It's Complicated

"We must break our dependency upon foreign turmoil," announces one S. Colbert (thank you, Adam Ellis).
Sometimes a joke is the only way to break into a conversation (thank you, Kurt Vonnegut).
It's complicated, so complicated, and I don't know exactly what I'd do right now if I was a famous gov't employee whose job appears to require what is sometimes referred to as diplomatic posture, the skill of awaiting the right moment to speak and act decisively as nonviolent witnesses to the hope of peace, love, and understanding are imprisoned, beaten, and killed. But because this job isn't my job and because my mind keeps going back to Peter Gabriel's 1982 song, "Wallflower" ("I will do what I can do"), I've undertaken a couple of embarrassingly uncostly efforts in bearing witness. I held a sign with a few dozen Egyptians and their children yesterday. And I hereby post the up-to-the-minute latest from a very articulate, on-location blogger called Sandmonkey. As I write this, his blog remains suspended following his arrest, but he's been tweeting again and promises to return to his interrupted story soon. A recent recorded interview with the man is available here. Presuming an interest in the civil rights of human beings animates us (That's Brand America, right?) and we're moved by the politics of nonviolent engagement undertaken most famously by Jesus of Nazareth, I reckon the least we can do is pay attention. Here's Sandmonkey...

I don't know how to start writing this. I have been battling fatigue for not sleeping properly for the past 10 days, moving from one's friend house to another friend's house, almost never spending a night in my home, facing a very well funded and well organized ruthless regime that views me as nothing but an annoying bug that its time to squash will come. The situation here is bleak to say the least.

It didn't start out that way. On Tuesday Jan 25 it all started peacefully, and against all odds, we succeeded to gather hundreds of thousands and get them into Tahrir Square, despite being attacked by Anti-Riot Police who are using sticks, tear gas and rubber bullets against us. We managed to break all of their barricades and situated ourselves in Tahrir. The government responded by shutting down all cell communication in Tahrir square, a move which purpose was understood later when after midnight they went in with all of their might and attacked the protesters and evacuated the Square. The next day we were back at it again, and the day after. Then came Friday and we braved their communication blackout, their thugs, their tear gas and their bullets and we retook the square. We have been fighting to keep it ever since.

That night the government announced a military curfew, which kept getting shorter by the day, until it became from 8 am to 3 pm. People couldn't go to work, gas was running out quickly and so were essential goods and money, since the banks were not allowed to operate and people were not able to collect their salary. The internet continued to be blocked, which affected all businesses in Egypt and will cause an economic meltdown the moment they allow the banks to operate again. We were being collectively punished for daring to say that we deserve democracy and rights, and to keep it up, they withdrew the police, and then sent them out dressed as civilians to terrorize our neighborhoods. I was shot at twice that day, one of which with a semi-automatic by a dude in a car that we the people took joy in pummeling. The government announced that all prisons were breached, and that the prisoners somehow managed to get weapons and do nothing but randomly attack people. One day we had organized thugs in uniforms firing at us and the next day they disappeared and were replaced by organized thugs without uniforms firing at us. Somehow the people never made the connection.

Despite it all, we braved it. We believed we are doing what's right and were encouraged by all those around us who couldn't believe what was happening to their country. What he did galvanized the people, and on Tuesday, despite shutting down all major roads leading into Cairo, we managed to get over 2 million protesters in Cairo alone and 3 million all over Egypt to come out and demand Mubarak's departure. Those are people who stood up to the regime's ruthlessness and anger and declared that they were free, and were refusing to live in the Mubarak dictatorship for one more day. That night, he showed up on TV, and gave a very emotional speech about how he intends to step down at the end of his term and how he wants to die in Egypt, the country he loved and served. To me, and to everyone else at the protests this wasn't nearly enough, for we wanted him gone now. Others started asking that we give him a chance, and that change takes time and other such poppycock. Hell, some people and family members cried when they saw his speech. People felt sorry for him for failing to be our dictator for the rest of his life and inheriting us to his Son. It was an amalgam of Stockholm syndrome coupled with slave mentality in a malevolent combination that we never saw before. And the Regime capitalized on it today.

Today, they brought back the internet, and started having people calling on TV and writing on facebook on how they support Mubarak and his call for stability and peacefull change in 8 months. They hung on to the words of the newly appointed government would never harm the protesters, whom they believe to be good patriotic youth who have a few bad apples amongst them. We started getting calls asking people to stop protesting because "we got what we wanted" and "we need the country to start working again". People were complaining that they miss their lives. That they miss going out at night, and ordering Home Delivery. That they need us to stop so they can resume whatever existence they had before all of this. All was forgiven, the past week never happened and it's time for Unity under Mubarak's rule right now.

