Taking Off and Landing
Telling the Story
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So, in the Fall, i.e., in about 17 days, I’ll be teaching a course called “Introduction to Christian Heritage”, which is effectively all of Christian history and theology in one semester, fifty minutes a shot. After looking over several syllabi, I’m quickly realizing that this is an impossible task, an exercise in utter futility. I’m reminded of the Ani Difranco song where she describes having to flee a burning building, but only having arms enough to carry one of your children at a time. What do you leave behind? What do you let go?
Do I teach Irenaeus or Tertullian? Calvin or Luther? How can I not talk about the mystics? How can I leave out St. Francis? Very quickly, the bus fills up, and there are too many folks left at the stop, carrying their sack lunches, trying to get back to the monastery. I slam the door, pull my driver’s cap down, and speed through the yellow light. Immediately, I regret having picked up Schleiermacher, with Catherine of Siena still on the corner looking so frail and waif-like. Schleiermacher is forever kicking the back of my seat, while Catherine would always sit politely, scribbling in her notebook.
In two weeks, I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to have made my decisions as to how this story goes, the story of the church and the world, the tale of the pilgrim people of God in the dark. Is it a comedy? A tragedy? A thriller? At times, a slasher flick, and at times, a dramedy. The plot keeps changing, the cast of characters keep shifting–just as soon as you like one character, they wander off screen to be replaced by another lookalike who doesn’t seem to know that they’re supposed to imitate the ticks of the previous one–it makes the plot easier to follow.
But the characters keep changing things up and losing their lines and improvising brilliantly, and so this is a really hard story to tell. But it’s a good story, and one I’ll enjoy figuring out how to tell. In the Spring, I’ll tell it again, for a different group who haven’t heard this one before. It never gets old, and I imagine, I’ll never stop crapping my pants at the thought of telling it wrong.
The Ending of Summer Approaches on an Overstuffed Pillow: A Haiku
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August One: never a friend.
It speaks of deadlines, and nights
Measured in worry, not love.
HOW TO TALK PAST EVIL IN THREE STEPS or WHY THE BAD GUYS IN FILM GO FREE
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In this post, I’m going to attempt to do two things: 1) discuss two seemingly dissimilar movies (No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight, and 2) offer up a theory of why in both of these movies, the bad guys keep getting away. Here’s a hint: it has nothing to do with the bad guys being really slippery or the good guys being inept.
The Dark Knight, by the way, was freaking awesome, and I’ll try to talk about the movie without actually talking about it, for the sake of the three readers of this blog who still haven’t seen it.
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In No Country, you have the story of Anton Chigur, an unstoppable force of evil who takes delight in being the purveyor of death, as evidenced by the near-orgasmic look on his face in his first kill. It’s no small stretch to see Heath Ledger’s take on the Joker in a similar vein; he gleefully describes the difference between using knives and guns, noting that the knives are just more exquisite. Two films, two villans who have looked over the edge of the abyss and found only their only reflection looking back. Both villans are described as living by their own internal code of right and wrong, and as such, find absolute joy in living out that chaos and destruction.
This is the genius of these characters: it’s not that they have chosen to live out the ‘bad’ end of society’s spectrums, embracing the illegal end of the law; for both Joker and Anton Chigur, there is no law. All that is left, having broken past the bounds of right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, is sheer aesthetics: the delicious and exquisite embrace of pleasure for its own sake. At one point, the Joker remarks to Batman that he could never kill him. Why?
“You’re just too much fun.”
The problem that both Batman and the sheriff of No Country suffer from is the same: they operate within a framework of good and evil that their villans simply do not recognize. Seeing it in the chaos wrought by the Joker is easy: Batman’s heroics are characterized as stretching the limits of what constitutes pursuing the ‘good’. As he taps citizens cell phones and risks the lives of the innocent, Batman strains the limits of being a good guy, doing what he does for the sake of the city; the Joker’s crimes, however, have no logic of right and wrong and so for all Batman’s straining the limits of moral behavior, the Joker moves along unphased. In No Country, we see the same behavior, as the sheriff and his crew struggle to make sense of why Chigur is chasing after the money; in the closing monologue, the sheriff describes a dream of his father, and how in it, he loses money, but experiences no real remorse over this loss: for him, the money central to the narrative of No Country bears no meaning for the sheriff, a man of the land and of family.
