Why I Shouldn't Watch Youtube Videos

I can’t help but comment on the sheer volume of responses to the recent video, “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus.” And I have to start with an obvious point made by Chesterton all those years ago that a thing is not all the more serious for being taken seriously. The videographer—Jefferson his name—certainly has good intentions. He demands that a distinction be made between possessing a personal relationship with Jesus and adhering to a series of dogmas reducible to the name ‘religion.’ The video is little else besides the old Evangelical obsession with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as the element sui generis—God coming down to man—distinguishing Christianity from all other religious systems. The truth, of course, is that all religions claim to have the element sui generis which stands over and against other religious systems. His brand of Christianity is not all the more unique for claiming to be unique; it is only unique if it is right.

That’s not to say that I think he is wrong; nor is it to say that I think he is right. I’m unconcerned at present with the truth of his assertions. What interests me is that we’re talking about this guy’s claims at all. I have watched the video several times bemused and befuddled not at what he means but that so many people are interested in what he means.

Of course, I have two disadvantages. The first is that I have been overly exposed to the vocabulary of Evangelicalism. I find most of it empty of content and the rest worn out from overuse. The other, I confess, is that I get all snooty when the word “poetry” is used loosely. Sorry, but the guy is as much a poet as I am a pillow-case.

But I think when I boil it down, I am mostly frustrated with the quality of our public discourse. Why is there a giant kerfuffle over this particular video, over what is so obviously a semantic quib, over whether the belief in and personal relationship with Jesus is a religious statement? I understand the need to help justify one’s claims with a corresponding sentiment; what I don’t understand is why we’re doing quasi-religious theory in order to generate that sentiment. Why are so many so desperate to correct a small, insignificant error--if it is an error at all? I do not reject the importance of the answer, i reject the importance of the question. If he is right, so be it. If he is not....so what?

It is symptomatic, I think, of an Evangelical tendency to neglect good thinking. To put it less delicately, many people talk most adamantly concerning issues they do not understand. And the best indication that someone does not understand is that they get disproportionately emotional about it. The first markers of bad arguing are overreactions and oversimplifications. In this case, Jefferson is oversimplifying the Jesus/religion dichotomy, and everyone else is overreacting to his oversimplification. The reality of the situation is that he deserves a pat on the head for his efforts, and everyone else deserves a disapproving glance for taking him too seriously. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yet it is this general neglect of sensible discourse, this penchant for all things trite, which does more than irritate me. It worries me. It proves conclusively, I’m afraid, the failure of our church education to inculcate not mere doctrine, but quality of dispute. Really, it is the failure to educate Evangelicals in the principle of epistemological humility. Whatever happened to, “be wise as serpents but gentle as doves”?

The truth is that whatever else Christianity must be over the next century, it must not be this simple minded if it is to fit the needs of a dissonant American people. It must be able to harbor in one bay the multifaceted consciousnesses of millions whose internal lives are infinitely more complex than their forbearers. People used to live in a village, or a city, or, if they were truly experienced, a country. They used to do what they were told and get along. But we, dear friends, live in the world, and the world is fairy-land without the fairies. We have returned to Canaan, and the gods tempt us on all sides. Jesus conquered Olympus, I grant, but he has not yet conquered Absurdism (perhaps his most formidable and long-standing opponent), or the Eastern religions, or tribalism, etc. Baal greets us with smile at the click of a button or the purchase of cheap plane ticket. We will know, and already do know, Philistines whose actions don’t seem all that philistine. Idols are everywhere, and the people who flock to or fight against our Christianity will not be of one mind. This is America for heaven’s sake. This is the world. We had better get used to the idea of being wrong, as well as the idea that others might be right. We must learn the distinction between theory and dogma, and which must be defended (to the death) and when. We must gain that maturity which chooses which battles to indulge and which to ignore. It seems altogether obvious to me that Jefferson’s video does not deserve the attention it has received. It is thoughtful enough for a youth camp; it is not thoughtful enough to be treated as theology.

