Ruminations on Ruminations at Oxford

The year at Oxford wasn’t what I expected it to be, and I’m OK with that. In all honesty, I don’t quite remember what I was expecting my time there to be like while preparing myself last summer, reading up on the differences between American and British English, talking with friends who had spent time at the University, buying jars of peanut butter to stow away in suitcases...just in case. We often hear people say that things we’ve yet to experience rarely meet our expectations, and I often understood failed predictions invariably as disappointed predictions. There wasn’t breathing room in my life-philosophy for surprise, or at least a conscious embrace of surprise, “surprise” defined as the flouting of what we had expected. Certainly, there is a range of pleasantness to surprises: the flat tire on my bike that greeted me a few weeks ago deserved a grimace and accompanying “ugh.” Disappointment is a real thing. However, what matters is the posture with which we approach the betrayal of our expectations, whether we choose to play along with the new direction or respond with bitter reluctance. Wallace Stevens saw life as a stream down which we ought merrily, merrily, merrily row our boats, whistling a tune as though life were but a dream in which we were whisps of smoke.

This notion of “choosing our response to life’s circumstances” tended to strike me as the kind of pitiful, embarrassing guidance you might find in a spineless self-help book. I held a philosophy that valued grief and disappointment as somehow more poignant than joy and gladness, seeing the latter two as exhibited by the slightly ignorant and/or delusional. I had unwittingly adopted a kind of scholar’s melancholy: the realest feelings are the heaviest feelings, and levity is mere flippancy in the face of the human condition. An irony of my year at philosophical Oxford is that, of all places in the world, this was the one where my imagination began to thaw as I discovered and embraced the “joyful laughter that echoes through Creation” as some theologian put it. I had not expected this, and celebrate the surprise.

CS Lewis played an integral role in this spring awakening, as though his mirth reached through heavenly spans into my life. Other’s words can do that, can reach across generations and personalities to meaningfully grace our lives. One of my tutorials was on Lewis’s writings, which meant that I was in constant , if pretend, conversation with him – my mind was always full with his thoughts, words, delightfully witty prose, and insight. A central theme I discovered in his work was his notion of a jovial reality: at its core, the universe in which we live springs from beneficence and love, that it isn’t the victim (or result) of meaningless, destructive chaos. Having matured during the height of the Modernist movement, Lewis recognized a disconcerting cultural trend that assumed the latter perception about reality, which was undoubtedly influenced by the two World Wars. This notion bothered Lewis, who had fought in WWI and lived near London during the Nazi bombing raids of WWII, for he saw it as an alarming and unreasonable turn from belief in a loving God who cares for each of his beings, flaws, virtues, and peculiarities included, yet who allows them to act of their own accord.

For Lewis, grief, disappointment, and pain were real things, and each had significant weight in his life. Yet he found a deep conviction in providence, in “the laughter of things beyond the tears of things,” as Frederick Buechner puts it. The laughter of Sarah at the news of her pregnancy, her son who she ends up naming Isaac, Hebrew for “laughter.” The laughter of the lame man made healthy near the pool called “Beautiful.” The laughter of a mangy, broke street performer when you plop your bag of loose change at his feet. The laughter when you feel the embrace of a loved one after months apart.

It seems to me that Lewis’s confidence in a joyful reality came from his belief that when we pray “Thy Kingdom come,” God’s Kingdom really does come through into our world in the midst of our loneliness and confusion and sorrow and helplessness. We often imagine God’s Kingdom coming as a shocking, publicized, international political overthrow, something that declares itself in flashing lights, yet Jesus talked about it differently, describing it as like finding a buried diamond, or as yeast working in a loaf of bread. It’s a surprise when we notice it, yet it’s happening all around us, inside and outside of church walls, through Christians and nonChristians alike. It’s happening in particulars. It isn’t happening in a way measurable by our mechanical standards, as though we could post time lines that measure incremental Kingdom-arrival like donations for building projects: Creation will always be groaning until the end of time.