And so, two heroes, and two complete lacks of understanding. In both cases, it is not that the hero tries to overcome evil and lacks the will to do it; evil is simply playing a game that good knows nothing about, and so, the good guys come off looking befuddled and helpless, grasping at straws, making heroic gestures that completely miss the point. Because for Chigur and the Joker, the hero’s willingness to go beyond the normalcy of good is not what is required; for either to be stopped, good and evil have to be discarded altogether, and they must be defeated by being more beautiful than their opponent, by performing an act so altogether haunting that their opponent respects them, not as a moral superior, but as a true artist.
It does no good extending our own definitions of good to match the excesses of evil, for evil plays by a logic that has no respect for the rules; it goes up chutes and turns over ladders, examining lines on the board as no more solid than light beams streaming through the dust. And so, approaches to evil must not seek to match their excesses, but stand in their core strength, and in doing so, bear the scourges of evil in order to overcome it–not by force, but by suffering.
Updates 3.0
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I’ve decided that I’m tired of carrying around grad student fluff, i.e. the 15-20 pounds I’ve gained since starting grad school. So, I’m running a few times a week, cooking more, and doing 50 pushups/100 situps a day for starters. My days as a long-distance runner are safely back in 2003, so it’s time to rebuild. It’s like the Dodgers admitting that, yes, they won the World Series in 1988, but Kirk Gibson’s been retired for a decade now, and their entire roster was over 35, so changes might be in order.
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Dissertation work goes very slowly. I’m cranking through the last gasps of a remedial exam, after which I’ll be able to focus SOLELY on reading for dissertation and for a couple of side projects with one of my profs. Oh, and teaching for the Fall. Can’t forget that one. Who doesn’t have a syllabus drawn up yet? (Points thumbs at self): this guy.
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Work at the Press goes well, though busy as always. I’m able to do most of my work remotely, which really helps me out, as I’m able to work best when I’m not at the office. This bodes well for my future vocation, in which ‘office hours’ is really just a placeholder for ‘this is when I can talk to you, so be here or best of luck to you’.
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The Dark Knight was unbelievable. I’m going to see it again, and plan on blogging on it in a week. You’ve been given fair warning.
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Things with the lady are great: she wound up taking a job in Waco, which is of no small joy to me. And it’s a job she’s really excited about. So, two thumbs up. She’s moving into a duplex closer to my end of town, which is also nice, and when she gets back from visiting her family, hopefully her job will have started, and give her some semblance of normal routine, without which she cavesinto a crumpled soda can. I really love this woman.
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I’m feeling the need to thresh some things out of the bookshelves, mostly just stuff I know I’ll never read again, and didn’t really care for the first time around. Or some of the dozens of books that I bought with best intentions but have NEVER read. Goal for self: give away one book a week til what I have to give away is off my hands.
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This summer has been way to travelled. Vancouver, Memphis, Houston, Indiana, New Orleans…and I still haven’t been to see the folks in Shreveport like I need to. Oh, and see the above post detailing what needs to happen in the next month before school starts. Sigh.
United We Fall; Divided, We Fall
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If you want to know what The Happening is really about, go here for my thoughts. This movie is as much about environmentalism as Christmas is about mistletoe.
New Orleans
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So, I’m out again, leaving for a week with the youth at church at 5 a.m. to drive to New Orleans. All excited about the departure time, raise your hands.
None? Yeah, me neither. The youth are having a sleepover at the church to facilitate a prompt departure time. Guess who’s sleeping in his own bed tonight and passing on an all-night capture the flag before driving eight hours?
This guy.
Let the Bleeding Begin
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I was wondering how long it was going to take before this happened. With Falwell gone and Robertson a fringe lunatic, you’re left with pretty much only Dobson to champion the religious right. Yes, I grew up on Focus on the Family, and will forever be indebted them for introducing me to Adventures in Odyssey (which as a kid, was a killer radio show for long car trips), but when Dobson starts making pronouncements on sound biblical hermeneutics, it makes me crazy.
Because this isn’t the first time that Dobson has forgotten that his PhD is in Psychology and not New Testament translation. Again, this is the problem with ‘priesthood of believer’ run wild–everyone thinks that because they can read, they can read Scripture well. This isn’t to say that Obama is a great exegete: stretching biblical texts over a myriad of social issues can be just as sloppy. In both cases, two things are in play: 1) capturing the political imagination by way of Scripture, which can be helpful and dangerous, and 2) the recognition that Scriptural interpretation must be done by way of communities in the way of Christ, and not to prove an agenda.
