Ocean Orchestra @ Typepad

Upon Dave's Debauchery

"Life will go on. Millions of people tonight will eschew prayers and icon, even connubial relations, in favor of Dave (and other ironicists), waiting for their displacement-prophecies and self-caressing lyrics, to lullabye them into meaningless dreams of leftover passions -- a common bizarre experience for a fragmented, disaffected soul.

It's hard to sleep, to rest, nowadays. What's demanded these days is a narcotic to bring on narcosis, since the sleep of good work, grief and joy, is so hard (notice how many sleep clinics there are?). What's wanted is a nightly, fanciful dose of ironic anaphora that repeats, in vain caressing repetition, the invocations of a chuckling world without sin -- sinless because, you know, camouflaged in shadow."

Adapted from Second Terrace.

American Metamorphosis: prewriting

Over the last week I've a few ideas. Not exactly profound in themselves, I've thought perhaps as notions they could be developed into full-bodied, if I had the time. One came to me while listening to Kentucky's Poet Laureate Gurney Norman this past weekend. Something he said about the way Americans used to craft quilts -- how just about anything could be saved and called to noble quilthood. Then I thought about all the trash we produce in a single day in this great land. In fact, I think about it every day when I buy lunch at the one of the many dispensers of food on campus. At some of these are positioned receptacles with signs that read: "Don't be trashy. Please recycle." The receptacles themselves don't seem to be specifically for recyclables. They contain all manner of waste, save perhaps feces. Every time I use such a bin I drop something in there I think could've been recycled, yet I know it won't be. Obviously the sign is meant to make me feel bad, because beside the general trash bin no recycling bin is provided. 

This all came to mind while listening to Gurney Norman. And in those few seconds of firing synapses I realized something: we've given up everything. So often in our nation's history, past and present, we've crafted an image of ourselves as the best the world has to offer. We used to do this in principally religious terms. We thought we had found the Promised Land. We strove to possess it once and for all. We raped and murdered for it, revolted and cast our benefactors in an unseemly light. We performed forced baptisms in golden streams and shot the newly baptized on the other side. We were like Jacob: we took by strength and cunning something not rightfully ours, claimed a glorious inheritance and went on to do tremendous things with it, wrestling with God and seeming to win. And like with Jacob's descendants, generations have passed and we've accomplished things unfathomable to our forebears. 

But where has it gotten us? Now, we take everything we're given and throw it in a trash bin telling us to recycle. We'd rather saunter over square miles of pavement than tread acres through the wilderness. We choose virtual realities over living souls, and unwittingly feed our young to carnivorous industries of all permutations. And even when we're made aware of our deleterious choices, we continue sipping from the same broken cisterns, feigning remorse and best efforts. Truth be told, we'd rather drink watery syrup than the hearty blood of Christ.

Unsavory a fellow as Jacob was, God had use for the ignoble vessel. Likewise, the United States of Old committed grievous sin, but the clay was still worth shaping. Our ancestors, stained with all manner of corruption, could still marvel in their struggle with the Divine. But things are different now. We no longer marvel. We can't even concentrate long enough to stand and stare into His beauty. We must be entertained; we seek satisfaction. Less now like Jacob, we've been reformed as Esau. The ruddy Esau was hungry, and he casually forsook his birthright to be fed. He gave up hope in eternity for a Happy Meal. 

You can see it everywhere now: how we spend our time, what we eat, how we house ourselves. You can see it in the buildings in which we do business. Pass through a sprawling neighborhood, rich or poor, recently built. Do you like what you see? Inspect the tawdry design, the plastic houses. What can the stripmall teach us about wonder? How does Halo, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Mario Party or Motorstorm train us up in the Way we should go, or bestow the life-preserving virtue we all love to miss in our young ones? What does Second Life have to do with life eternal? Somehow we've convened -- faithful and faithless alike -- around the mythic Pursuit of Happiness, and in so doing we've cast Mythos far off. We've "paved over paradise and put up a parking lot," because this is where we intend to stay, ever and always rooted simultaneously in boredom and the dread of being bored. 

Undeniably we are Esau: We have sold our birthright for a full belly. We too have supplanted hope -- an expectation distinctly and divinely human -- with a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth. We crave and demand the toys that feed our fantasy and our febrility, and we'll let men, women and children overseas work 15 hour days for 20 cents an hour if it means we'll have them cheap. And the veneer of moral indignation we put up upon finding out does nothing to destroy the construct. To be unplugged is to be in darkness. And who wants to crusade on an empty stomach; who would rather be foolhardy than fed? 

We have to feed. 

