Piety ought to be inseparable from critical thinking

Here's the teacher making plain:

We have to pay debt to the sources to the sources of our being. That includes mom and dad. That includes the community that shaped you. That includes the nation that both protects you as well as gives you some sense of possibility. And for religious folk, of course, it includes God. Now, the problem is there has to be some Socratic energy in one's piety. Piety ought to be inseparable from critical thinking.

--Cornel West in conversation with Eduardo Mendieta

People Have the Power

"The tactics are unorganized, largely leaderless and only just beginning," says Robin Wright.

And this just in from the BBC.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

 

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

And hard it is in spire of blazoned days.

 

We are the mimics.Clouds are pedagogues.

The air is not a mirror but bare board,

Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro

 

And comic color of the rose, in which

Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips

Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

Prophetic Alignments

This is the comprehensive wit of Hortense Spillers. One of my favorite people in the world. I'm not sure how to adequately recommend her beyond urging people to google away and pay heed to the care and subtlety and subversiveness with which she puts things.
I here paste one text she draws out and places along a certain continuum (a "prophetic alignment" she calls it). It's Thomas Jefferson on the slave economy in which he lived and moved and upon which he had his material being:
"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of the situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference. The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."
Think about it.

To begin, the image is the work of Jaap Scheeren, a recent fascination of mine. And what follows is something I wrote the morning after our relationship with Noisetrade had begun. Here tis:

“I made $10.95!” Sarah exclaimed from behind a laptop this morning. She went to bed, woke up, and witnessed the appearance of nearly eleven dollars worth of public affirmation of her song-craft which braved the oceans of Internet while she slept. All manner of things made well.

I wish I was more the lyrical wit, but I’m the one in this relationship who types out the largest number of straightforward sentences (My books, let me say it again, are footnotes for her lyrics). It befalls me to offer the following report.

A little over two years ago, Sarah had a couple of performance appointments closely aligned, Calvin’s Festival of Faith and Music (Emmylou, Neko, Sufjan) and the Greenbelt Festival (Billy Bragg, Over the Rhine), and she suspected it would be impolite to show up without what the young people call product. With the help of Todd Greene and Tony Doling of Bulb, Chris Leonard  and Brad Ritter of the Contemporary Music Center, and Brother Jon Foreman of Switchfoot, she’d long accumulated three EP’s worth of material and now saw fit to put together individual, everyone different, stenciled artworks (Like snowflakes I tell you!) to house the plastic. They sold, we might say, like hotcakes, but the demand, mail-order-paypal-wise, was a little more than we could comfortably manage. She ended the online dealio, but often sent them out for free (her anxious partner noticed) to e-mailers whose demands dribbled in via the mostly quiet but still glowing website.

So, just last night, we’re having dinner with Mark and Molly Nicholas at our home. Inquiries concerning one another’s projects leads to Mark’s casual mention of Noisetrade goings-on. We begin to suspect this is what ancient texts refer to as The Shape of Things to Come. So many of our friends and neighbors have climbed aboard. Why not? Joe Kirk and Derek Webb strike us as upstanding citizens. Wouldn’t it be cool it being a gift economy we’re in and all? Molly types away, images are shared, and after they’ve gone home we get an e-mail pronouncing it a done deal. We’ll have the other EP’s up over the next few months.

I think it’s an excellent fit. People who extol Sarah’s music have always been potential friends and co-conspirators rather than--what do they call them?—fans? Share away, my friendlies. Publicize as you see fit. Blog if you want to. Blog around the world. Consider yourselves deputized. Enjoy. 

Speaking is resurrection

I really enjoyed this. Think you all will too.
Sarah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co-c5gPWfiM

A Blessed Interdependence Day To Everyone

So, as Kevin's response indicates, this entry initially contained something completely different image-wise: Pat Benatar video-performing that amazing song, "We Belong to the Light," which fit with something Rich King said to me ("Happy In(ter)dependence Day"). The embedding was regrettably disabled.
I now give you this wondrous image kindly lent to me by my friend, Derek, of the Most Everybody Loves Their Lives blog. You can imagine how agreeably geeked it leaves me.
I hope everyone's had a redemptive-feeling weekend.

I am not yours

You Whose Name

You whose name is aggressor and devourer.
Putrid and sultry, in fermentation.
You mash into pulp sages and prophets,
Criminals and heroes, indifferently.
My vocativus is useless.
You do not hear me, though I address you,
Yet I want to speak, for I am against you.
So what if you gulp me, I am not yours.
You overcome me with exhaustion and fever.
You blur my thought, which protests,
You roll over me, dull unconscious power.
The one who will overcome you is swift, armed:
Mind, spirit, maker, renewer.
He jousts with you in depths and on high,
Equestrian, winged, lofty, silver-scaled.
I have served him in the investiture of forms.
It’s not my concern what he will do with me.

A retinue advances in the sunlight by the lakes.
From white villages Easter bells resound.

