something better. They would shake their heads about the tree, and about how people always brought it up, and they would long to be already gone up to the mountain, to have already begun.
They built a few homes, first, and a common place to eat and a post office, and then they set to work on the road. The road led farther up the mountain and they worked up the mountain cutting trees and hauling them back down again to be sawn into logs. They worked long days, together cutting and hauling and sweating for the idea of utopia. The cleared brush and talked about someday having a railway and everyday they pushed farther. The wrote promotional literature and read that book again and talked about what they were doing. They talked about what they were doing and why they were there and how they were different and always they'd talk about the future. The world was full of hope, those days, those early days. By the time the road was finished there were 300 of them. Three hundred socialist utopians who'd put in a little money and put in days and days of work and put their hope up there on the mountain. They talked with joy about what they'd left behind and about escaping all that was below and every morning the woke up and went again to the road.
The road was 18 miles long and they thought about that road as the symbol of everything that they were. They saw themselves as changing the face of the world, starting with this hand hewn road rising 4,000 feet closer to the sky. For four years they worked on that road and then at the end of the road they found the tree. They hadn't know they were looking for it until then.
When the came to that tree they stopped. They stopped working and the forest fell silent and they stared. It was the biggest tree in that forest full of the biggest trees in the world and they stopped at the top of their road and looked at that tree. It seemed to them, and later it proved to be true, that that tree was the biggest tree in the world. The next day they all went to see it again, walking their way up the road just to look. They all stood there, 300 utopian dreamers on the side of a mountain with their necks craned back staring up at the age of that thing towering into the sky, staring until their eyes went blind in the sun and longer and until the sun went by and began to set down over the valley.
The day after that they began to talk about it. They said to themselves how big it was and how it wasn't just a rumor and what were they going to name it. After talking all that day all the way up the mountain and down again, and talking over the evening meal and through the night and over their meal the next morning, they came up with a name. It seemed so important, the name they would name it. It seemed historic and like this would name what they were doing up here, like this would be the password separating the past from the future, like this would be the name of the thing calling from utopia, from the wilderness. They talked about it and then as suddenly as they had begun they knew. It was right, as if it had always been as they called it now and they called it by the name of that book that they'd read that had started all this. It was, they said, The Karl Marx tree.
The next year the government came. The government claimed that land, took the land and the road and the tree. Preservation, the government said, and they made the mountain into an official forest and into a park and they gave the tree another name. The saw the tree and claimed the tree and named it, taking it away from the utopian people and naming it after a general from one of the wars. The utopians fought for a while and yelled for a while. For a couple of years they pleaded and argued and made their case and then they despaired. Without the tree they didn't see the point anymore. They went away. The forest grew back and the buildings fell down and the place went silent. The triangle of land between three rivers that was supposed to be the beginning of a new world was wilderness again.
If you go there today the only thing left of those utopians is the post office. And if you want to see the tree, where once 300 dreamers stared into the sky above a mountain, you'll have to go up another way.
They had heard of it, the tree. People had told them. They would tell people they were going up into the mountains. They'd tell people that they were going to start a utopian community, to start the beginnings of a new world up in the mountains where this tract of land was laid out in a triangle between three rivers. They'd tell people about the book that they'd read, and the idea that they'd heard, and how now they were going.
The people would pause, with nothing to say, and then they'd say about the tree, a big tree.
They'd heard about the tree as a rumor left behind, an inconsequential fact, a point of trivia. When the people mentioned the tree they'd think the people didn't get it, didn't see the vision, didn't hear the voice calling them up into the wilderness. The people would say big tree and it would remind them again of the way they felt displaced from this world, how everything was so wrong but that here was the hope of something better. They would shake their heads about the tree, and about how people always brought it up, and they would long to be already gone up to the mountain, to have already begun.
They built a few homes, first, and a common place to eat and a post office, and then they set to work on the road. The road led farther up the mountain and they worked up the mountain cutting trees and hauling them back down again to be sawn into logs. They worked long days, together cutting and hauling and sweating for the idea of utopia. The cleared brush and talked about someday having a railway and everyday they pushed farther. The wrote promotional literature and read that book again and talked about what they were doing. They talked about what they were doing and why they were there and how they were different and always they'd talk about the future. The world was full of hope, those days, those early days. By the time the road was finished there were 300 of them. Three hundred socialist utopians who'd put in a little money and put in days and days of work and put their hope up there on the mountain. They talked with joy about what they'd left behind and about escaping all that was below and every morning the woke up and went again to the road.
The road was 18 miles long and they thought about that road as the symbol of everything that they were. They saw themselves as changing the face of the world, starting with this hand hewn road rising 4,000 feet closer to the sky. For four years they worked on that road and then at the end of the road they found the tree. They hadn't know they were looking for it until then.
When the came to that tree they stopped. They stopped working and the forest fell silent and they stared. It was the biggest tree in that forest full of the biggest trees in the world and they stopped at the top of their road and looked at that tree. It seemed to them, and later it proved to be true, that that tree was the biggest tree in the world. The next day they all went to see it again, walking their way up the road just to look. They all stood there, 300 utopian dreamers on the side of a mountain with their necks craned back staring up at the age of that thing towering into the sky, staring until their eyes went blind in the sun and longer and until the sun went by and began to set down over the valley.
The day after that they began to talk about it. They said to themselves how big it was and how it wasn't just a rumor and what were they going to name it. After talking all that day all the way up the mountain and down again, and talking over the evening meal and through the night and over their meal the next morning, they came up with a name. It seemed so important, the name they would name it. It seemed historic and like this would name what they were doing up here, like this would be the password separating the past from the future, like this would be the name of the thing calling from utopia, from the wilderness. They talked about it and then as suddenly as they had begun they knew. It was right, as if it had always been as they called it now and they called it by the name of that book that they'd read that had started all this. It was, they said, The Karl Marx tree.
The next year the government came. The government claimed that land, took the land and the road and the tree. Preservation, the government said, and they made the mountain into an official forest and into a park and they gave the tree another name. The saw the tree and claimed the tree and named it, taking it away from the utopian people and naming it after a general from one of the wars. The utopians fought for a while and yelled for a while. For a couple of years they pleaded and argued and made their case and then they despaired. Without the tree they didn't see the point anymore. They went away. The forest grew back and the buildings fell down and the place went silent. The triangle of land between three rivers that was supposed to be the beginning of a new world was wilderness again.
If you go there today the only thing left of those utopians is the post office. And if you want to see the tree, where once 300 dreamers stared into the sky above a mountain, you'll have to go up another way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)