To all of those people I say: NEVER! I am sorry that your lives and businesses are disrupted, but this wasn't caused by the Protesters. The Protesters aren't the ones who shut down the internet that has paralyzed your businesses and banks: The government did. The Protesters weren't the ones who initiated the military curfew that limited your movement and allowed goods to disappear off market shelves and gas to disappear: The government did. The Protesters weren't the ones who ordered the police to withdraw and claimed the prisons were breached and unleashed thugs that terrorized your neighborhoods: The government did. The same government that you wish to give a second chance to, as if 30 years of dictatorship and utter failure in every sector of government wasn't enough for you. The Slaves were ready to forgive their master, and blame his cruelty on those who dared to defy him in order to ensure a better Egypt for all of its citizens and their children. After all, he gave us his word, and it's not like he ever broke his promises for reform before or anything.

Then Mubarak made his move and showed them what useful idiots they all were.

You watched on TV as "Pro-Mubarak Protesters" – thugs who were paid money by NDP members by admission of High NDP officials- started attacking the peaceful unarmed protesters in Tahrir square. They attacked them with sticks, threw stones at them, brought in men riding horses and camels- in what must be the most surreal scene ever shown on TV- and carrying whips to beat up the protesters. And then the Bullets started getting fired and Molotov cocktails started getting thrown at the Anti-Mubarak Protesters as the Army standing idly by, allowing it all to happen and not doing anything about it. Dozens were killed, hundreds injured, and there was no help sent by ambulances. The Police never showed up to stop those attacking because the ones who were captured by the Anti-mubarak people had police ID's on them. They were the police and they were there to shoot and kill people and even tried to set the Egyptian Museum on Fire. The Aim was clear: Use the clashes as pretext to ban such demonstrations under pretexts of concern for public safety and order, and to prevent disunity amongst the people of Egypt. But their plans ultimately failed, by those resilient brave souls who wouldn't give up the ground they freed of Egypt, no matter how many live bullets or firebombs were hurled at them. They know, like we all do, that this regime no longer cares to put on a moderate mask. That they have shown their true nature. That Mubarak will never step down, and that he would rather burn Egypt to the ground than even contemplate that possibility.

In the meantime, State-owned and affiliated TV channels were showing coverage of Peaceful Mubarak Protests all over Egypt and showing recorded footage of Tahrir Square protest from the night before and claiming it's the situation there at the moment. Hundreds of calls by public figures and actors started calling the channels saying that they are with Mubarak, and that he is our Father and we should support him on the road to democracy. A veiled girl with a blurred face went on Mehwer TV claiming to have received funding by Americans to go to the US and took courses on how to bring down the Egyptian government through protests which were taught by Jews. She claimed that AlJazeera is lying, and that the only people in Tahrir square now were Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. State TV started issuing statements on how the people arrested Israelis all over Cairo engaged in creating mayhem and causing chaos. For those of you who are counting this is an American-Israeli-Qatari-Muslim Brotherhood-Iranian-Hamas conspiracy. Imagine that. And MANY PEOPLE BOUGHT IT. I recall telling a friend of mine that the only good thing about what happened today was that it made clear to us who were the idiots amongst our friends. Now we know.

Now, just in case this isn't clear: This protest is not one made or sustained by the Muslim Brotherhood, it's one that had people from all social classes and religious background in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood only showed up on Tuesday, and even then they were not the majority of people there by a long shot. We tolerated them there since we won't say no to fellow Egyptians who wanted to stand with us, but neither the Muslims Brotherhood not any of the Opposition leaders have the ability to turn out one tenth of the numbers of Protesters that were in Tahrir on Tuesday. This is a revolution without leaders. Three Million individuals choosing hope instead of fear and braving death on hourly basis to keep their dream of freedom alive. Imagine that.

The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay "because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people". This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can't. I am heading to Tahrir right now with supplies for the hundreds injured, knowing that today the attacks will intensify, because they can't allow us to stay there come Friday, which is supposed to be the game changer. We are bringing everybody out, and we will refuse to be anything else than peaceful. If you are in Egypt, I am calling on all of you to head down to Tahrir today and Friday. It is imperative to show them that the battle for the soul of Egypt isn't over and done with. I am calling you to bring your friends, to bring medical supplies, to go and see what Mubarak's gurantees look like in real life. Egypt needs you. Be Heroes.