--Czeslaw Milosz

A word of advice

With thanks to Alli Steen Magee

Democracy to Come

I'm beginning to think that the possibility of following the likes of Persiankiwi (whose view of her/his own links is blocked by his/her govt'), Tehranbureau, and their equivalents around the sweet old world is reason enough for people to sign up for twitter. Other media outlets do not (cannot) cut it on a day like today.

Paying Attention

A telephone plea from Mir Hossein Mousavi:
I AM UNDER EXTREME PRESSURE TO ACCEPT THE RESULTS OF THE SHAM ELECTION. THEY HAVE CUT ME OFF FROM ANY COMMUNICATION WITH PEOPLE AND AM UNDER SURVEILLANCE. I ASK THE PEOPLE TO STAY IN THE STREETS BUT AVOID VIOLENCE

The Just Shall Know That They Only Live By Faith

Faith means through a mirror dimly or “through a glass darkly.” It’s what we do. I leave the rest to Caputo whose On Religion and What Would Jesus Deconstruct? are worth looking into. Sans, incidentally, means without:
“Through a glass darkly…means sans apocalypse. Even the Apocalypse is sans apocalypse. That means that the believers in that book should temper their claims about The Revelation they (believe they) have received, since it is their interpretation that they have received a revelation, while not everyone else agrees. A revelation is an interpretation that the believers believe is a revelation, which means that it is one more competing entry in the conflict of interpretations.” John Caputo, On Religion
Interpret away, my friendlies.

What good would it be to them?

Why Some People Do Not Read Poetry

Because they already know that it means
stopping and without stopping they know that
beyond stopping it will mean listening
listening without hearing and maybe
then hearing without hearing and what would
they hear then what good would it be to them
like some small animal crossing the road
suddenly there but not seeming to move
at night and they are late and may be on
the wrong road over the mountain with all
the others asleep and not hitting it
that time as though forgetting it again

--W.S. Merwin

There is many a small betrayal in the mind

This one gets cut and pasted all over the place, but it felt like a redeeming act to put it up in yet another corner. My favorite poem lately. Ladies and gentlemen, William Stafford...

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

May The Tradition Be Enriched This Weekend

Kirk: "You're not a fish, Spock."
Spock: "Nor am I a man."

If You're In The Area...

This Thursday (May 7th) at 11:30AM, I'll be joining the sweet people of the Nashville Cohort at the Flying Saucer (affixed lovingly to the back half of Union Station) for food and conversation. All are welcome. You're advised to call the place sometime beforehand if you're wanting to order a dish.
Not a whole lot to report upon here other than gratefulness for the good vibrations consistently sent my way from people who are reading the book. The "book launch" consisted of people who'd gathered at Portland Brew and it went on for maybe three hours. Sarah thanked everyone for coming. I expressed my desire that everyone would introduce themselves to someone they didn't know, and then we just yakked away. Every fifteen minutes or so I'd invite people to share a quote, a line from a song or a poem, or anything they had in their heads that seemed fitting. Lots of Willy Wonka gems, some Gerard Manley Hopkins, and even one instance where Tony Doling and Joe Nolan saw fit to re-enact a scene from Oliver Stone's Wall Street. It occurred to many of us that this sort of thing is probably what we're hoping for when we "go out" to a cafe or a bar or a party, and facilitating the now-people-share-words moment(s) seems to do the trick. I suspect we'll do it again.
One quote I didn't share but which seems to speak to what went well that night (and to what probably happens whenever we rightly say that anything at all goes well) is this: “Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”
Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”
Hope this finds everyone feeling (or nearing) well.

Magic At Its Deepest

Sarah here.
Just reading Harry Potter book 3 and came across this line, "When one wizard saves another wizard's life, it creates a certain bond between them." This had me remembering an exchange I had with David yesterday that I wanted to share.

A friend a long time ago said that you become what you are afraid of. Paralyzed by the truth of that thought yesterday (my list of things I am afraid of is impossibly, "I can't believe I still exist", gods help me, long), David and I had a suspended silence sit-down. Amid the recondite, thickening clouds, the voice we hear when we think "David Dark" cut clear as day with this line:

We become what we love.

Hope that one rings through when anyone out there finds themselves caught in the fear storm.

There's Nothing I Can Do

This isn't a tee-hee, "Remember the 80's?!?!?" post. I was tempted to only offer the audio as way of avoiding this impression but got to thinking the video might afford at least a little illumination. I'm a sucker for what I take to be neglected significance within popular expression generally regarded as disposable. And I think Peter Godwin dropped something rather deep, subversive, and McLuhanesque upon the public with "Images Of Heaven" (see text below). I think he's chronicling what he thinks is happening to him in his relationship to images. Dude doesn't like what's going on in his own head and he's saying so. Think Charley Patton's "Lord, I'm Disturbed" or Elvis Costello's "Psycho." The fellow isn't kidding around. Eighties earnestness formed (and forms) me, I admit. I don't think of it as prudish or obvious or overwrought. I file it as a sort of religio-poetic meditation/confession on the topic of what Blake calls mind-forged manacles and what William Burroughs has in mind when he tells us to look hard at the Naked Lunch at the end of the long, newspaper spoon. How do we characterize our relationship to the objects of our mediatized contemplation? What is the nature of the proselytization we're undergoing? What are we building up on our karmic accounts? I don't have a title for the mix I have i mind, but Godwin's jam will lead it all off, followed by Arcade Fire's "(Antichrist Television Blues)" and PJ Harvey's "This Mess We're In." Other suggestions are welcome. And don't we think The Killers would be very pleased if they reproduced the sound of this one in the studio? Isn't it what many of us are going in for? And doesn't it sound like John Taylor's bass?
Lettuce know your thoughts.
"Images of Heaven" P. Godwin (my attempted transcription)

