Christianity and the force of history

It was said in the recent CNN special “After Jesus” that if not for the conversion of Constantine, Christianity would never have become the force that it is, essentially that Christianity like all religious movements is an historical accident that could have been stopped at any number of points had this or that chance event not occurred—and any number of intellectual Christians will be suspicious of the claim that God helped Constantine win the battle; we simply don’t see good evidence for such a God. But perhaps history does not work this way after all. Christianity was a growing force in the empire at the time of Constantine, though many emperors and others had tried hard to get rid of it. Like a bubble rising or a stream falling this force was looking for a place to emerge. It happened to emerge here. Had Constantine lost, it would have emerged elsewhere. But it was going to happen because it was a swelling force in history—a force which the church, for all we know, prevents like a dam as much as it channels like a dredge.

Alarmed

Children used as fuel in woodstoves to heat the house—
Oh well, I thought, in this hideous dream, probably too late
to help them anyhow, though they must be in pain, but that’s the way
we heat our homes these days, and though I went back to reading the book
because, after all, there was work to do, I awoke in a sweat
and remembered—I had forgot to set the clock.

Somewhere inside me lives someone who knows how to shock me.

He uses images because he does not have words.
And never the obvious ones
like an image of me failing to set the alarm.
I’d like to know who he is and how he knows so much
and why he keeps such careful track of everything
I’m hoping to lose—like time.
And why he spends all night
shouting at me.

 

The Sensor in the Ceiling

The sensor in my ceiling is watching me

It wants me to move.

If I do not obey, it will throw me into darkness.

It’s like a cowboy shooting bullets at my feet

To make me dance.

Closed Form Poem

by Alan Lindsay

 
 

This is a closed form poem. The rhythm

is invariable. It does not rhyme.

But the third line has to be

enjambed and the fifth line always begins with the word

yellow. I am sorry. You cannot alter the subtle play of vowels.

The glottal stops, the fricatives—all stay the same.

Also caesura, strategically deployed. You cannot change

the words, or the order of the words or any of the line

breaks. The form is locked tight as a drum or painter’s canvas.

 
 

I have created the form. It is mine.

How can you make the poem your own?

You can change the name beneath the title.

That name is not part of the poem and does not belong

to the form. You can tack the poem to a tree

deep in the woods, overlooking a stream. You can place the poem

on a pole in a field above the swaying grass, above the gazing grain.

You can tattoo the poem to your breast and embarrass men by asking them

to read it to the final period. You can recite it before crowds on New York City streets

hurrying to work with cardboard cups of Starbucks in their free hands.

 

Open Form Poem

 

 

 

Why would that be?

Reality gives us too little to think about, too little stimulation for the brain, so we create puzzles and literature and math and physics. They keep our brains busy, our minds from imploding. They satisfy our craving to be curious. But why would evolution spend the resources necessary to create a being dissatisfied with survival? Nature’s principle for success is excess: cast millions of seeds in the expectation of a dozen trees. Create a universe whose size exceeds all image or metaphor in the hope (if hope is part of the universe) of a handful of planets capable of sustaining life and of creatures capable of looking back at it and saying “what?” Because if it make sense to say that the universe is for anything, that is what it is for.)  Any God this universe has is not interested in efficient manufacture.  Why would that be?

A reconsideration of Wittgenstein’s “Family Resemblances” and “Language Games.”

What baffled Wittgenstein was his inability to define “games,” a simple concept, easily understood, but which defies the impulse of the dictionary. I have no interest in defining games. But I am very interested in his bafflement. There’s nothing special about a word that cannot be defined. What would be interesting would be a word that can be defined. What’s fascinating is the fact that anyone ever thought up the concept of dictionary, which is the legacy of Platonism, which got everything backwards. How much of history and philosophy and just thinking has been confused by the idea that meaning is something that words have rather than something, as every poet knows, that we use words to produce: always in time, at a moment in history. The moment stretches and changes through memory and writing (which is any form of recording) forward (Shakespeare would have said “backward”) into time. But meaning only ever exists at a moment, the moment of saying, the moment of hearing (writing/reading). We want to be as precise as possible, but not based on the meaning of the word, based rather on the history of the use of the word—the contexts in which it has been used to create meaning. The presupposition that meaning exists always already “out there,” and that our job is to find it, inscribe it, and pass it on is a metaphor less accurate and less useful than the metaphor deployed here, that words are used to inscribe meanings available but never yet accessed in language, by novel combinations of words. What is “out there” is the pressure of “being” at this moment on the writer (thankfully, me) to reassemble the words to settle for now the image whose formulation is functional, which makes our present make better sense. Since words like “game” (and all other words, those that obviously defy definition—poetry and history and love and nation and person and on and on—and those that we think do not) mean only in moments, then all uses are stipulative. And so in a moment of use “game” have have all the precision of the number “2”’ and “2” all the vagueness of the concept “nice.” And what’s surprising is that it is surprising. 