"I would rather die than hate you."

To commemorate America's most explicitly--though not exclusively--Christian holiday, I'd like to share a few selections I couldn't fit into the space of a tweet. First, a little something from the always-magnificent Ray Waddle in yesterday's Tennessean.
This from the New York Review of Books. The most helpful account of life in China I've read in a long time.
And I Have No Enemies. Liu Xiaobo's witness strikes me as deeply in sync with King's, and his posture's been a very helpful point of contemplation in light of events (and talk about the events) in Tucson.
We are a beginning.

Boney King of Nowhere

"Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious."
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Redemption Songs

Here's the deal. We have an amazing and outrageously redemptive phenomenon happening in Nashville these days with The Contributor. And to my deep delight, the operation is housed at DPC. Anyway, the poster broadcasts the fact of a fundraising event this weekend, but it doesn't say diddly concerning the music on offer that evening. I'll fill you in. There's Julie Lee officiating and performing. Robby Hecht, Lex Price, Elizabeth Foster, Nathan Phillips of the Winston Jazz Routine and the Choir At Your Door, Odessa Jorgensen of Bearfoot, Angel Snow, Jason Goforth, SARAH MASEN, STEPHEN MASON of Jars of Clay, Harvey Gerard of HOBOTRON, DAVE PERKINS of Chagall Guevara and everything cool EVER, Anita Smith, and Sierra Hull.
All this and the monthly Art Crawl too. Come round and be enriched.
UPDATE
It now appears that TaRee J. Avery and ACTION! are also set to bring their powers to bear on the evening.
Too. Much. Love.

Camus on Morality

If someone told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine of them would be blank. On the last page I would write, "I recognize only one duty and that is to love." And as far as everything else is concerned, I say no.
Albert Camus, Notebooks

Jigsaw Jazz

This is young Peter (age 6) illustrating a couple of categories. I'll be drawing the visual into our Eliot/Joyce/Kafka discussion today. It occurs to me that I might bring Kafka's words on Picasso in as well. Is Picasso a "wilful distortionist?" someone asked him. Kafka: “I do not think so...He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes 'fast,' like a watch--sometimes.”

The Robot LifeGuard Electrocuted Everyone.

This is my first foray into composing science fiction. Wait, that's not entirely true. In high school, I took the legend of Frosty the Snowman down a distinctly sci-fi path which I might choose to share more broadly some day soon. In the glorious meantime, I give you my shortest story: The Robot lifeguard electrocuted everyone. Feel free to commit it to memory and share it with others. You can place it alongside Hemingway's attempt at shortness which I reprint here without permission: "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." Mine, let the record show, is shorter (word-wise), and will also serve as the title of an upcoming work of fiction.
Friend, doppelgänger, and lead singer of Bulb, Todd Greene, was kind enough to give me the above illustration. Enjoy.
That is all.
UPDATE: The above illustration is available as a print (signed by the illustrator and the author), a t-shirt, AND (should the perceived need arise) a refrigerator magnet. For details, contact david dot dark at vanderbilt dot edu

"With the Oven Mitts of Science Fiction We Can Grasp The Red Hot Casserole of the Now"

Concerning the Fall

Dear Humans from Earth...
I take this opportunity to address the issue of a few appearances.
A couple of local goings-on. The Tokens Show, for instance, is a local happening, viewable and downloadable, conjured into existence and hosted by one Lee Camp, writer, teacher, activist, song & dance man. I'll be joining him onstage Tuesday of next week with many a talented friend. Details here. I'm also joining Richard Goode for a conversation at the Southern Festival of Books. I believe we'll be in the Old Supreme Court Room on October 8th at 1:00.
Sarah and I will both hit Waco, Texas for David Crowder's Fantastical Church Music Conference the weekend of October 1st.
And on November 17th, I'll be doing an evening talk/conversation at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. No Internet-ish publicity for this just yet, but I'll give you details if you ask for them.
Oh and Gloria Gaither did an incredibly gracious radio interview that was mostly about the Sacredness of Questioning Everything. I offer her my thanks. It can be unearthed once you scroll down a little right (# 21)...here.
UPDATE! And lettuce now add unto the mix Tuesday October 5th. I'll be sharing words with Trevecca students. All are welcome. The details.
This it for now. But I wouldn't want to miss the opportunity to drop into your laps a recent poem that draws heavily upon Carolyn Forché, an Ubuntu saying (via John Mbiti), and Robert Palmer. I think we'll call it Come On In.