Nothing is sacred
So, give me your soul, my love
Nothing is wasted
On someone like you

Somebody killed me
Then tore out my heart, my love
Somebody thrilled me
With photos of you

And there's nothing I can do
The media made you
There's nothing I can do
'cause you don't exist
you don't exist

Just images of heaven
that take me to hell
Images of heaven
Of something to sell
Images of heaven
Images of heaven

Something possessed me
An image of you, my love
Video visions
That play on my mind

Nobody blessed me
With power to reach, my love

One cheap illusion
Can still be divine

And nobody believes
In this new religion
Yeah nobody believes
'cause nobody sees
nobody sees

These Images of heaven
That take me to hell
Images of heaven
of something for sale
Images of heaven
Images of heaven

Images of heaven
Images of heaven

And there's nothing I can do
The camera made you
There's nothing I can do
'cause you don't exist
You don't exist

Just images of heaven
that take me to hell
Images of heaven
Or something to sell
Images of heaven
Images of heaven

Sarah brings us the following from Dorothee Soelle:
The insight that the way to God in Jewish thought leads via the
neighbor, that is to say, via the woman next door who gets on my
nerves and always listens to the wrong music, is one of Judaism’s
greatest gifts to humanity. I believe in that but also with the desire
that my neighbor who reads nothing but the tabloids will someday also
enter the way to God...
Radical humanism has its own language difficulties. It
cannot pray and cannot wish for more than what seems possible. But we
all need the “more” we call transcendence. We need a guarantor of the
rights of the poor, the superfluous and disabled, a guarantor that is
greater than our reckoning. In that sense, we are all incurable,
“religious.” It is an illness we cannot get rid of in the life of
industriousness.

Calm (down) Sunday

Sarah Here.
Just noticed while Jesus weeps for J-town he wails, "if you only recognized what makes for peace". And wanting to get in line with this "Some of all people...". Happy Palm Sunday everyone. "Save us".

Word has arrived that
peace will brim up, will come
"like a river and the
glory...like a flowing stream."
So.
Some of all people will
wondering wait
until this very stone
utters.

-Margaret Avison

Face Rank

I commemorate today's release of THE SACREDNESS OF QUESTIONING EVERYTHING with the most compelling photograph of my own face I could find. I'm also including some especially good blurbs as I have yet to figure out (or find a friend to hire or help me to figure out) how to put them on an opening splash page. Here're a few:
"David Dark serves up a unique blend of pop culture and high culture, generously seasoned with religious texts. The result is an immensely readable, profoundly subversive, and deeply prophetic book." — Andrew Bacevich, Author, The Limits of Power
"David Dark is my favorite critic of the people’s culture of America and the Christian faith. He brings a deep sense of reverence to every book he reads, every song he hears, every movie he sees, but it is a discerning reverence—attentive to truth and Jesus wherever he comes on them. He is also a reliable lie detector. And not a dull sentence in the book." — Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message
"Brilliant and charming and insightful as always, Dark comforts both my soul and my mind with this synthesis, part memoir and part essay, of the culture around us and the culture within us." — Phyllis Tickle, Author, The Great Emergence
"David Dark is one of our wisest authors, and I plan to read everything he writes. The Sacredness of Questioning Everything will comfort questioners, doubters, and skeptics with assurance that their questions can be faithful, and it will challenge the complacent with an ethical summons to wonder. It invites everything to give life—and faith—a second thought, and did I mention that it’s beautifully written?" — Brian McLaren, Author, Everything Must Change
On the prospect of helping the thing go gangbusters...
Be seen in public reading it as often as possible.
Spread word.
Place it on the top of whatever stack of books you have in whatever place your sitting.
Review it for Amazon.
Ask your library to order a copy.
Tell people who bring in people to talk to other people that I'm a...um...silver bullet or something.
Start a discussion group.
Figure out how to create/facilitate the circumstances that lead to me sitting at a table in front of a camera talking to Stephen Colbert.
Testify.
We're having a thing tonight at the Portland Brew at Twelve South (7:00). I'm hoping it'll be the beginning of a bunch of people I like coming to like other bunches of people I like...the beginning of a bunch of beautiful relationships...Maybe someone(s) will fall in love. We'll have more things like this in the weeks to come.
"Face Rank" is a reference to Scott Westerfeld's Orwellian, McLuhanesque mash-up of Sales Rank and Facebook in his tag on to the Uglies trilogy: Extras. It was a good, prophetic word delivered unto me today by one Sarah Masen.
I hope my book enriches lots of people. Lemme know what you make of it if you have the chance.