James, meet Barak. Go have a beer and work this out. Or coffee. Or a bag of caramels. But please, for the love of Colorado, get off the airwaves.
Caspian and the Logic of Violence
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I finally made it out to see the new Narnia flick last night. It’s been a ridiculously busy few weeks, and so, moviegoing has been low on the list of things to-do. I think I’ve been in town a grand total of two weeks since May 15, so hopefully this is all on the decline, and the movie-watching will ramp up in the days to come
One of the things that struck me this time around was how violent the movies are. I’ve read these a few times, and my Dad read them to us as kids at the dinner table, but I don’t remember all the battles. I remember Puddleglum and Shasta, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember anything about the wars as the movie unfolded. I started running back through the various books in my head and realized that most of them are built around wars of some sort, and rising in my heart, I felt this strange moral conflict: I’m a pacifist, in that I believe that the Christian, because they believe in Jesus and the call of Jesus to peacemaking and non-violence, should abjure the use of violence, and yet, I love these stories. I love these well-told tales.
At one point, there’s deliberation as to whether the Narnians are going to stay in their fort and defend, or go on the offensive and attack the Telmarine fortress. Discussion flies back and forth as to which place is most defensible, and suddenly Lucy pipes up, “You’re thinking as if there’s only two options: to die here or to die there”. And in that line, I realized that this is the great tragedy of the book that Lewis uses the battles to talk about: these battles take place in the absence of Aslan. This is not to say that there is not a battle which takes place with Aslan present, but the logic of warfare operates on the principle of Caspian and Peter: either the Christian participates in war here or war there. Lucy’s one line undermines this logic and says, “There is a third, more completely ridiculous option, and that is to wait for Aslan”, the one who defeated the White Witch to begin with.
Caspian, desparate for victory, nearly turns to the Dark Magic to accomplish the victory, turning away at the last minute, and ultimately is aided by Lion in victory, but note the outcome of the battle: whereas Caspian’s war operates with a zero-sum logic (that either the Telmarines or the Narnians must be destroyed), Aslan’s outcome is one of mutual benefit (that the two co-exist, with the opportunity for a new beginning given to those that cannot live together).
The logic of Aslan’s kind of warfare is one of defense and ultimate living side-by-side. Of course, this makes the assumption that the Christian’s position on war must be lived out on the terms of warfare, and not radical patience, that the Christian must live their convictions in the ways established by the governing authority, that the Christian must circumscribe their imagination by the fictions of the state. And in that sense, Lewis’ logic is still captive to the nation-state: he makes the assumption that the warfare of Aslan must play be the rules set up by the Telmarines. And so, while Lewis’ warfare looks for more collaborative outcomes and more humane alternatives than total destruction and subjugation of one’s enemy, I’m left wondering how the war of the Lion is meant to lead us in thinking about war: should war be about collaboration and mutual outcomes, or is this to lose the game already?
My sense is the latter is true, that Lewis’ lion is still captive to thinking about conflicts between Telmarines and Narnians in terms alien to the true natures of Telmarines, Narnians, and lions.
But to Write…What?
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Being around Kevin this weekend and hearing about his latest exploits with creative writing has reminded me of aches as old as ashes in the fireplace. I love to write. I love to read the way that words trickle out of a brain, or from a set of fingers, or hear the way they stumbled down an old woman’s lips and into her son’s computer, transcribing fading thoughts of a Sunday in Wisconsin.
I love written words, and the way they capture memories, how they harness wild thoughts, corral feelings. And I love the way these memories leech out the sides of the vault and rearrange their captive walls. Ultimately, the events are uncontainable, wild, living, and words do their best to keep up. Therein is the eternal joy of writing: chasing down the right way to put into characters and symbols the fulness of the heart.
That being said, I don’t really care for Cormack McCarthy or Ayn Rand. They communicate their visions pretty clearly, and what leeches through the vaults is toxic: wastelands of human selfishness and fragility, toxins which are never cleaned, but only preserved long enough to let us smile for a moment before the toxins eat our bones away, and efface any memory we had of joy. If you’re going to write from a vision of humanity as bleak as theirs, go with Vonnegut and at least you’ll go down laughing.
“Everything was fine and nothing hurt.”–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