We're going to have to find ourselves beautiful
It will involve libraries
Of Country Music
Not as a genre
But a possibility,
A matter of opening
Again and again
The Book of what happened
Of learning to to savor the sighs
The incomplete sentences
Of other people,
To view with imagination and deep affection
Our addiction
To love
Our only hope
(We might as well face it)
And with impossible-feeling
Dysfunction
Drawn into the circle of song
Dragged into
The space of the talkaboutable,
The plainspeak,
The ancient candow
That knows (always knew)
There are no unrelated people.
I am because we are.

I Believe That Children Are Our Future

It won't be a spectator-kind of situation exactly. It's immersive. It's what Sarah's been up to with the children of our congregation and artist friends who've been kind enough to get in on the act. It's...a chapel transformed into a human body. You walk into it. There are kids inside to show you what to do and see and how to get the drift of what's going on. It's called Consuming Catastrophe: The Comedy of the Heart; A Play in Ate Parts, and it might go some distance in undoing the damaging image/experience of church as a place where young people are taken to learn to hate and fear their own bodies.
Sarah's "Sunday School" space is equal parts storytelling and intelligence gathering. She begins with story (Jesus' parable of the mustard seed, for instance), and then they go from there w/ drawing, playing, singing, asking questions, attempting analogies, and producing images of their own. Their money quotes ("I am art," "There's a virtual, galactic battle going on in my head," "The future is where we go to remember") have generated the installation, even as we note that they refuse, wonderfully, to regurgitate these gems on command. So anyway, they'll be there. Anyone within reasonable driving distance of Nashville would do well to be there too. And I imagine it'll be the most strange, blessed, and inspiring thing going on in our beloved town. It's a going public, we might say, with what our Sunday mornings look like. One more crack at togetherness, as H. Simpson puts it, or, in Sarah's words, another go at putting skin and bones on the mystery of God. Be there and be square. It'll be good for everyone. The opening is this Saturday, September 4th in DPC’s chapel at 6:00. Food and drink will be available as a part of the Artluck’s 1st Saturday Art Crawl. Write me if you're at all confused. More info and a visual clue or three of what some of it will look like can be found right....here.

I Like How They Kept My Pregnant Pause

Here I am in conversation w/ a very kind woman in Toronto. If, upon viewing this, Lynch or the Coens or either Anderson decide they'd like to employ my gifts in an upcoming film, please inform them that I can be reached via the Facebook platform. That is all.

Eat, Pray, Sam

He cut the flowers, picked the basil, oregano, and parsley, praised the health of the heirloom tomatoes and basically rocked my world with culinary Zenship. Sam loves food and his love grows our love.

Pasta Sam:

1pkg. delicious egg noodles

Heirloom tomatoes

Kenny's Farmhouse Cheese (aged gouda)

backyard basil, oregano, parsley

affordable olive oil

cook noodles, drain, add above ingredients, toss, eat, pray, Sam.

Tactics, Creations, Initiatives

I suspect one of the phenomenona that'll put Nashville on the cosmic map is the fact that it played a role in facilitating (and was itself facilitated by) the personality of Todd Greene. You'd have to cast your eyes upon ALL the work (hard to do given his self-publicity allergy), but the dude can be meaningfully described as America's Richard Hamilton just as much as, depending on the stage we have in mind, we could find ourselves associating him with Howard Finster or Jasper Johns.

Anyway, he's doing his thing at the Twist Gallery on Saturday evening. Details here. But it doesn't mention anything about his band performing as well. They're called Bulb. They include one Sarah Masen. And they're on their...14th album, I think. Here's their video. I dare you to not be moved by it.

And while I'm describing the Nashville scene as I understand it this weekend. Everyone should know about Blackbird Theater. It's not everyday one can bear witness to the public debut of a local theater company and the world premiere of an original play. They appear to be, in the most profound and helpful sense, crazy. If you're like me, you've always wanted Edgar Allan Poe and Nietzsche and Annie Oakley and Rasputin and Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy and H.G. Wells to have a little hoedown together. With this evening's premiere of Twilight of the Gods, such madness shall be realized. We are Nashville.