Bedtime: a short story

Bedtime

My pants fell to the floor, and I slid into bed. The covers were getting cold just like the beginning of last winter, and my pillow had traveled over to other side where she used to be. It was stuck underneath a sheet. I yanked it, and looking I noticed the fan unplugged. The little things annoy, like a dripping faucet or a bug bite or a fan unplugged. I turned over, and my boxers rolled up underneath my thigh as I rewound my motion, getting out of bed to go plug it in. The same motion of getting in only reversed. Like me now, the same height of passion only reversed. The outlet lay behind a leather chair, just out of arms reach, on the empty side where she used to be, like all things, just out of arms reach. They were unbunched now, and I walked slowly around the bed, lowering my gate till I began a crawl like in those evolution pictures where ameba changes into man, only reversed. Crawling to reach the outlet. The night was silent, and so were my words. Like all words, they crawled. Like me, my words crawled.

Keep still, I said; don’t talk. Keep your eyes open. Wait. Wait. Keep your eyes open. Her wide eyes took in the world. Her wide eyes watched the world. I crawled like my words toward the outlet. The carpet curved around my knees, my hands leaving tracks like deer tracks. Silence is a sound the second you say it. And it was silent when she went limp, and I say it, and she is still limp, and it is silent now and I say it. Just therapy. Just words. Unmeaning doesn’t mean unmeaning. It can’t; I can’t. I do not have the luxury of bricks or birds. Because I can see the stars fall from her eyes. I watched Orion tumble from his perch; I watched the big dipper droop and fall. She shouldn’t have turned the wheel. The headlights cracked and windshield and my ribs. She shouldn’t have turned the wheel.

I had changed the thermostat ten minutes ago, and finally heard the heater vibrating to life through the walls. The outlet was far away and I stabbed at it. The fan was already switched to on, pointing in the wrong direction. I knew because I could feel the air toward me on the floor and I remembered anew the white noise and the unmeaning. It blew fresh against my face, like the feel of her breathing while she kissed only not. She breathed heavily and with a pitch in her voice. The fan too has a pitch, only not. I pushed myself off the carpet, smelling her leftovers on the sheets. She’s not breathing, he said, and I mumbled words I do not remember. I do not remember what I said, and I can’t hear her sleeping, even though she’s sleeping. The fan and the white noise, and I call it silence, not her breathing, and I call it the unmeaning and the hum of the fan, as if that’s not a meaning. And I, bending over, retrograde, smelled her on the sheets again like in the evolution pictures.

I stood up, my shoulders slummed, and scudded back around the bed. The covers were still cold, so I made friction with my hand on the sheet and slipped back in. One should never stick their necks out for giraffes, I joked, and she laughed, her wide eyes and the orange juice everywhere. The waitress got a good tip. The unmeaning of the white noise and her breathing while she kissed. Nighttime breakfast and the waitress poured her more orange juice. She snorted, and could barely say I am cute, so she said it with her eyes, and I saw Orion’s tumble, and the waitress got a good tip. Keep your eyes open. I said. Wait. Wait. Then the fan wasn’t blowing on my face so I turned it toward me, and the covers felt cold again. I pulled them over my head forgetting and not forgetting to turn the lamp off.

Just therapy. Just words. She’s not breathing, he said. The orange juice stained my shirt and the blood stained the orange juice. I heard the ribs crack as he pumped her breast; him touching my breasts and it was ok and it was not ok. Her breasts not breathing. Him touching my breasts. My breast cracking at hers cracking. I said Wait. Wait. all selfish. And when she was limp and the stars were gone I knew my sin. She couldn’t talk, her eyes were afraid, and I knew my sin.