The Paradox of Memory

Memory is fallible.

Every time you access a memory you change it.

To retain a memory you must access it often.

The more vividly you remember a long-ago event the less accurate that memory is.

The passion then that became your being is therefore now more metaphor than substance.
True only as metaphors are true.

If the goal is an accurate account of an event, recording works best. You can put it down just then and put it away and never think about it--until, years later, you stumble upon your image of this forgotten time and read it like a story, one you feel you may have read before, recalling each line as it emerges, unable to anticipate what’s next, as though the account you are reading is of something that happened to someone else.

Which it is.

It is always the destiny of history to be resurrected

as story. 

Murphy's Law and Gun Control

I don’t know the origin of Murphy’s law. I suppose the origin is only a google away, but it doesn’t matter. The law itself states, as we all know, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” with a sometimes corollary, “at the worst possible time.” The corollary is clearly a late add-on, intended to intensify the perceived cynical joke that is the heart of the law. But the law itself, though comically formulated, is in fact a law. Better stated, “Anything that can happen, will happen, given enough time.” It explains why intelligent life showed up in the universe despite the extraordinary chances against it (by the reckoning of some). The universe is that big and that old and given certain conditions it is possible. It tells us also, then, that even if we were to eliminate all causes of death except one—let’s say car accidents—then eventually everyone will die in a car accident. Much could be accomplished if we were to simply keep Murphy’s law more prominently in mind when we do such things as build nuclear power plants and put in place ample safeguards to insure against meltdown. There are not enough safeguards in the universe to insure against meltdown. Or when we argue about gun control: no law (as the right wing always reminds us) will prevent random slaughter. Or when we put locks on houses: no lock will prevent unwanted access. Safeguards and locks and laws are all means of reducing chances, lowering percentages.  That doesn’t mean they are useless.

More on Time and Language and Borges and Nietzsche

Borges’ “New Refutation of Time,” and Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return,” rest on the same thing (for “thing” we could read “fact” or “error”): that the world of language has no way of conceptualizing the world of experience that can fit into itself (that can “comprehend”) time. Our system of concepts as well as our vocabulary is too poor. We simply cannot say what we intuit regarding time in an irrefutable fashion.

A close look at Borges’ essay reveals how tricky the problem is: is it according to experienced that time exists or according to intellection? Experience tells us both that time exists and that time does not exist. Borges walks down the streets around his old neighborhood. One moment succeeds another. He stops at a wall,

I kept looking at this simplicity. I thought…: This is the same as thirty years ago… Perhaps a bird was singing and for it I felt a tiny affection, the same size as the bird; but the most certain thing was that in this now vertiginous silence there was no other sound than the intemporal one of the crickets. The easy thought ‘I am in the eighteen-nineties’ cased to be a few approximate words and was deepened into a reality. I felt dead, I felt as an abstract spectator of the word; an indefinite fear…. I did not fear that I had returned upstream on the supposed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I was the possessor of a reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity.

It is the same thing expressed by Keats, “Thou wast not born for death immortal bird.” Borges also experiences this eternity, as do we all, he tells us, in music and other “human moments,” such as suffering and pleasure, moments repeated exactly from one person to another, moments, we might add (contra Bakhtin) that are the basis for art and language, when identity fades and different experiences lose their difference.