Hanna-Barbera Theology

I’d like to share a serendipitous slip of the tongue vouchsafed unto me via the testimony of a five-year-old concerning an image many might recognize, a definitive image within the Hanna-Barbera tradition. Having spied a certain pattern from tale to tale, the child described the standard operating procedure whereby the figures of Scooby and Shaggy would respond to duress (a man in a monster costume, for instance) by leaping into one another’s arms and quivering together. They hold each other, we might say, but the child put it better: “They hold their ‘chothers.” And with the enunciation of this concept, that of the ‘chother, I believe we’re sitting squarely within the glow of a religious insight. Drawing on the Buddhist principle of anatta (no-self), Harold Oliver once proffered the following paradox: “There is no-self, and it is the relational self.” According to this wisdom, the idea that any of us can have meaning alone or be the authors of our own significance or have joy for which we only have ourselves to thank is a death-dealing delusion, a psycho covenant that implies that a strong, successful few of us might somehow gain our lives without losing them. But if we hold to the ‘chother principle, our sustenance comes to us via the fact of relatedness or not at all. I am because we are. Whatever self I can be said to have is the gift of self I receive from my relation to others, the groundless ground (think of the way Shag and Scoob almost levitate) of the ‘chother. When we’re confronted with crisis, when we join together in song, or when we experience (or receive) a vision of soul, the question of where one person starts and another stops begins to dissolve; individualism takes on an unreal and unseemly quality. In such moments, we’re summoned not so much to act as if the road to life, loveliness, salvation and—possibly--sanity can only be entered into where two or more are gathered but rather to proceed in recognition of this sweet, scandalous, embarrassing fact. We have to find, hold on, and let go within the circle of our ‘chothers. It’s the only life available. Within it, we live.

The Gift

There are those who do not survive change. It is as if human beings were like that subclass of insect, the Metabola, which must undergo complete metamorphosis from egg, through larva and pulpa, to imago. In some way the fluidity of gift exchange assures the successful metamorphosis. Woody Allen used to tell a joke at the end of his stand-up routine: he would take a watch from his pocket, check the time, and then say, “It’s an old family heirloom [Pause] My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed.” The joke works because market exchange will always seem inappropriate on the threshold. There is a discrete range of conditions that will assure the emergence of the imago. A man who would buy and sell at a moment of change is one who cannot or will not give up, and if the passage is inevitable, he will be torn apart. He will become one of the done-for dead who truly die. Threshold gifts protect us from such death.
--Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

Bulb's "Undersea"

This changes...everything.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bulb.

He doth prattle on and on...

David Dark at Downtown Presbyterian (April 25, 2010) from Geoff Little on Vimeo.

Evolving Church

Re-member Humanity

We have been trying to remember humanity; to re-member humanity in the rigorous liturgical sense--to exercise anamnesis, the heart of the Eucharistic command and privilege: When you do this, remember me. Which is to say, Stay with history, Make something of it, by falling within its main line of action, the breaking of bread, the sharing of wine. Make a community whose life will also be available to history.
--Daniel Berrigan, America Is Hard to Find

"Please cease destruction of self and others."

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it...
The huge metallic arm came up again. "We are attempting to make peaceful arrival,” the elbow said all on one note. “Please inform others that this is peaceful arrival. We do not have any weapons. Great self-destruction follows from unfounded fear. Please cease destruction of self and others. We do not have any weapons. We are nonaggressive unfighting species.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, Lathe of Heaven

The New Vision

What do I want? Well, I want the new vision (I would use this word only to myself),--the new vision fastened in the material world by style. the vision must be of the strength, variety, validity of life, implying the ethically good
--Thom Gunn, 1964
I do believe in poetry as an activity reflective of one's life at its fullest--not only reflective, but it actually can be one's life at its fullest.
--Thom Gunn, 1980
w/ thanks to Colm Tóibín for his review of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn

A Way to be Witnessed

“Christianity is something to do, not a philosophical puzzle. It comes about not when someone affirms a creedal proposition, but when someone does something. It is a way to be witnessed, not a proposition to be proven.”
John D. Caputo, How to Read Kierkegaard

"Everything is capable of renewal."

Christian faith in salvation and liberation is based on a fundamental conviction that nothing in the world is simply fated to be. there is nothing in the universe that simply cannot be helped. No evil is so impregnable as to be absolutely irremediable. Everything is capable of renewal, and the world is destined to realize the utopia of the reign of God.
--Leonardo Boff
w/ thanks to Don Beisswenger

Don't-tell-me-you-believe-all-that-junk Literature

I've been checking out Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology from the library over and over again for years, and I'm about halfway through it. I check it out today and see where some sweet, geek-kindred soul has affixed the above description to this durable old copy. Just wanted to record the blessed fact. The world feels richer already.
Published in 1967, it features Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delaney, and numerous others (Ellison calls them all soothsayers). Isaac Asimov's foreword reminisces concerning those bygone days when science fiction was "don't-tell-me-you-believe-that-junk literature...don't-fill-your-mind-with-all-that-mush literature." It's as if they're all running a victory lap. Ellison's intro: "What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution." Color me now and forever a glad sucker for this kind of thing.
I'll look to lay down a review at some point.