Trust Issues

As not so many of you may know, that deeply controversial activist for all things human, Sarah Masen, my partner in crime and matrimony, has taken to attempting the education of children at the place called Downtown Presbyterian. Needless to say, she's amazing everyone. And I couldn't resist the temptation to post something she sent out to our congregants. There's so much here. So much that reads (as you'd've imagined) like a song. Enjoy:
Two weeks ago I attended a seminar on children's religious education at Trevecca University. We walked through Godly Play, a regimen similar to our Sunday school program. It focuses on story-telling and reflection using manipulatives (story-specific figures and props) and meditation techniques. I met a number of other area education directors from different congregations and traditions and enjoyed hearing about the successes and failures of their teaching adventures.
During a group discussion at the end of the day, a question arose concerning the pressure we often feel (be it illusory or otherwise) with regards to making sure the children are “learning the right things”. I suppose you could call it a trust issue. Letting a child hear a story from the Bible and giving them the space and means to reflect on it is something we are not inclined to do. My instinct is to tell them what I think the moral, the climax, the conflict, or resolution of the story is in my expert (somebody gag me) opinion. Simply telling them the story and getting out of the way isn’t the model I was given growing up in church. This may be one of the reasons I had little trust in my own ability to make good decisions as I got older. These days, however, I think of the church and children’s Sunday school as a place for discernment rehearsal. It is all we really do when we say we “study” the bible. We are grasping at the wonders and complexities (the mystery) of the bible as a healthy part of our psychological development. Maybe you are already there, but I was struck afresh with the enormity of leading a class full of children through the beginning stages of their spiritual journeys. I want to encourage them to trust their already-holy spirits that have them discerning (and sometimes saying) all manner of amazing things week after week.
I want to make sure you know that the opportunity to join me in this enormous endeavor is available to you. You will learn so much, and all that is required is a listening ear and a desire to be hospitable. I at least ask for you to pray about your potential involvement in the children’s programming. Write me if you want to sit in on a class with these little theologians. I guarantee if you are open, you will be sitting at the feet of great teachers (and I am SO not talking about myself).
That's it.
Hope this finds everybody well.

Class Act

We Are Each Other's Business

Paul Robeson
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

That time
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other's
harvest:
we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.

Watch and Learn

Color me chastened.
Be inspired.

For the record

"If you don't use your own imagination, somebody else is going to use it for you."
Ron Sukenick

Redeeming Transmissions

Don't know how many PPIF congregants are familiar with the prophetic witness of Bill Hicks. Radiohead dedicated THE BENDS to his memory (I think I mention as much in Everyday Apocalypse). One of his quotes opens the final chapter of GATA. It's from his album, Rant in E-Minor: "Lift me up out of this illusion, Lord. Heal my perception, so that I may know only reality." Anyway, I find him crucial. Here's David Letterman repentantly relating a sad account of Hick's appearance on his show and undertaking an inspiringly awkward and deeply redemptive conversation with Bill's mother. You'll have to follow Youtube's directions to parts 2 and 3. I have the ever-loving, always-inspiring attentiveness of one Joe Nolan to thank for the heads-up concerning this excellent smidgin of television.

World Without End

...it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation…from good start to happy finish the truly catholic assemblage gathered together…

"Superman exists. And he's American."

According to the Testimony of the Poets

The Song of Songs tells us that love is as strong as death, but immediately adds that jealousy is as cruel as the grave, and sexual relations in themselves appear to be inseparable, according to the testimony of the poets, from the tension of egos, the sense of ownership and possession, the panics of status.
Northrop Frye, Words With Power
image by Marc Chagall

Putting People in Faceless Categories

Come together...Right now.

April 1, 2009

Hebrew Melody

Clara Rockmore on theremin
Nadia Reisenberg on piano

United States of Unconsciousness

Disposable Heroes of the Hiphoprisy.
I saw this video at Greenbelt in '92 on a night when I'd been carrying Walker Percy's Message in a Bottle around in the hope that someone might ask me what I was reading. First spotted a favorite Marshall Mcluhan quote in the window of a Dublin bookstore not long afterward: "Anyone who thinks there's a difference between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either." If, against convention, I could be allowed THREE bookends, I believe I could fit an awful lot of my adult-life squawking in-bethreen them.
Enjoy

Let Your Soul Lead the Way

I give you Afrika Bambaataa.

With Thanks As Ever To wood s lot

These days
whatever you have to say, leave
the roots on, let them
dangle

And the dirt

Just to make clear
where they come from
- Charles Olson

Failures Rise

Probably my favorite Switchfoot song.
Such words.

You can hear it too, if you're sincere.

It's just right.
I thank Mark Miller for the cue.