Words. Words. Words. She couldn’t talk and I have nothing to say. As if the story of the thing makes the thing more bearable. As if saying that the story isn’t therapeutic isn’t just a story wanting what’s therapeutic, and us learning another meaning ad infinitum. The banality of words. The banality of the dead. The banality of that goddman deer. The drama banal par excellence. Therapy is Lethe or death or her alive. Not God, not distraction. It is not even therapeutic to say there is no therapy. Just words. And yet we say them and feel the therapy. But we have only dominated with words, words, words. An infusion of meaning into the mundane, as if saying it is mundane isn’t just a substitute meaning. As if saying we don’t need any aid isn’t an attempt at some kind of aid. As if the revolt against the unmeaning isn’t grasping for meaning, and the rejection of hope doesn’t hope for something. We are hope. We are meaning so long as we are human. And it does not matter whether it is true, it does not matter what is true if truth is unmeaning. It is. I am. She was. Calling it languor doesn’t accustom you to the fan.

She used to pull the covers over my head because she knew I sleep like that. But the light still gets through, and even though they were over my head now the light still sneaked through. I remembered the lamp. The little things annoy, like a dripping faucet or a fan unplugged or a lamp still turned on. Me trying to sleep in the darkness, but the light always shining through. I whisked the covers back and stretch to pull the lamp chain. It slipped a bit, so I shifted further over to get a good grip and tugged. It was dark now, and I closed my eyes. They always have patterns, though less so in the light. How can I see colors when there is no light on the back of my eyelids? What am I seeing if not light?

Augustine Paper: Intro paragraph with footnotes

This paper explores Augustine’s hermeneutical approach to Genesis 1 in Confessions. It takes the more developed hermeneutic theory of On Christian Doctrine and seeks out parallel content (however seminal) in books XII and XIII of Confessions. Though the theoretical books of On Christian Doctrine (1-3 dated at 397) emerge at about the same time as Confessions (397-401), there is a measurable distance between the two hermeneutics.[1] Augustine tends toward inclusivism in Confessions. His method and theory intentionally license multiple ways of thinking and interpreting.[2] On Christian Doctrine¸ on the other hand, seeks to restrict which interpretations are permissible with the use of rules. Ultimately, this breaks down to the methodological difference between an autobiography and a philosophical treatise. Confessions is just that, a confession. In the first nine books, Augustine confesses his moral culpability: his lust, gluttony, pride, etc. In the latter four books, however, Augustine confesses his intellectual fallibility.[3] His licensing of and openness toward assorted interpretations in Confessions demonstrate his commitment to intellectual humility through contrition.

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[1] “Non solum sibi ssed aliis etiam”: Neoplatonism and Rhetoric in Saint Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, Martin Camargo, Source: Rhetorica: A Journal of the history of Rhetoric, Vol. 16. No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 393-408

[2] For an example found earlier in Confessions one can turn to Augustine’s account of well ordered passions. Augustine combines Platonic, Stoic, and Peripatetic traditions in his account of weeping (among other passions), where weeping is permissible given certain provisos and sin given others. He borrows the Platonic conception of justice (or well-orderdness), and combines it to the putative Stoic doctrine of pathaiei, all the while operating from within Aristotelian virtue ethics. For more, see Sarah Byers, “Augustine and the Cognitive Cause of Stoic ‘Preliminary Passions (Propatheiai), (Journal of the History of Philosophy 2003).

[3] Book X focuses on a theory of memory, book XI on a theory of time, and books XII and XIII on a theory of interpretation. Another way of looking at the difference from books 1-9 to 10-13 is between the sins of Augustine’s past and the sins with which he struggles while writing Confessions, i.e. past and present sins (see Margaret Miles, Desire and Delight, (New York: Crossroads, 1991), 101).

I Missed the Train and Started Talking

It’s uncommonly quiet sitting in 30^th Street Station after 10:00, eerie not hearing the gallop of shoes in the foyer. I lost my train ticket, missing the 9:19 to Thorndale, and I find myself looking at the tracks, lost like Odysseus in that abstract idea we call journey, trying to pass the time till the next train. Who was I, what haunted me, what hopes did I have? There is a difference between the shrink-wrapped narrative I tell people and the story I tell myself of myself. We are all hidden creatures I guess, each harboring greater or lesser degrees of what we take ourselves to be. Tonight I find myself wanting to tell my story as i see it.