Mirandized

Wednesday I found out that one of my heroes has terminal bone cancer. It has spread throughout his body, and he has a cancerous cyst on his lung. I was very let down and without hope most of the day. I thought to visit him, but I only know him nominally, and barely at that. The most I can say about our familiarity with one another is that he likes one of my bands, which is currently out of commission. 

All the same, he has profoundly shaped how I approach music, and for this and more I feel beholden to him. As a kid and young adult, I always wanted my bands to somehow reflect his work. Now that I'm older -- and my bands are more or less void -- I still admire him, personally and artistically, though thankfully now on a more human level. 

He went in today for an operation on his lung. If they successfully removed the cyst, the doctors are to begin radiation on the cancer soon. There was talk about the possibility of having to have his entire lung removed... I pray that wasn't the case. I still hope to visit him.

Mirandized

Per Mission

Christbaum

The Faithful

I've been largely absent from the written word for several months now, approaching a year. Somehow my drive and patience to write slipped out of view just as soon as I entered the Church. I read a lot now. Much spiritual material, and I spend way too much time quoting what I read on Facebook. I pop by Lee Bozeman's blog from time to time, and his terse but poignant updates give me a model of how I might still tap out my ideas occasionally. If so, I suspect I'll keep things low key and still at this blog. I started a blog at Wordpress, and intended it for more academic and ambitious discourse. But I'm less concerned about proving faith to anyone now. Truth has been shown, and I trust it.

Will be writing music with Greg tonight. We're determined to finish what we think will be our band's final album. Of course, there may be more left in us afterward, but we're not looking that far ahead.  

The Faithful

Tobias on Atheist Delusions

It's amazing how big the world can still be. Becoming Orthodox has opened me to a near-inexhaustible library of astounding and propounding -- and indeed holy -- literature, both ancient and contemporary (seeing as how the contemporary is also ancient, given its infinite source), as well as in book and blog form. A great example would be Fr. John Tobias' review of David Bentley Hart's new book, Atheist Delusions, a book I have been so eager to read that I'm contemplating pushing back my next summer reading book back a slot. Few, if any, match Hart's eloquence in writing and wit, but Fr. Tobias doesn't leave his readers wanting.

Consider the following passage, in which Fr. Tobias clarifies Hart's thesis, for anyone who may have thought Atheist Delusions could or should be boiled down to "a sure bet in a back alley cockfight with the "new atheists." 

His proposition was that the Christian Church brought about a profound revolution, whose effects permeated the world of human society. It established what is facilely known as "Christendom" (West and East): everyone knows that, but Hart proves that what we like to think of as "the West" is fundamentally this very Christendom – despite the current and odious attempt to establish a secular singular Europe. All the liberal things we are justly proud of are in fact Christian inventions; to name just a few: things like hospitals, effective medicine, justice for the powerless, "healthcare and welfare," the prohibition of gladiatorial combat, the eradication of slavery, the full involvement of women in religion (suggesting that the male priesthood contradicts the full participation of women in Orthodoxy is as lamentable as supposing that female motherhood diminishes the participation of males in parenthood, or that female wifehood prohibits the full range of male sexuality).

That last point sounds abrupt in a bozart age when "full participation" has been jingo-ized into hieretical affirmative action. But Christianity was the first to involve all adherents – rich or poor, slave or free, men or women, Greek, Roman and Jew – cramming them all into one single Liturgy and Sacrament, the same font and cup, the same nave. The question of "why can't I be the celebrant?" was never related to St. Paul's "in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free."

The Christian Revolution went deeper than political enfranchisement, thank God. And thus, all the conservative things, too, that we cherish are at least fulfilled in Christianity, if not inaugurated at the Cross and Pentecost. Truth and the infinite, the beautiful and the good were wrested out of the heave-ho tides of cultural philosophies and political cults. They were solidified, even "realized" (if one wants to sound hackneyed) in the Holy Tradition catapulted by the Third Person and the Apostles. 

He has a good deal more to say on that subject and others, touching on even the recent (and suddenly receded) wave of hero worship around our new president. I found this part particularly enjoyable and insightful:

I am glad this book came along when it did, because I was down in the dumps about history and all that – contemporary history, that is, like right now. I wasn't so sad about Obama winning, nor was I very glad. I saw the hoopla all last year, and what brought me by the lee was not that the country is turning socialist (which it's not), or that the masses adulating Obama were like the despotic pep rallies of the Thirties (which they are not). Obama's rallies were more like revival meetings (very familiar to me) and nothing at all like an Amway or Falangista gathering, or any other such synaxis of troglodytes.

But Obama's revival meetings, like all revival meetings, are bound to grow cold and clammy at the press of real tomorrow. Time itself proves too great a challenge for all Protestant endeavors, especially including the fervent myths choreographed by the Democratic Party.