Until then, God’s Kingdom – his rule, his way of doing things – is sprouting up like fresh grass through cracks in a city sidewalk. It has taken some time for this notion of God working his redeeming, restoring way into our world to sink in, probably because my imagining of his Kingdom is so influenced by stories of coercive, heartless, industrial and capital expansion that deal in abstract numbers and impersonal aims; our imaginations need re-training to recover realities of God’s character and love and joy.

While preparing to head to Oxford, I imagined that I would meet intelligent people, read and write overwhelmingly much, and learn a different culture. These things all happened, in one way or another, yet I could never have predicted the conversations I would have, what I actually would read and write and learn, how I would change. These particulars invariably surprised me. I grew thankful of the surprises, and began to trust what I had known all along, that God loves us, that he works to fill our lives with joy as we seek and honor him. It’s a continual process, marked with uncertainty, fumbling, and grace, this seeking to live in relationship with God, yet, as we do, we learn that, beyond all religious jargon and institutionally-general assertions of God’s love from churches and churchmembers alike, God knows our hearts and our stories. He knows what we need to discover life, real life, and leads us to these sustenances. Discovering the reality of this particular love is a perpetual epiphany, one that confirms in our souls the best thing: it’s good to be who we are, where we are, alive. We need reminding. A quote from “American Beauty:”

“…That's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things and…this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.”

And this picture of a hot air balloon above the University:

Let's See

A few years ago, my dad gave me a newspaper article during Christmas break that he had found while I was away at school, and I have kept it since. It is a short piece (link) written by Garrison Keillor, and the wonder and loveliness of it have haunted me to this day, a sentiment no doubt woven with my quiet surprise at my dad having read and kept a writing that met me in such a real way. In the article, Keillor describes traveling on a bus in Manhattan during a chilled December night, sitting behind a couple he judged to be in their “early 20s:”

“She was a pale-skinned dark-haired beauty, perhaps an Egyptian film star, perhaps not, and the way she laid her head on his shoulder said that they were sweethearts, but he was so cool toward her, so blasé."

He didn’t kiss her once though she clearly wanted him to. I hear him say, ‘I was over at Larry’s when you called. Sorry I didn’t call you back.’ ‘What were you doing?’ she said. ‘Just hanging out.’ His hair was much nicer than a man’s hair should be. Too much time spent on that, and why would you hang around with Larry when you could be with her?”

This glimpse reminds me of how it is to return home from college after months spent away from home, away from the smell of my closet, a soft blend of laundry and old books, from the quiet murmuring of one of my parents talking on the phone downstairs, from the stairway that is so built into my muscle memory that I now only trip one out of fifteen times when skipping a step on the way up to my room. And, of course, the people: the smell of my dad’s aftershave as he hurries about a breakfasting kitchen, my mom leaving the nearly-finished Chicago Tribune crossword puzzle like a fresh footprint, my younger brother’s indecipherable grumblings chosen over distinct “yes’s” or “no’s” or “I’m at a tumultuous stage in my life and, though I desperately desire to relate with others, the effort is too much right now and you, family, will simply have to wait while I remain in my adolescent-cocoon.” These things I have grown accustomed to, that I see but don’t see, in all their humanness and loveliness and peculiarity.

I begin to wonder, What else am I growing accustomed to? What else is becoming familiar, so familiar that it annoys with its sameness, fulfilling the adage, “familiarity breeds contempt?” Why is it that we desperately desire to know, and be known, yet start to feel stale in our own home, in our own skin? Perhaps it is not so much new people or new places that we truly desire, but fresher, realer ways of seeing all that’s around us. Like Keillor,

“I don’t want to be like that young man, in the presence of magnificence and oblivious to it. His life has been too easy for him to understand what a miracle her love is. Mine has not.”