A year ago this time I worked two jobs 65 hours a week as a pizza delivery driver and grounds crewman. The year previous I worked at a factory tossing bread into a trash can. The three years prior to that I was in undergrad, studying, making friends, losing friends, going through that all too common early twenties identity crisis. Sometimes I wish I could tell that boy breaking up with his first love some five years ago that it was only the beginning. That as he closed the closet door to cry and curl up on the floor, to slither down uninterrupted by the gawking eyes of his roommates, he was closing the door on naivety.

During my first class at UPenn listening to Peter Struck lecture on the phenomenological character of 20^th century myth-theory, I realized that I was a long way from cutting deep-dish pizzas into just 6 slices instead of the normal 8. I realized the distance between me now and the factory, the watching of the same motion of one’s right hand gripping bread-dough off an assembly line hundreds of times a day. It’s impossible to describe the drop in emotion waking up at 4:30 every morning to a pinpointed soreness in the shoulder muscle, a soreness which both reminds you of yesterdays woes and predicts todays. I was even further away from that fumbling undergraduate, kicked around from one emotion or belief to the next like a hacky-sack. And I was ages away from that boy who had traveled the world, who had experienced more by the time he was 18 than perhaps most people ever will.

Because if it is not true of me then it is not true of anyone. I have seen “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” And I do not merely mean the sublimity of an Namibian sunrise, perched atop Monkey Mountain (a name perfectly descriptive of the animal population) like a bird at dawn singing a song with my eyes. I do not mean the air of the Swiss Alps, how for some reason it’s so crisp you feel like you’re molesting it just by breathing it in. I do not mean the skip of the heart and trip of the legs turning the corner to see the Dome (pronounced dwomo) for the first time. I do not mean the serenity of sipping white wine with my sister atop a hotel, Athens below our feet and the Parthenon lit up brighter than a star against the silver night. I do not mean the alien beauty of the Blue Mosque or Hagia Sophia, so transcendent to all I’d known. I do not mean the lights of Hong Kong city, their worldliness and their splendor. I do not merely mean Venice Square, or the Botticelli room, or the Grunewald, or the Uffizi, or Ephesus, or Patmos, or the Aegean, or the smile of Namibian children, or laughing with Nidipo, or prayer under the Southern Cross, or the thrill of smuggling, or, or, or…

I also mean the love of my mother, how she nurtured and coddled and pushed and prayed for me in ways specific to my own needs. How she still does. I mean the love of my father, how he taught me the quality of a good man through both words and actions, his work ethic, his wisdom, his unyielding courage. I mean how my parents love each other, holding nothing but God in higher regard. I mean a sister and a brother with whom I can trust any secret. I mean the charisma and value of my closest friends through the years. I mean the love I have known on this earth. I challenge any of you to find someone who can equal me in graces given, the talents, the wealth, the health, the love.

But I am a man of extremes. I have loved and lost. I have held dying children in my arms. I have seen the gaunt expression of teenagers unsure of whether they have HIV. I have sympathized with depression not as an outsider but an insider. I have seen drooping cheeks, mouth agape in labored breaths staring in my mirror. I have suffered bouts of insomnia. I have had chronic hives, gained weight, smoked, drank, and ate the pain away. I have felt loneliness, bent over, heaving, taking another hot shower that doesn’t make the silence any more bearable. I have been so angry that I have blacked out. I have spent months on end waking up in terror, not knowing why or if it would ever stop, wondering how the first thought of my day can be the discovery that I am horrified. I know what it is to look at beauty and hate it because it gives me hope, every smile a heralder and harbinger of heartache. I have both wished for death and feared it. It’s a violent juxtaposition owning the strength of youth while feeling the defeat of age. I have died many times, have clenched my teeth and pumped my fists toward the sky more than I have bent my knee in repentance and gratitude.

I have had what theorists call religious experience, where 4 hours seemed like 10 minutes, and I was so overwhelmed with God or Good or whatever you want to call it that I could scarcely withstand it. I have been in such states of angst that (and there is no other way of explaining it) the colors of the world grew richer, darker, thicker. I have been so in love that I would have gone to hell for someone. I. Have. Felt.

