Sisters and brothers, pay attention. Today's what we might call Daniel Johnston Day at Lipscomb. The man's art will be on display on campus for the next few weeks, and he'll be on hand for a performance this evening at 8:00.
While one of the narrators in the documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, almost captured a sliver of something in describing Johnston's people as a kind of fundamentalist Glass family in the Salinger vein, his role as a practitioner of--what shall we call it?--the biblical imagination has gone largely unremarked upon, except in the most dismissive sense, and his place as a pilgrim within and without "Church of Christ" culture, a peculiar inheritance he shares with Roy Orbison, is mostly visible to those who share such attachments. At noon today, this situation will begin to change as Gregory Alan Thornbury offers a provocative word concerning Johnston's witness entitled "Does Daniel Johnston Believe More Bible Than You?" I'm set to moderate discussion and offer a response. I read the whole thing aloud to Sarah this morning and we were simply amazed. I know his offering will be available in published form at some point in the near future, but you can partake of the conversation personally if you can make it to Lipscomb within the next hour and a half. Exit your cubicle now.
"The Cult!" Stu and I exclaim almost simultaneously. And just as we realize it's a mashup underway Dory weighs in to assure us it's Flo Rida's "Good Feeling" that's going on. I'll bet this exchange is happening in millions of households; that it's all, in fact, calbrated. I make a mental note to educate Dory sometime soon concerning what 1985's "She Sells Sanctuary" once did for a sixteen-year-old Nashvillian on his way to marching band practice.
Just this morning, I was trying to give an account of how weirdly moved I was by the whole thing when Sarah chimed in to help me out: "It only worked on an emotional level?" Yes, sort of. "Trick-motional?" I suppose so. There's the admonition to love the life that we're living, the sound of a man of color asserting he'll be the President one day interspersed with the hope of walking on water, prevailing in a lion's den, and being possessed of a brand new spirit with all these loving interactions between people of differing class and ethnicity in historic scenes that definitely didn't actually go that way. And as my heart goes back to the teenage feeling, I see a white headbanger--I knew quite a few back then--being crowd-surfed in a bar and held up to a window where he exchanges an affectionate glance of celebratory solidarity with a brown-skinned woman across the street. This is as I'm still processing the white woman getting all free doing the robot which evokes, for me, the video for "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa & Soul Sonic force. I got weepy just trying to talk about it. Sarah listened and watched as I held the laptop in the bathroom but was largely unmoved. I guess that's what I get for being born in the sixties. I'd very much like to have a conversation with the Don Draper who conjured the thing.
Sarah listens, and she's happy for any and everyone's creative breakthroughs. But she generally views these expensive productions as a waste of perfectly good emotion. "Who broke through to what?" she'll likely ask. She bristles, prophetically I'd say, over the fact that the image of Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, could be sold to Apple to sell products cobbled together by people crushed by death-dealing working conditions. I don't have a "But..." to follow or qualify this sense of dis-ease except to register a few readings/findings/thoughts that have arisen in the days following.
I once asked my Comp II class to write out an account of an instance in which they believe they heard their own voice in someone else's. It could be something someone said, but it could also be a song, a film, a book, a visual, or a performance in which someone said what they wanted to say but differently or better or in a way that somehow uniquely got through to them. The prompt is usually preceded by a presentation of Bob Dylan's "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie." We all have a Woody Guthrie of one kind or another, I tell them. When I deliver this particular assignment again, I believe I'll follow it up somehow with this from Robert Pinsky's Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry: “What makes us all one—and what makes us all different—seems deeply involved with a voice: a voice that is both imagined and actual; both inner and social; both mine and someone else’s; that separates me and includes me. It will not do to sentimentalize this voice.”
I believe Sarah's often more alive than I am to the dangers--the cruelty even--of such sentimentalization. I see so many of my own hopes and dreams reflected back to me in this dadgum beer commercial, but there's a difference between getting choked up over scenes of racial/class harmony and giving--or receiving--a voice. Fantasy or lived relationship. Hyped-up, momentary feel-good versus actually paying attention to a living someone. One can pass a lifetime mistaking the two. It will not do to sentimentalize.
And this might be a completely ridiculous stretch, but Pinsky ends his book with Edward Arlington Robinson's "Eros Turannos" whose cadence--if you can believe it--slightly resembles that of Flo Rida's "Good Feeling." I don't know what this says about the way I process things, but I think it got through to me all the more thanks to the commercial. As I read it alongside Flo Rida, the one somehow enriches the other, but Robinson's offering is so sad; revivifyingly so, after a Super Bowl.