Time is experienced as successive and eternal, as existing and as not existing. In language it is posited as the only explanation for phenomena and yet it is uncapturable, inexpressible. It must be posited because it cannot be shown to exist at all. (To call it “self-evident” is to say the same thing in a disingenuous way, trying to erase the very problem—not visible to language.) Time’s existence and time’s nonexistence are both part of both language and experience, but as four nonoverlapping circles.

This cannot imply that our experience is true and our intelligence is false. But it does mean that we have to choose which to accept before we can choose how to respond. (How could one stay neutral here?) Let’s choose, provisionally, momentarily, experience over language not for no reason, but only because it’s more interesting to do so. It leaves us more to say.

This problem of the inadequacy of language to its presumed object is of course not limited to the comprehension of time. This inadequacy of language to match experience (subjectivity) or the world (objectivity) accounts for the whole being and frustration of philosophy as well as literature. It’s demonstrable, for example, of the infamous cogito, the so-called foundational statement of modern philosophy. The statement itself has become ragged for all the darts tossed at it: I think, therefore I am. In its favor, it functions as well as statement can to capture the experience of being. But it does not make logical sense—it fails in terms of language. So here’s the point: contradiction is the sine qua non of statement. Go back through these very paragraphs and graph the contradictions.

In his “New Refutation,” Borges makes the marvelous statement that night pleases because it “suppresses idle details, just as memory does.” Reading—in fact any comprehension of language—requires darkness as well as light. All coherence, all meaning, is washed out if the reader comprehends the full scope of every word. Every word is a potential metonymy. And every statement is a riddle of contradictions that must be ignored for the reception of the thread meaning that runs through it under the fabric of noise. All understanding requires the good faith and hard work of the receiving brain. 

Tomorrow was Christmas

Tomorrow was Chirstmas said Mr. Escher yesterday there will be snow.

Ambaguam, Beginning at the End

Ambaguam, Beginning at the End

He's not human.

My Dearest John

Please,

stop loving me.

It’s distracting.

Oh, I’m not saying you don’t do an admirable job smiling and chatting

and walking nonchalantly away,

but that smile and that catch in your chat

and those eyes that affix my eyes

so I can’t duck or nod or turn

my head. I want to spend a night in bed

without this stone in my chest.

Is that too much to ask?

I want to walk outdoors on a cool spring morning and feel the world’s effervescence

without howling.

Stop reminding me about Paris. Stop asking

if I’m okay. (I’m not, okay?) Stop telling me you have a free hour

every Thursday after lunch.

Stop running past my window

in your cleverly reflective running shorts

and matching shoes. I’m here,

but I won’t tell you.

Dear John, somewhere

someone has days

she can’t get through

because of what she thinks when she thinks

of you. Dear John,

I don’t care that the past can never be put away,

That what it will have been is always yet to be determined.

I do not care.

This has to end.

Love,

Jane

Redeeming the Past

"The past can never be put away because what it will have been is always yet to be determined."

One theological difficulty I've long had has been the problem of redemption. An event happens, an evil event, how can that event be redeemed? How can the evil be erased? It cannot be made not to have happened. It can't be defined away. What amount of "good" and of what type pays for it? It's not a question of a willingness to accept payment in lieu of justice--as happens endlessly in the courts. Nor is it the idea that "if we do this good thing than that bad thing will not have been in vain." It may be that it was not in vain. But was it ever paid for? Can you ever say "I'd rather have the good that came out of my child's death than the for the child not to have died." The good doesn't pay back the evil no matter how good it is. The whole economic metaphor breaks down because payment is made in an unconvertible currency. The bad thing was evil, the good that it was transformed into was good. But that legerdemot that allows us to substitute "evil" for the event doesn't fool anyone. Much more needs to be said here.

But the next step in thought is what I have quoted above. The event itself has never stopped happening, whatever it was. The past has never sat still. What it was is always changing. And in this lies the hope for the redemption of the past. In principle, if a tragedy can be ameliorated by a subsequent love, then is it possible for enough love to redeem it? The goal is not to make it to have been okay, but to make it no longer to have been evil. If any degree of evil can be erased, then the whole can be overcome. Much more needs to be said.