Leonard Cohen on the State of Christianity

From an online chat...
Seth: You have such vivid Christian imagery in many of your songs,
and much of it is contrasted with the selfishness of the "modern"
individual. I was wondering what's your take on the state of
Christianity today?

Leonard Cohen: Dear Seth, I don't really have a 'take on the state
of Christianity.' But when I read your question, this answer came to
mind: As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ
comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.

Ever So Slightly Behind Some Curve

So...I write a really cool piece on The Mountain Goats for Killing the Buddha, I tweet it, and hardly anyone pays me any mind. Then I tweet an only mildly funny word of despair concerning Smashmouth's cover of "Under Pressure" and myriad peoples take note. I remain unsure as to how to best broadcast these things. The Mountain goats deliciousness can be found here. I believe it speaks to all manner of interestingness. And I love how the album cover of The Life of the World to Come evokes (to my mind) the artwork on the final albums of Rich Mullins.
And perhaps now is as good a time as any to share a Paul Muldoon poem I copied out of a magazine. The last stanza helps me to just say No when I'm tempted to google myself. Enjoy.

A Second Hummingbird

Yet another money-man
With a finger in the till
At Flavor & Fragrance, my own
Not standing still

no less a stance
than his, the only grounds
for his existence
now being to make such rounds

and roundelays as mine, to touch
what I’ve come to see
as the raw nerve

in each of us, each
doomed to think himself ever so
slightly behind some curve.

--Paul Muldoon

That Popular Feeling

You arrived as I was leaving
You were filled with that popular feeling
I could tell by the walk
I have heard about the walk
"Injured Bird"

Like the Invisible Man directing traffic
I'd be ineffective no matter how enthusiastic
"It Is What It Is"

I post the lyrics in the hope it will drive folks to access the songs and consider the life. He left us yesterday in Athens, Georgia under a rising tide of over $70,000 in medical bills. He's one for the ages. I'm reminded that we'd all do well to celebrate, champion, and lift up the voices of the geniuses we're given to discern while they're still with us.
Kristin Hersh remembers him here.
Some especially good conversations with the man are here and here.

History of Lights & Shadows

It's yours beginning with a click to the right. It's awfully good. It makes sense. Music feels a little like tapwater these days but it still does its business. Here's what you would have printed somewhere within the package if you were one of those people who procured or bought what they call "hard copy":
A History of Lights and Shadows
All songs written and performed by Sarah Masen 2007 except track 5, music by bulb words by sarah dark2007
All songs recorded by todd greene and tony doling at I’m going to kill you studios. Additional guitars and programming also by the mad duo. look these lovers up @ www.bulbmusic.com
one exception: track 6 was recorded by jon foreman at everybody to the limit studios in san diego, CA. the impossibly hopeful vocal arrangements were also jon’s masterful doing. I give him the Buddha bow.
It’s been years since I’ve done this. I have many people to thank. AHoLaS would not have happened without the kind and encouraging time of Todd and Rusti Greene and Anthony Doling. I would also like to thank David for all the time he gave me to get away on Monday nights and plenty of afternoons to stare into oblivion a little. This little project is dedicated to you. Thank you for loving me so well.
Much of the content of this ep came from reading George Eliot’s, Middlemarch.
track 1 TRY
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
track 2 LET’S KILL HIM
Some people did what their neighbors did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
track 3 PLOUGHMAN
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
track 4 SPEAK
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?
track 5 SO LONG SO LONG
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
track 6 THE RIVER
I would not creep along the coast but steer out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

Everything In Its Right Place THIS CHRISTMAS

I trust everyone understands that, from where I'm sitting, the way to go THIS Christmas when it comes to that relative/friend/associate with whom you want to take things to the next level conversationwise is toward this little fellow right here. There are of course some companion volumes with which one could complete the set. And if you're an absolute completist when it comes to the author's work and feel a little off kilter until you have everything, you'll want to spy his contribution in a fine volume called Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive. It serves as an introduction to all manner of deliciousness philosophical and cultural and all that. My bit primarily treats Thom Yorke's Eraser project ("Start Making Sense: Witnessing to the Possibility of Witness"). One quasi-disclaimer. If you're someone who finds it difficult to give your attention to an argument, an image, or another person's voice once an expletive's been dropped, I will encourage you away from this volume, for now, and urge you to consider applying your offendedness more broadly (toward needless death, destruction, and hatefulness for instance...not that the deployment of blue language is never hateful). I have a number of items and scenes I'll mean to blog about in the next few days. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I give you this poem I can't seem to get enough of:
Religion Comes

Religion comes from our pity for humans

They are too weak to live without divine protection.

Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning of infernal wheels.

Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice

Of compassion, pity, understanding?

To be human is to be completely alien amid the galaxies.

Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.

--Czeslaw Milosz

Description is Revelation

Description is revelation. It is not
The thing described, nor false facsimile.

It is an artificial thing that exists,
In its own seeming, plainly visible,

Yet not too closely the double of our lives,
Intenser than any actual life could be,

A text we should be born that we might read,
More explicit than the experience of sun

And moon, the book of reconciliation,
Book of a concept only possible

In description, canon central in itself,
The thesis of the plentifullest John.

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, from "Description Without Place"

Everything Is Broken

This was an extraordinarily good time that I only recently recalled is available as a recording online FOR FREE as people put it sometimes. It's all in the context of John McClure's course last Fall, Popular Music and Religious Identity. It's where Czeslaw Milosz and Jars of Clay and Paul Simon meet. It's me, Sarah, Cary Gibson, Stephen Mason, Charlie Lowell, Brian Ritchey, Katie Herzig, Matthew Perryman Jones, and sweet people a-plenty. A conversation that could've kept going and might yet and probably always is.
Anyhoo, for your edification, it's riiiiiiiight....here.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

Jesus is God’s ‘revelation’ in a decisive sense not because he makes a dimly apprehended God clear to us, but because he challenges and queries an unusually clear sense of God: not because he makes things plainer—on the ‘veil-lifting’ model of revelation—but because he makes things darker.
Rowan Williams (appropriated from Chris K. Huebner)

No such tales are told

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its
people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged
to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an
American to be poor, even though America is a nation
of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men
who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and
therefore more estimable than anyone with power and
gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They
mock themselves and glorify their betters.
- Kurt Vonnegut

There Is A Place Beyond Ambition

There is a Place Beyond Ambition

When the flute players couldn’t think of what to say next

they laid down their pipes,

then they lay down themselves

beside the river

and just listened.

Some of them, after a while,

jumped up

and disappeared back inside the busy town.

But the rest—

so quiet, not even thoughtful—

are still there,

still listening.

- Mary Oliver

Here Goes Everything

God Bless...

Bless This Mess by David Bazan

god bless the man who stumbles
god bless the man who falls
god bless the man who yields to temptation
god bless the woman who suffers
god bless the woman who weeps
god bless the children trying her patience

trouble getting over it is what you’re in for so pour yourself another
it’ll take a steady pair of hands
holy or unholy ghost well now i can’t tell but either way you cut it
you should get some distance if you plan to take a stand

god bless the house divided
god bless the weeds in the wheat
god bless the lamp lit under a bushel

i discovered hell to be the poison in the well
so i tried to warn the others of the curse
then my body turned on me i dreamt that for eternity
my family would burn then i awoke
with a wicked thirst

by my baby’s yellow bed i kissed her forehead and rubbed her little tummy
wondering if she’d soon despise the smell
of the booze on my breath like her mom
through a darkened mirror i have seen my own reflection
and it makes me want to be a better man
after another drink

god bless the man at the crossroads
god bless the woman who still can’t sleep
god bless the history that doesn’t repeat