That is not the cause of my diffuse woe. There is nothing new about Democratic disillusionment (for therapy, they should read about Claudius' disillusionment with the Senate). I grieve, rather, for the ongoing illusionment of the Republicans and all who are "right." The divide between authentic conversativism – the sort envisioned by Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot and the Inklings, Richard Weaver and the Agrarians – and the current dreck of right-wing, neo-cheney-con, evangelo-babbulo palinitism is getting more like the gulf between Lazarus and rich man … that is, after the tables were turned. I grieve that Chesterton and Belloc would be certainly damned as socialists and communists by His Cigarness, the Grand Poobah, and His Minister of Michael Scott Impersonation, Dreck of Fox. Already, "distributism" is thrown here and there as a curseword. I would worry for GK and Hillaire more were it not for the sorry fact that they are not read, if they are known at all.

The whole piece, while admittedly I don't quite grasp it all, is quite intriguing, and makes me only more eager to read Hart's book. Can The Brothers Karamozov really stand to be pushed back?

To remind myself

How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.

- WENDELL BERRY -

Presupposing Nothing

Approaching Pascha (Easter), it strikes me how uninterested human beings have become with resurrection. That the idea that a person could raise or be raised from the dead could become almost a commodity (even among Christians!) makes little sense to me, though I perceive the tendency just as keenly within myself. At what point did we lose our fascination with the idea that death could be not be as definitely final as we know it to be? Is it that we, having disposed with the religions that seek to make some sense of faith, nevertheless continue to presuppose an afterlife, a syrupy residual that we, deep in our hearts, still hope for even while we recoil from any explicit discussion on the matter?

Of course, there are the skeptics out there who proclaim vigilently the absence of every hope. There's a popular atheistic slogan that started with advertisements on buses in England and is spreading across the West among the new breed of "humanists," which reads: "There's probably no god, so stop worrying and enjoy your life." Another slogan I read from Seattle appeared at Christmas time: "Why believe in a god? Be good for goodness' sake."

This paradigm presupposes nothing. All we have is what we've got, here and now. Let's make the best of it. Of course, these slogans can only make sense among those raised within the efete mentality of the West, and would undoubtedly prove asinine to the majority of humans on the planet, who generally live, move and have their being in what the West considers abject poverty by its own standards, and often under great duress. To those who presuppose nothing, we'd best not talk of resurrection, because that would demand of us hope, but in spite of every fiber within us that struggles to hope, the spirit of this age -- proclaimed from the rooftops and the sides of London buses with the static of a bullhorn -- intones that all we have to hope for in this life is greater comfort, instant pleasure, and not to be alone. This last hope, of course, can only be proffered by others whose hopes amount to as much vacancy, or less, and who at their very best can only offer themselves after they themselves have been satisfied.

Without resurrection, this life is a vacuum.   

(For more compelling and well-expressed thoughts on this and similar matters, read this.)    

Wheel Behind Wheel

By St. Nikolai Velimirovich

XLI

With fasting I gladden my hope in You, my Lord, Who are to come again.

Fasting hastens my preparation for Your coming, the sole expectation of my days and nights.

Fasting makes my body thinner, so that what remains can more easily shine with the spirit.

While waiting for You, I wish neither to nourish myself with blood nor to take life–so that the animals may sense the joy of my expectation.

But truly, abstaining from food will not save me. Even if I were to eat only the sand from the lake, You would not come to me, unless the fasting penetrated deeper into my soul.

I have come to know through my prayer, that bodily fasting is more a symbol of true fasting, very beneficial for someone who has only just begun to hope in You, and nevertheless very difficult for someone who merely practices it.

Therefore I have brought fasting into my soul to purge her of many impudent fiancés and to prepare her for You like a virgin.

And I have brought fasting into my mind, to expel from it all daydreams about worldly matters and to demolish all the air castles, fabricated from those daydreams. 

I have brought fasting into my mind, so that it might jettison the world and prepare to receive Your Wisdom.

And I have brought fasting into my heart, so that by means of it my heart might quell all passions and worldly selfishness.

I have brought fasting into my heart, so that heavenly peace might ineffably reign over my heart, when Your stormy Spirit encounters it.

I prescribe fasting for my tongue, to break itself of the habit of idle chatter and to speak reservedly only those words that clear the way for You to come.

And I have imposed fasting on my worries so that it may blow them all away before itself like the wind that blows away the mist, lest they stand like dense fog between me and You, and lest they turn my gaze back to the world.

And fasting has brought into my soul tranquility in the face of uncreated and created realms, and humility towards men and creatures. And it has instilled in me courage, the likes of which I never knew when I was armed with every sort of worldly weapon. 

What was my hope before I began to fast except merely another story told by others, which passed from mouth to mouth?

The story told by others about salvation through prayer and fasting became my own.