Language and the NRA

If this is a blog about language, then it's impossible not to comment on the language of the NRA. Two things: the mantra-like argument that makes one's ears bleed: "The problem is large and complex. And these new restrictions will not solve it." A statement of fact--that doesn't address the question it pretends to address. A response to an argument the other side never made. Yes, the problem is large and complex. And certainly new gun laws are, in relation to the scope of the problem, small. But large, complex problems do not often admit of simple solutions. New gun laws aren't meant to SOLVE the problem. They ADDRESS the problem. They are one facet of a comprehensive solution that people of good will, be there such people on both sides, work out together. The only sensible response of the NRA and its supporters would be, "I don't believe this will help much if at all. But it's also not much of a sacrifice. No one needs military weapons. No one needs 100 round clips. If giving these up allows us to move on, we'll do that, because the goal to see that no more people die in these massacres. And if we don't take the first step, we'll never get to the second step. And anyway, no sane person would suggest that these laws make the world more dangerous." But of course they don't. They stall and preach an absurdist reading of the second amendment and make clear their primary interest is not life or law or order but the free right to guns of all kinds.

Second, behind the effectiveness of this childish argument lies a perverse (one is tempted to say insane) reading of the second amendment. No great effort is required to discover that the second amendment exists because Washington and company did not want the U.S. to have a standing army. They wanted a people's army. Because of real threats from foreign powers, the government was willing to risk the dangers of having weapons in the hands of citizens so they could call on those citizens at a moment's notice and not have to go through the trouble or expense of buying guns for a whole army. (There was no factory production of guns in 1780.) The purpose of the second amendment was to prevent the U.S. from having a standing army. It was a backdoor strategy. The very text reveals the forces of contention from which these words emerged.

The amendment in the end is somewhat cowardly and even cynical. Yes, it says, we know that there will be violence out there among the people. Intelligent people are aware that a country full of armed citizens is a minefield. We will lose good people, innocent citizens because of this law. But the trade off is security for the whole nation. And we'll take that--because we do not want an army. We do not want a force that could sweep in and challenge the civilian government.

All of that is forgotten in this debate (which is more a shouting match than a debate). Even the Supreme Court with its "original intentionists," pretend that the amendment simply guarantees every citizen a right to a gun for SELF-defense. The "militia" clause is erased. The intention which in this case is clear and available is simply ignored. And the nation becomes more militarized as it becomes more polarized.

If the people are out buying more and more guns simply because they don't like the elected president, we have a huge and complex problem, not one that can be solved or addressed by maintaining liberal gun laws.

Oz House or OzHouse (never Oz-House)... It's getting hot in there....

http://www.amazon.com/Oz-House-ebook/dp/B008YTUW2U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357867109&sr=8-1&keywords=oz+house+lindsay


Newly published. A fun frolic through fairy stories and lands.

Time Travel--evolved thoughts

Actually the problem with time travel (I know, what does this have to do with Language, Poetry OR Gardens?) never seems to be discussed at all--though I'm sure it HAS to have been broached somewhere. It's this: Matter cannot be two places at the same time. A body is nothing but a sack of molecules. And every molecule in your body already exists at any time you would want to come from or go to. You see the problem? A body cannot come back in time because IT'S ALREADY THERE--not in the person who exists (perhaps) under the same name, i.e. not in a younger self. That's the least of the issues, since his body won't necessarily have very many of the same molecules (a little out of my league with that claim), but because the molecules that make up the body in 2056 exist in loaves of bread and the bark of trees and the guts of whales in 1972. If I go back from the one time to the other, where am I going to get the molecules? These are not copies of those molecules. They are the same molecules. I don't see a solution for this problem.

The History of the Nude in Art

After each veil comes off there is a

pause. A moment for memory. A

moment for art. Still life skin

flushed against colored silk, the azure,

the orange, the crimson, the gold

diaphanous the aureole’s pink browned

through the green of the final veil the dun

curved flesh alien tinted from the upraised arm

to the hip, the bumps of the spine like thumbs the black

pubic hair the round rump—and then the skin and then the skin

too unwinds to the white bones then the bones curve and bend like

branches or rivers like love and like tears over contours of earth like wind

that runs over outcrops and drop-offs the bones yearning for a shape

that will voice the bodily essence static and eternal whose essence is

only

motion.