I may be rightly accused of not expressing myself, but I may never be accused of having nothing to express. There is a reason I have the poet’s instinct, the incessant need to revalorize every experience. Mine are myriad, variegated, and stifling. Being overtly self-aware, I have an especially acute sensitivity to suffering, and potent memory of my joys. My silence is not an indication of lack of something, it is the opposite. A taciturn poet is a man drowning in meanings, not the other way around. There is too much, not too little. Silence has been my answer, sometimes for better sometimes not. Part of the time I believe that the effusions of youth are self-centered—perhaps I am exercising that demon right now. Part of the time I am afraid to feel; I put my trust in the comfort and stability of meaninglessness. Part of the time I don’t feel because I’d rather listen or help. Some of it is sin, some habit, some a little of both, some of it is good.

There is a sense in which a person can be actively loving by actively seeking to be loved. Egoism of intent turns out to be altruism by the nature of things. Saying you want someone to hear you, love you, listen to you, is to say that they are valuable enough to risk letting them in on the story you tell yourself of yourself, even to help you define what you mean by ‘you’. And I think I can get away with this post as something more than simply therapeutic—more than some effusious rambling— because I don’t often ask others to hear my story as I see it (however jumbled and non-linear it may appear here). It is an invitation of a sort, an apology for my silence over the years, even a treatise of regret. But whatever else it is (and it is many things), it is certainly mine, my story, my way of seeing myself.

10 Lines from 10 Authors

The love of poetry is rare these days. It’s a lonely hobby, I’m afraid. Few are those who read it; fewer still are those who can read it properly, with enjoyment. I am willing to publicly disgrace myself (probably because it is 3 o’clock in the morning) by admitting that I have a mound of poetry books piled on my bathroom sink. Added together, you’d find a leaning tower of poetry stacked 3 feet high --no exaggeration--within arms length of the toilet. It has been like this for years, giving me plenty of time to rummage through thousands of poems. What follows are some nifty lines from poems I particularly enjoyed—though you will not find my favorite poems in this list. They come in no order and completely off the top of my head. As such the indentations, grammar, and all such details will be desperately off. My apologies. I wish only to convey those things I’ve enjoyed, without having to put in the effort normally demanded during daytime hours. I simply needed something interesting enough to keep me from being bored and boring enough to put me to sleep.

10. “Even now, I know that I have savored the hot taste of life/, Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast,/Just for a small and forgotten time/ I have had full in my eyes from off my girl/, The whitest pouring of eternal light,/ The heavy knife, as to a gala day.” – from the final stanza of Black Marigolds translated by E.P. Mathers

9. “lady I swear by all flowers” –e. e. cummings

8. “is it so Wind, is it so? All that you and I do know is that we saw fly and fix ‘mongst the flowers and reeds of Styx, yesterday, for a bed of tiger cubs, a great fly of Beelzebubs, the bee of hearts, which mortals name: Cupid, Fie, and Love for shame.”—From Song of the Stygian Naiads by Thomas (Lovelace?...Love something) Beddoes

7. “May she be granted beauty and yet not/ Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,/ Or hers before a looking glass, for such,/ Being made beautiful overmuch,/ Consider beauty a sufficient end,/ Lose natural kindness and maybe/The heart revealing intimacy/ That chooses right, and never find a friend.”—From A Prayer For My Daughter by the ineffable William Butler Yeats

6. “or do the Modern dance. To you that’s destiny, to us it’s chance”—from The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning by W.H. Auden

5. “so Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down today. Nothing gold can stay” from Nothing Gold can stay by Robert Frost

4. “his effable, effin ineffable, singular inscrutable name”—from The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot

3. “for art is a form of catharsis, and love is a permanent flop, and work is the province of cattle, and rests for a clam in a shell, so I’m thinking of throwing the battle—would you kindly direct me to hell”—from Coda by Dorothy Parker

2. “And happy melodist, unwearied, Forever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! More happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting and forever young, All breathing human passion far above.” --From Ode on a Grecian Urn by the grandiloquent John Keats

1. “life is over there on the shelf”—by Emily Dickenson