Notes on a Revolution

Not sure where to begin in broadcasting my enthusiasm for the subversive, life-giving text displayed above. Let's start with samples: "There is absolutely no reason that you, with your flute-rocking skills, cannot be the Ian Anderson of tomorrow,""Every musician since the beginning of time was, at one point, a beginner," "Your voice can be one of the most powerful instruments you ever own (if you choose to use it). And it’s free!," "A lot of things sound good with distortion on them; personally, I believe distortion is the salt of sound effects—it makes everything better." Amid an arsenal of accessibly technical tips on how to get your own act going (helpful even to a 39-year-old male), Jessica Hopper delivers these good news tidings to her growing and determined public. As a musician, a critic, and the music consultant for This American Life, she knows what she's talking about, AND she's coming to GRIMEY's THIS WEDNESDAY at 6:00 in the PM. Have you heard tell of Sister Rosetta Tharpe “the original shredder?” Did you know that Big Mama Thornton wrote "Hound Dog" or that Carol Kaye played bass on the whole of Pet Sounds? Come on out and hear what all's afoot. I'll be there with my ladies and my boys. I end with more Jessica: "You’ve got all the time in the world to edit and/or drive yourself crazy over the details; attempting to get it perfect on the first try (or second or third for that matter) will only trip you up. Self-doubt is something all artists struggle with, but being self-critical while you’re writing may stunt your growth as a lyricist, and you want to be full-size…You don’t have to try to achieve in a system that excludes you/your band. You can make your own system, whatever you want it to be like."

Thanks to Jeff Jones design guru and Rilian Torode artist sage, we will have prints to raise funds for the DPC summer arts program. Check it.

You can buy one riiiiiiiiiiiiiight HERE.

More art show images. The show will include ceramics and a variety of other mixed media.

The Divine Within: Documenting the Secrets of Childhood

You are cordially invited to the 4th annual children's art show at the Downtown Presbyterian Church featuring the collaborative work of well known Nashville theologians under the age of 12. 

Below is a copy of the press release. If any of you know anyone who wants to do a story on it... there is definitely one here. Hope to see you there. 

THE DIVINE WITHIN: Documenting the Secrets of Childhood At our most artful and receptive moments--Sarah Masen suspects—we all understand that paying close attention to the creative wisdom of a child is every bit as enriching as meditating, reading sacred text, or taking in a good French film. For Masen, the Director of Children’s Education at Downtown Presbyterian Church, moving out of comfort zones and past an easy sentimentality in our openness to what children would show us is probably our best—our only—hope for emotional development. Opening September 5th in collaboration with the first Saturday Art Crawl, The Downtown Presbyterian Church presents: “The Divine Within: Documenting the Secrets of Childhood”.  This years children’s art show features works of collaboration which tweak the conventional mentor/mentored model. The guiding vision places a child-artist in the role of instructor and a collaborating adult as the recipient of theological instruction afforded by the child. This partnering flips the script on curriculums often associated with churches (Point #1 “You’re a sinner”) and presumes, from the outset, what Masen frequently cites as “the already holy spirit” of the child. Prepare your hearts for illumination. Opening begins at 6:00pm. Light fare will be provided for small and grown wayfarers. *** If you would like more information about this show, the participants and origins, or to schedule an interview with Sarah Masen, please call her at (248)505.1476 or email her at sdarkdpc@gmail.com

 

Wheresoever

Biblically, the Holy Spirit names the faithfulness of God to his own creation. Biblically, the Holy Spirit means the militant presence of the Word of God inhering in the life of the whole of creation. Biblically the Holy Spirit is the Word of God at work both historically and existentially, acting incessantly and pervasively to renew the integrity of life in this world. By virtue of this…affirmation of the biblical witness, the false notion—nourished in my childhood in the Episcopal Church—that the Holy Spirit is, somehow, possessed by and enshrined within the sanctuary of the church was at last refuted, and I was freed from it…It was—it is—the biblical sage of the Word of God as Agitator, as the Holy Spirit, that assures me that wheresoever human conscience is alive and active, that is a sign of the saving vitality of the Word of God in history, here and now. 

--William Stringfellow, The Politics of Spirituality

"Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise. Nevertheless there are possibilities of increasing social justice through the development of mind and reason.”  

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society 

Due Reverence

“An irrational society accepts injustice because it does not analyze the pretensions made by the powerful and privileged groups of society. Even that portion of society which suffers most from injustice may hold the power, responsible for it, in reverence.” Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society 

God Bless the History that Doesn't Repeat

It'll take more time than I have before me right now to make a start at saying what I want to say about Dave Bazan's latest. I'll begin by asking everyone to pay heed to "Bless This Mess" which looks to be the first single (and a magnificent intro to the sensibility of the whole album). Then mosey on over to "The Passion of David Bazan" which, for my money, (and at the risk of putting it oddly) bears witness to his witness better than anything I've read (not just because its author was kind enough to quote me profusely). The author, Jessica Hopper, will be praised at length in a future post noting her upcoming Nashville appearance at Grimey's to promote THIS. In the meantime, consider the song. I believe it's an instance of cosmic plainspeak which, as ever, expands the sphere of sanity little by little.

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.