False fasting accompanies false hope, just as no fasting accompanies hopelessness.

But just as a wheel follows behind a wheel, so true fasting follows true hope.

Help me to fast joyfully and to hope joyously, for You, my Most Joyful Feast, are drawing near to me with Your radiant smile.

The Life of St. Nikolai Velimirovich

A Poet's Hair

Recently while at dinner with friends, someone commented admiringly on my current style of hair. He said I "look like a poet." I was simultaneously flattered and crushed. The tragic irony in what he meant only as a compliment was that -- regardless of how I look -- I am not a poet, and yet how I've longed to be. Over the past year I've written hardly a line I've liked. I'd like to blame it all on the utter misery my current schooling causes me, but truly I think it goes much deeper than this. Yes, school has sapped my strength of spirit, and left me with little to no time to wander as I must to see what I must write in night hollows and the common passer-by. But the current silence from my pen stems from something more existential than academic ennui. Perhaps it is as much medicinal as it is painful.

Orthodoxy may have something to do with it. I've learned while journeying in that I have very little to say on many matters I would have previously waxed on about to no end. It's not that I've lost all confidence; indeed, I feel I'm growing into a greater confidence that the vain pursuits I had so set my heart upon before were simply that: vanity, which stirred my passion to no fruitful end. Orthodoxy is slowly instilling in me an otherworldly security, one which begins with the spirit and begins to grow outward, leaving me with the simple hope that it will slowly and surely begin to shine forth as light from this ebbing frame: the light of Mount Tabor come to illumine me, soul and body.  

Tonight we've entered Great Lent, and tomorrow begins the fasting. I've tried to finish off all the foodstuff I have left that won't be eaten during the fast, but unfortunately I just couldn't drink that much root beer. Hopefully I needn't throw it all away, and can find a suitable home for what soon will be orphaned food and drink.

Photo 23

<-- This, by the way, is my "poet's hair." A big muddled mess of medusaic locks. I honestly don't know what a poet looks like. I'd much rather grow into the practice of being one. 

Ultraconflagrant

Stripped from the Second Terrace:

Why is it necessary for nutcases to deny the Holocaust? Is there some benefit (material or psychic) that is realized? Moreover, how is it possible for a denier to become a bishop? I hear today that the Vatican is demanding a complete renunciation of these views (which the media have labeled, of course, "ultraconservative"). I guess if he says the right things and spins around three times and clicks his heels he'll be hunky dory for the mitre. But "renunciation" means "repentance," and "repentance" means (everywhere except fantasy island) never asking, never expecting, never demanding rights, privilege or position. Williamson should be happy to come back into the Church as a layman. Never as clergy. And God forbid, never as a bishop. Is that not the meaning of repentance learned by the Prodigal Son?

I too was flabbergasted at the thought of a man who denies the full scale of the Holocaust being readmitted to the Roman Catholic Church as a bishop. In the RCC, this type of thing has to come from the very top, since there is a very top in the RCC, and it's mind-binding to think that Benedikt would have gone through with it in the first place. First of all, Benedikt is German. Secondly, he's the Pope, and the most heavily scrutinized Christian of them all. What's more, he went through with it and then didn't even stick to his guns. I mean, when I first heard about it, of course it was branded a scandal in and out. But lately I don't give news sources much credit for giving Christians much credit. So I thought to myself, "Maybe this is being blown out of proportion; maybe he had his reasons; maybe the newly redeemed bishop has been misconstrued." Of course, I had no clue, but I guess I gave the Pope the benefit of the doubt. Surely he wouldn't have done so stupid a thing as the anchors actually described.

But he didn't stick to his guns. After less than a week of public outcry, Benedikt joined in with the chorus: Rescind your odious beliefs, good sir! At this point I realized the Pope had been completely out of line in the first place. What good could come of this guy being reinstated as a bishop -- the shepherd of thousands of Christians? 

In a way, I guess I still hold out for the possibility that something was going on here that the news sources aren't picking up on... Or maybe they just don't care. The reprobate beliefs of this particular guy were juicy enough to fit the headlines. Not that the reprobate would be in any way vindicated were this the case. Filth is filth no matter how you couch it or who's against you. 

Still, what prompted me to respond to Fr. Gregory comments in the first place was his mention of this faux-bishop's views as "ultraconservative." What in hell makes a man who believes the Holocaust never took place in any way, shape or form conservative? How is this choice of word anything but a blatant attempt to demonize conservatives and demonstrate just how crazy they can go? I don't even identify as a conservative, but this term, ultraconservative, is ultrabogus, and a good deal disrespectful to any of the respectful conservatives out there. The same can (and should) be said for jokers who like who call things "hyper-leftist" or "ultraliberal." Our news sources need not partake in polemics or intimidation.