Machina ex deus. How else to explain their popularity despite the fact that they actually come from places that do not make us better people for owning them, the factories in China where more than a dozen young workers have committed suicide, some by jumping; where workers must now sign a pledge stating that they will not try to kill themselves but if they do, their families will not seek damages; where three people died and fifteen were injured when dust exploded; where 137 people exposed to a toxic chemical suffered nerve damage; where Apple offers injured workers no recompense; where workers, some as young as thirteen, according to an article in The New York Times, typically put in seventy-two-hour weeks, sometimes more, with minimal compensation, few breaks, and little food, to satisfy the overwhelming demand generated by the theatrics, the marketing, the packaging, the consummate engineering, and the herd instinct; and where, it goes without saying, the people who make all this cannot afford to buy it? "Who Was Steve Jobs?" - Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books Update: A glimmer of hope on the question of supply chain transparency here (w/ thanks to Geoff Lovett)
Enchanted Hills Camp for the Blind 1950 Wayne Miller
The mysteries don't scare me anymore. Someone once said that all silence is the recognition of a mystery, but I don't believe that anymore and I'm not sure I ever did. I think silence is many things (a sort of reading room or academy of mysteries, maybe), and many of them fine, but I don't think it's a recognition of a mystery. That's much too general. You might recognize a mystery in the loudest room or the most crowded street or in the face of a passing stranger or the furtive smile of someone you love. When you do recognize a mystery, though --when you really recognize a mystery-- I believe you're compelled to address it, to try to speak its name and describe its features, to give it a face so that you will recognize and remember it until the end of your days. Because it's no small thing, the recognition of a mystery, even though it happens all the time and we may not even be properly aware of it. Still, I believe such recognition calls for some banging of pots and pans, some fireworks, some exultant noise.
Hold Out Hope: An Old Pep Talk Brad Zellar
A few months ago, IV sat down with seasoned poet, musician, critic, and mystery describe-er, Joe Nolan, to talk religion. What follows is another beautifully described mystery. All who have ears, what do you think? Describe it in your way. Keep it essential, in the footsteps of Joe.
IV: Annie Dillard worded the sigh, "Who knows what God loves?" It messed me up for years. Now I hear it as a helpfully cathartic/poetic cry that holds a confession of deep love mixed evenly with complete and utter unknowing. Is faith even possible?
JN: There is a broken empty space where Christianity exists.
When Williams set down plainly his manifesto, "No ideas but in things," he was not being odd or silly or unintelligent, and what he said was not unprecedented. He was accepting a limit (for himself and his own work, first of all) that would protect things from the limitlessness of abstract ideas, abstract definitions, abstract rules and cases. Things--or, by implication, persons, places, and things--properly mark the limits of ideas. Things do not merely make manifest the general names and categories by which we describe them; they also impose a discipline on those generalities, so that the generalities do not become so general as to be unknown and unfelt in embodied particularity—so that they do not, so to speak, escape imagination and form. This is the divorce Williams speaks of early in Paterson: names and ideas becoming separate from the things they denote, so that “the language stutters." The tangible defines and disciplines the intangible. Concern for ideas in the absence of a concern for things, or at the expense of things, is capricious and dangerous both to things and to ideas. --Wendell Berry, The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
If you got something outside the common run that's got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolk; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Put the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances. "old Ephraim" to Chick Mallison in William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust
Tuesday Evening, IV staffers were challenged by professional game-ers Stephen and Jude Mason to participate in the meaning-making sport known as Apples To Apples. As aspiring followers of high-stake-surrealism, we were ready to make non-sense one bite at a time. Of course, all this ridiculousness begs the question:
In love we're all the same We're walking down an empty street Tonight and every night... Let's go walking down this empty street Let's walk in the cool evening light Wrong or right Be at my side The Blue Nile, Downtown Lights
So tonight The Blue Nile is playing. Children are watching Eddie Murphy in some new movie that isn't as wonderful as Bowfinger. The cups are filled with box wine kicks. Author and stand-up wordsmith, David Dark, is washing dishes. The inner-view begins.
IV: Alright... as we are comically quotidian at the moment, let's talk about Romance. What do you make of it?
DD: I want everyone to have it. I think of Portia in The Merchant of Venice when she told Bassanio that his gaze divided her heart, giving one half to him and the other, if it's still hers, also his. I think too of the tale Dmitri told his brother Alyosha (in Brothers Karamazov) of the night Katerina Ivanovna came to him, thanking him for sparing her drunken father some form of debtor's indignity by offering him her body. He was so moved by her beauty and nobility that, contrary to his usual pattern, he refused her offer. After she left, he stood there amazed at himself, overwhelmed at their exchange and so doubtful that he would obtain such heights of ecstasy again that he drew his sword and, by his account, came close to impaling himself. I think of something like the desire to pour your own life into what you take to be the depths of another human being. This is what comes to my mind when I think of romance.
Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward
Say to them, Say to the down-keepers, The sunslappers, The self-soilers, The harmony-hushers, “even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.” You will be right. For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.
This is where David Dark and Sarah Masen transmit the occasional Hey Looky Here as well as a li'l broadside or three every so often. Rock the Casbah, party peoples. Seriously. Rock the Casbah