A Straight Christian's Ruminations on Gay Marriage

I am constantly stupefied and bewildered over the church’s opposition to gay marriage. Like many others, though still a minority of those who profess Christ, I hear echoes of what is among the most embarrassing and revealing episodes in the history of the church—its centuries of support for slavery. Clearly now the church recognizes it was on the wrong side of history then, and it’s on the wrong side of history now. The difference is that then—by the nineteenth century at least—the church was in a meaningful way at least divided on the issue. How long before the church truly divides over this? How long before the church crosses over to the side of empathy and compassion and moral defensibility? When will the church stop being a vehicle for conservative, reactionary “decency” and truly take on the challenge and mantle of Christ? And most importantly, why does it always take so long?

                The church should be at the forefront of this issue. It should not lag and wait coyly. It should not wait until the real work of justice is done before it decides to jump aboard. The constant, historical reluctance of the institution to occupy the position at the forefront of history which is proper to it does incalculable damage to the gospel.

                Those who wish to deny the honor of marriage to people who are not straight love to quote St. Paul in the book of Romans. I have to say that it’s not surprising that a first century Roman Jew would have an unenlightened understanding of human sexuality. I don’t think the reasons for this need to delay us. The problem, for so much of Christianity, is that the words here spoken are in the Bible and like the bible’s endorsements or seeming endorsements of slavery and patriarchy and so much that is unenlightened, it’s hard for people whose faith is in the Bible instead of the God of the Bible to let go of anything it says or seems to say. If they did, they’d have to think. They’d have to use the spirit to interpret the law. But this is of course just what the Jesus of the Bible so often castigates the religious leaders of his time for failing to do.

                Moreover, in the same Bible, by the same author, we also read this: “But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”

                Is the passion of a gay person somehow less intense, is it easier to control that the passion of a straight person? Can a homosexual find sexual satisfaction in the bed of a straight person? And is it right to ask him or her to do so? Do we really believe we are following the scripture and supporting “biblical marriage” if we say to the straight person, “if you cannot control your passion you should marry” but to the gay person, “if you cannot control your passion, good luck”? If, as the church maintains that the sexual act is only proper within the confines of marriage, then the church’s opposition to sin is tantamount to condemning a minority of God’s people to a fight it acknowledges they have not chosen and will not be able to win. The God that made them gay will not grant them the gift of celibacy merely because their society refuses to recognize their sexuality.  We know this.

                Gay marriage is morally and biblically the equivalent of straight marriage. The church has a religious obligation not merely to endorse but to be on the forefront of the movement to have it legalized and blessed. The failure to do so condemns not the gay people who ask for acceptance among the people of God but the church itself. It undermines the moral authority of the church—already so terribly damaged by its insistence on standing firm on the wrong side of history. And it drives good people—straight and gay—out, in search of alternative institutions or religions of greater moral authority, or way from all such voluntary institutions altogether. It is not enough that there by a few socially progressive churches that tolerate or even endorse gay marriage.  Any church that wants to call itself Christian and which professes to learn its faith in any part from its scripture needs to stand foursquare behind this issue and these people, these children of God.

Why Stephen Hawking Is Wrong about Time Travel

Hawking tells us that if time travel were possible someone from the future would have come back by now. Time is fragile. It is so fragile that whenever anyone from the future does succeed in going back in time all of history from that moment forward is erased. As soon as the time traveler sets foot in the past he ceases to exist. He’s never been born. If he has never been born, however, he can no longer go back in time. And as soon as a history exists in which he does not go back in time, all history is restored. Does this create an infinite loop? Not from the point of view of the time traveler. The forward pressures of time are such that though this all takes place in a millisecond, at the expiration of that millisecond he is already past the time wherein he returned to the past. His only experience is that he has failed. He is still inside his time machine, and he is still in the present. And it does not matter how often he does this. Thinking he has failed, he may build and rebuild his machine. Whenever it works it will seem to have failed, because time is self-correcting. The moment of return and restoration is marked by a pause in memory, the forgetting and remembering of a word.

                What happens to all those new histories? Nothing is lost. Each of those trips to the past creates a branch that continues, diverges from the restored time, growing forever in a new direction.