Words of Explanation

Well...I had a really nice Daily Show clip up (Stewart asking some questions of a Fox News anchor in view of the paradigm shift for Brand USA in the wake of the Obama victory. The dang thing got taken down. One tangent within the thread that followed seemed worth preserving. Ahna asked about the blog title and the Gibson quote, and I responded lengthily. Here tis:
ahna,

i am of course delighted that you asked. "Peer pressure is forever" is something I once heard (or read) Patty Smith say. I think she had in mind the blind conformity that sometimes gets hold of young people (stereotypically) and she was suggesting that this sad habit we have of surrendering our ability to see (or redemptively imagine) what's in front of us is a lifelong struggle. I thought it was funny and true and maybe a good title or banner to drape over the activity of this blog. The William Gibson quote is a wittily intended reminder that these are just thoughts and links asserted (I'd like to say whispered) amid the static and the noise. One reason I put it up there is to help people to receive what I post without going crazy in a "Oh! Right! So what you're REALLY SAYING is..." I suppose I'm trying to encourage people to add or respond to the drift I intend, ask questions about my drift that aren't accusations in disguise (which rhetorical questions almost always are), disagree as unheatedly as they can, OR take the time to cast a tiny bit of positive reinforcement my way. It's the blog which will pass (settle to the bottom of the sea), and I suppose I say as much to remind myself (and my kind readers) that the posts can serve the very big deal of helping them (as this collage and the collages of others often helps me) to go out and learn and gather and try to be good to people OR they (the posts) can just float on down to the bottom more or less harmlessly (i hope).
Ahna, my pal, thank you for occasioning this bit of self-reflection with the gift that is your insatiable curiosity. I believe you're helping me redeem the times.

best,

jdd

He doth prattle on

More of Geoff Little's kind attentiveness unto me...

Letting The Days Go By

I think I was 14 when I first saw this on MTV. At the time, it struck me as about the coolest thing I'd ever seen; funny and profound and moving in ways I could feel without being able to articulate exactly what I felt. Still feeling it.
Got to meet David Byrne a few weeks ago when he showed up at Grimey's, and he struck me as a kind, curious man with the vitality of someone who really believes that time is neither holding us nor is it after us. Very generous and attentive. Made me feel cool when he laughed loudly at something I said.
This feels like a good performance to post in view of the days ahead in the land of my sojourn. I dedicate it to my friend, Porkpie.

Whose Infomercial?

Culture of Life

Once one is exposed to the comprehensive wit of Wendell Berry, there is no going back. The question 'What Would Wendell Berry Do?' comes to inform all manner of decisions in our buying, selling, and doing. In a treatment that is both wide-ranging and robustly evangelical, Bonzo and Stevens bring Berry's witness to bear upon one dim-witted economy after another with an invigorating account of Berry's more magnanimous economic vision. In a constant call to look harder at the world we're in, creation is imagined not as a resource for endless plundering but rather the place where God's kingdom, the great economy, comes, offering the hospitality that sustains, our only home and our only hope.

EVERYTHING IS BROKEN

Here’s what it is: Steve Mason and Charlie Lowell (you’ll perhaps know them from such musical ventures as JARS OF CLAY), Brian Ritchey, Cary Gibson, founding performer of the Belfast-based collective called ikon, Matthew Perryman Jones, Katie Herzig, one Sarah Masen probably, Tom Wills with his moving images, and everyone else who comes. It’s called "EVERYTHING IS BROKEN. It's songs and thoughts and conversation and maybe a Bukowski poem. 7:00 to 8:30. THIS THURSDAY NIGHT...October 23. It's part of a program called "LIKE A PRAYER" that's been going on all semester (see the magnificent Todd Greene image above...click to enlarge). This is the HUMAN CONDITION component to be followed by more proclamation-ish evenings. This would be the ecclesiates section, if you like. The lamentation/confession/complaining piece of lyrical witness. The nod to the parts of the Bible (most parts?) which might not look so good inscribed on a poster with a basket-full of puppies. For a second or two, I thought we might do well to call it “Sad Songs Say So Much.” Coffee will flow. My partners in crime with whom I’m directing/emceeing the evening are Philip Hood, Andrea Thornton, and Lauren Roden. Come on out. Come with questions. How does the market serve/obstruct the possibilies of artistic witness? What are we waiting for? How is justice served when we say what we feel, not what we ought to say? When has a sad, straight-shooting song turned everything around? How did it help? Let’s talk.

In the Company of the Law

I thank Chris Smit for this ministry opportunity.

Detroit, lift up your weary head!

We listened to Steve Martin's comedy albums on the drive to Detroit today (sans kids). Some Prince and Bob Dylan and P.J. Harvey and Neil Young and Leonard Cohen and Blue Nile and REM too. Hours to talk and think and remember that we really like other. Special thanks to the extraordinary personage, Jude Adam, for looking after our spawn. I'm about to fade into a headache-relieving sleep, but I wanted to post word concerning what could be called a sort of double-header. THIS Friday evening (10th of October), Sarah and Ric Hordinski are playing the Trinity House Theatre at 8:00. In view of the ever-faithful hometown crowd, it might already be sold-out, but it also might not be. One could google the venue or phone them (734.464.6302). And I'm speaking there the next morning. A 9:30 to 11:45 sort of thing. The USA. The elections. How we might be agents of redemptive unease and witnesses to the economy to come. Anyway, I was going to feel bad if I didn't issue a heads-up. And maybe some someone reading this is within doable distance. I hope everyone's weekend is remarkably good.

Apocalyptic for the People

Suppose on some gray day, as you plod down Wall Street, you should see God sitting on the Treasury steps, in His Glory, with the thunders curved about him? Suppose on Michigan Avenue, between the lakes and hills of stone, and in the midst of hastening automobiles and jostling crowds, suddenly you see living and walking toward you, the Christ, with sorrow and sunshine in his face?
Foolish talk, all of this you say, of course; and that is because no American now believes in his religion. Its facts are mere symbolism; its revelation vague generalities; its ethics a matter of carefully balanced gain. But to most of the four million black folk emancipated by civil war, God was real. They knew him. They had met him personally in many a wild orgy, or in the black stillness of the night. His plan for them was clear; they were to suffer and be degraded, and then afterwards by divine edict, raised to manhood and power; and so on January 1, 1863, He made them free.
It was all foolish, bizarre, and tawdry. Gangs of dirty Negroes howling and dancing; poverty-stricken ignorant laborers mistaking war, destruction, and revolution for the mystery of the free human soul; and yet to these Black folk it was the Apocalypse."The magnificent trumpet tones of Hebrew Scripture, transmuted and oddly changed, became a brand new Gospel. All that was Beauty, all that was Love, all that was Truth, stood on top of those mad mornings and sang with the stars. A great human sob shrieked in the wind, and tossed its tears upon the sea -- free, free, free.
--W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

"Angry barrage of insults"

Notice the pained look on his face when a man cries out the answer many within his campaign appear to be to be working toward. I wish he'd taken the opportunity to say, "That's not what we're about." It would have been an inspiring leadership moment. I feel for him if he thinks such leadership is something he can no longer afford.

Call To Prayer

In a phone conversation a few nights ago, my mother told me that she'd walked out of a church service praying that people would be able to see Barack Obama as they should. It occurred to me that this was about the wisest, most redemptively religious sensibility I'd witnessed during our election season. She wasn't stumping for him. I imagine she'd join me in praying the same thing concerning the way people see John McCain and any political figure over whom people can get--How shall I put it?--demonically worked up. There are people whose pulses will quicken if you mention how nice it is of Jimmy Carter to build houses for the poor, and there are people who will become visibly agitated if you calmly assert that George W. Bush means well and prays sincerely. I usually don't know what to do when meanness or rage gets hold. But I do know to at least try to pray. Maybe prayer is always just a try. Maybe there's a way of talking about these things that's prayerful without being sanctimonious. A way of communicating in something other than conversation-stoppers.
My mother said she was especially moved when she watched Obama exit the stage in Oxford, Mississippi. In my historical deafness, I didn't know what she was talking about. She explained that he would have been rightfully afraid for his life (and the life of his family) if he'd publicly appeared on that stage just a few decades ago. She was right. And she was right to be moved.
My prayer is that we would all be rightly moved. Righteously moved in the direction of the already-yet-still-to-come kingdom for which many Republicans and Democrats pray, never knowing what we're doing exactly. I pray that we would feel some affection--somehow actually like--the people we can't imagine ourselves voting for and the friends, family, and neighbors we suspect--with fear and trembling--will vote for them. Amid the din of hi-tech carnival barkers, loud televised people who claim to be without spin, and gentle mortals like myself who receive their words into their heads like a shot of espresso every few minutes through e-mails, radio broadcasts, and frantic visits to websites, may our hearts remain open to the possibility of being rightly moved.

Homeland Security

The Reckoning
by Theodore Roethke

All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.

We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
For all our scratching on the pad,
We cannot trace the error down.

What we are seeking is a fare
One way, a chance to be secure:
The lack that keeps us what we are,
The penny that usurps the poor.

Save Our Economy

ESSENTIALS OF SPONTANEOUS PROSE
by Jack Kerouac
SET-UP The object is set before the mind, either in reality. as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.
PROCEDURE Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.
METHOD No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas-but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)--"measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech"--"divisions of the sounds we hear"-"time and how to note it down." (William Carlos Williams)
SCOPING Not "selectivity' Iof expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)-Blow as deep as you want-write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.
LAG IN PROCEDURE No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.
TIMING Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time-Shakespearian stress of dramatic need to speak now in own unalterable way or forever hold tongue-no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting).
CENTER OF INTEREST Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion-Do not afterthink except for poetic or P. S. reasons. Never afterthink to "improve" or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!-now!-your way is your only way-"good"-or "bad"-always honest ("ludi- crous"), spontaneous, "confessionals' interesting, because not "crafted." Craft is craft.
STRUCTURE OF WORK Modern bizarre structures (science fiction, etc.) arise from language being dead, "different" themes give illusion of "new" life. Follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at pivot, where what was dim-formed "beginning" becomes sharp-necessitating "ending" and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle-Night is The End.
MENTAL STATE If possible write "without consciousness" in semi-trance (as Yeats' later "trance writing") allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so "modern" language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typing-cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's "beclouding of consciousness." Come from within, out-to relaxed and said.

"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."
Dorothy Day

This Present Darkness

The owners of the land came to the land, or more often a spokesman for the owners came...
Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or finance company owned the land, the owner man said: The Bank — or the Company — needs — wants — insists — must have — as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. YOu've scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.
The squatting tenant men nodded and wondered and drew figures in the dust, and yes, they knew, God knows. If the dust only wouldn't fly. If the top would only stay on the soil, it might not be so bad.
The owner men went on leading to their point: You know the land's getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land: robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.
The squatters nodded - they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crop they might pump blood back into the land.
Well, it's not too late. And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that. Yes, he can do that until his crop fails one day and he has to borrow money from the bank. But - you see, a bank or a company can't do that, because those creatures don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.
The squatting men raised their eyes to understand. Can't we just hang on ? Maybe the next year will be a good year. God knows how much cotton next year. And with all the wars - God knows what price cotton will bring. Don't they make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms?
Get enough wars and cotton'll hit the ceiling. Next year, maybe. They looked up questioningly. We can't depend on it. The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size...
And at last the owner men came to the point. The tenant system won't work any more. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him a wage and take all the crop. We have to do it. We don't like to do it. But the monster's sick. Something's happened to the monster.
But you'll kill the land with the cotton.
We know. We've got to take cotton quick before the land dies. Then we'll sell the land. Lots of families in the East would like to own a piece of land. The tenant men looked alarmed. But what'll happen to us? How'll we eat?
You'll have to get off the land. ... It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster.
Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours -being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not paper with numbers on it.
We're sorry, it's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you're wrong there - quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it...You'll have to go.
But it's ours, the tenant men cried. We ---
No, the bank, the monster owns it. You'll have to go.

--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
With thanks to Charles Campbell, Walter Wink, Ted Smith, and Ezra Pound
No taxation without representation.
We wrestle not against flesh and blood.

Bring It

If I knew of a Ron Paul video somehow equivalent to this (in the sense that it seems to have been directed by David Lynch), I would happily post it alongside this one. This is me wishing the two men would appear on television to talk thru the events of the last few days. I'm currently tuning in to Robert Scheer, Amy Goodman, and William Greider. I'm wanting everyone who considers themselves "conservative" to explain their use of the word in correlation with the film _Children of Men_ and the work of Wendell Berry. Any suggested reading, viewing, or listening on the subject of economy ecumenically considered?

Homework

It keeps coming up in conversation. This little chunk of apocalypse that made it into my head before I could drive. Within a very short span time an old movie theater friend (former manager of the Capri Twin at Harding Mall...Can I get a witness?) wrote me to say that he'd finally acquired his own copy of The Watchmen and persuaded his wife to read it (i'd foisted it upon him...I dunno...Twenty-two years ago) AND a younger friend I'll refer to as Porkpie said, "Dave, you've GOT to read this." I enjoyed telling Porkpie that I'd read The Watchmen, issue by issue, as it was coming out. As Porkpie articulated his enthusiasm, I became reacquainted with the depth of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons vision and remembered, as I do every few years, how its witness colored my views on all sorts of things even as I wandered away from "comic books." The Watchmen raised the bar so high that I couldn't quite put my money down on anything that followed it. I think there was talk of Terry Gilliam (Walter Hill too) doing a film version even before Tim Burton tackled Batman. I hope the film-to-come is good enough to get people giving the comic some time. I suppose the purpose of this post is to urge everyone who means to see the film to go acquire or borrow a copy (any decent library....that friend you strongly suspect has one) and read it beforehand. It's gritty and graphic and all that, but also devastatingly truthful. Come to think of it, I imagine it might've been my first experience with something I knew to be "objectionable" content-wise, as the saying goes, but illuminatingly grim like Shakespeare or Melville or Ralph Ellison. Maybe it prepared my heart for Dostoevsky or something. Anyway, I thank God for it.

Binding and Loosing

This would be my last go at significant emendation before the thing goes off to possible endorsers. If anyone can think of something clever or helpful you've heard me say in a "That oughtta be in your book" kind of way. Lemme know.
The Greenbelt Festival was wondrous. One can download a large percentage of the coolness, including my talks, here:
http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/shop/talks/
Here's me all sweaty and talkative with Steve Lawson:
http://qik.com/video/222720
And here's Ewan Gibson delivering, as he always does, the goods:
http://mysterybrethren.blogspot.com/
Two of the children are about to arrive on a bus. Must go. Still mean to say a word on Steve Martin soon.

Memory Believes

Believe me. The words "postmodern fundamentalist" only came strangely to mind as we strolled along, and I'm not sure I ever want to speak them aloud again. I also suspect that I could have come up with a more tasteful, reverent, and interesting way of speaking when I thought it somehow necessary to throw in that my dad had "passed." But this is the way these things go in the land of video I guess. Family members, please pardon my easy use of the first person plural. I don't mean to drag you into my madness (at least not unwillingly). "Memory believes before knowing remembers," sayeth Faulkner. I will say I trust the man’s epistemology. Anyone in Nashville care to guess where Geoff and I were? Incidentally, the youtube site has an option for viewing the thing in higher quality.
I'll get to Beck and Batman and the glories of Steve Martin's Born Standing Up real soon.

You Know Its Me All The Time

Many moons ago, I did a piece on Bob Dylan I'm especially pleased with and Paste now has it up on their site. There's a link to it over at stage left under Recent Broadsides. "I've Got My Bob Dylan Mask On," I called it (Dylan said it). And I couldn't track down the name of the person behind that wonderful little illustration. If anyone knows, please clue us in. I find it difficult overestimate the wonders of the Dylan one.

Secret Treasure Hidden

Poetry

Its door opens near. It's a shrine
by the road, it's a flower in the parking lot
of The Pentagon, it says, "Look around,
listen. Feel the air." It interrupts
international telephone lines with a tune.
When traffic lines jam, it gets out
and dances on the bridge. If great people
get distracted by fame they forget
this essential kind of breathing
and they die inside their gold shell.
When caravans cross deserts
It is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

Sometimes commanders take us over, and they
try to impose their whole universe,
how to succeed by daily calculation:
I can't eat that bread.

--William Stafford

The Saying of It

Lit Instructor

Day after day up there beating my wings
with all the softness truth requires
I feel them shrug whenever I pause:
they class my voice among tentative things,

And they credit fact, force, battering.
I dance my way toward the family of knowing,
embracing stray error as a long-lost boy
and bringing him home with my fluttering.

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;
it bites like a saw into white pine.
I communicate right; but explain to the dean--
well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing.

--William Stafford

Human

I've been reading Daniel Berrigan's commentary on the Wisdom of Solomon. So incredibly good. Whenever I read Berrigan, I get to wondering why I don't read him constantly. SO few people my age seem to give him any time, but I think he'll be remembered as a sort of William Blake-figure for our times. A sampling:
The Gift of Wisdom is not psychological acuity: it is the discerning skill of a heart open to all weathers, making all weathers from torrid to icy, one…The Gift ennables us to comport ourselves as humans—and this against the odds of an inhuman time...It would seem that the church is called to this momentous task: to hold close in Spirit, in honor and unity (and in face of cultural disintegration and incoherence), all that is worthy, all that is encompassed by the noble term human.

Talks Good With Words

My dear friend, the renaissance man Geoff Little, thought it might be worthwhile to ask me some questions with a camera rolling, and this is a mere smidgin of at least an hours worth of footage (the first of many more to come). Quite the gift to get me going in this way and to take the time to edit the thing. Thank you, Geoff, for thinking of it and even naming a time and place (that's his wondrous kitchen table) and for giving me something to put up as I try to figure out what I have to say about Beck's Modern Guilt and the Dark Knight film. I hope it at least provides a giggle for those who haven't seen me in person in some time. I do like to prattle.

Inappropriate

This doesn't work. I found it on the carpet at my mother's house where I was informed that it came out of a Cheerios box. "But the arm moves!" my mom exclaimed, knowing darn well just how to get me started. How the child psychologists under the employ of Fortune500 multinational corporations to accelerate sales of units could have let this pass is a question worth posing. Cross-marketing genius? Not at all. Whose profit? Whose mental health? Whose dreams are they looking out for? Why the nightmare raid on a baby's imagination?
Don't get me wrong. I still remember the thrill it was to me when Frank Miller gave us a drawing of the Joker (Issue #1 of the Dark Knight...twenty-something years ago) with a face disturbingly and inspiringly plain-looking. No impossibly long chin. Just a dude with never-to-be-washed-off make-up. It seemed to me at the time (years before Tim Burton went horseback riding with Jack Nicholson with an interesting proposition) that the people in charge should give Willem Defoe or, believe it or not, Michael Keaton a crack at the role. I'll be there for Heath Ledger's performance of a lifetime. Believe me.
But this little artifact of psychotic marketeering...If I was standing in a factory in China stamping these things out by the millions, I would have some not happy thoughts toward that strange land faraway, the land of this little babyman scaryclown's origin, a land that has an interesting speech habit whereby it decrees and advertises itself as "freedom itself," a city on a hill, a light unto the nations.
TO Mr. and Mrs. General Mills, you shouldn't have consented to or arranged this. Focus on the family. Stop the plastic presses.
TO friends and readers, isn't this hilariously bad? I'm carring him around in my pocket. Sarah refuses to look at it a second time.
Fondly,
jdd

Damaged or Whole?

Sometimes Andy Warhol said something. It was simple, what he said, but it was not a comfort. He was so polite, but it was not a comfort. He used simple words, words that honored the idea of simple agreement—“Oh, it’s so big!” and “Oh yes!” and “Oh, he was so cute!”—but there was no comfort in the agreement. And sometimes the agreement turned a corner, “Oh, he was so cute! But all he was interested in was drugs.”
Andy Warhol looked like a little god. It was so comforting the way he made everything uncomfortable. And the way the damage rose to the surface around him. The people around him had this in common, at first: a sense of sin. They knew what was damaged and what was whole. Andy Warhol knew, too. But sometimes he was coy. Sometimes he wouldn’t tell. People around him wondered if they had got it right. People around him wondered if they should be more damaged or more whole. It was hard to tell.

--George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context