When we know love, it’s easy to forget what loneliness feels like - what homelessness might feel like because homelessness is the essence of loneliness - its weight and suffocation, how seems inexorable. It’s easy to forget our deep need for one another, for love, when we are with those people, and perhaps this is sometimes a good thing to forget. Yet, it is our quiet, or frantic, sufferings that remind us of all that’s inside calling out to love and be loved. This is a level worth connecting on, the realest level there may be. As Frederick Buechner writes, in his work "Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain,"

“We are never more alive to life than when it hurts – never more aware both of our own powerlessness to save ourselves and of at least the possibility of a power beyond ourselves to save us and heal us if we can only open ourselves to it. We are never more aware of our need for each other, never more in reach of each other, if only we can bring ourselves to reach out and be reached."

If absence, longing, makes us realize our love for others, how can we live with this awareness of their beauty, of their loveliness and depth and humor and holiness? How can we not fall into well-worn paths of being with one another that, because of the familiar footfalls and cracks and ridges, blind people with a gauze of mundanity? We need constantly renewed eyes, hearts, as Jesus put it in Matthew 9.16,

“Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

How then, to engage in this restoration? Far from a conclusive answer, Anne Lamott writes an idea that points toward this renewal in her book Bird by Bird:

“ [Good] books help us understand who we are and how we ought to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They [teach]…quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pat attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded. I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”

I’m not sure if Jesus read literature, or if half of America even does. That’s not really the point, though. The point is learning to pay attention. To listen. To see others, really see them. I wonder if Adam and Eve had this problem of distraction or boredom before the Fall – probably not. It’s something we need to practice, to re-learn. We need wake-up calls. We need “eyes that see and ears that hear," and good art, good conversations foster this. What if we lived with the growing attentiveness to a God whose silence fills the earth: whose unspoken truth is everywhere, who came down to earth “delivering signs and dusting from their eyes,” as Sufjan Stevens sings? It is an ongoing pursuit, this awareness endeavor, and I wonder how much of it is us seeking to see something, and how much is grace-filled discovery. They mystery, however, is what pushes, lures, and tickles me onward.

Sounds of Heaven from Brooklyn?

“Tv on the radios new album is what the rapture will sound like if Gods angels are an indie band” was what a friend of mine recently texted to me, referring to the album “Dear Science” (the grammatical errors are not my own and I think that he would smile seeing me include them for authenticity’s sake). I’m not sure that I completely agree with him; if I were to imagine a band that most resembles an ensemble of heavenly hosts, Sufjan Stevens and his eclectic “Illinoisemakers” comes to mind. But I do think that he is on to something.

In a recent interview with the New York Times about their new album, “Dear Science,” TV on the Radio guitarist Dave Sitek explains, “A lot of bands have something to say; we have something to ask.” This posture of inclusivity, of listener engagement, permeates all of their music, reaching back to their first album, “Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes.” Though rather experimental and unconventional, a fusion of hip-hop, rock, jazz, and soul, Brooklyn-based TV on the Radio has yet to put out an album that does not resonate with its multifarious audience. Before “Dear Science,” their first and second albums, “Desperate Youth…” and “Return to Cookie Mountain,” respectively, each gained wide critical acclaim from musically diverse sources (i.e. Filter Magazine, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, etc.), and experienced decent sales.

What has kept me listening over the years, however, has been the incredible way that the artists (as well as being musicians, the band members each pursue different arts as well, one of them once being a sculptor for the now-defunct MTV cartoon “Celebrity Deathmatch”) of TV on the Radio push the boundary of pop music while not going overboard into the depths of inaccessible, experimentalist noise. The beats are fresh, the guitar licks tight, the lyrics profound, and the vocals provide a unique and curiously perfect cohesiveness to the complexity of the dark aural blend. They pull all this off while remaining a witty and laid-back bunch. Later in the interview, singer Tunde Adebimpe, describes the group: “As heavy as some of the songs get [on Dear Science], the joking around that goes on between the five of us gets out of control sometimes.”

For a band purported to be “God’s angels,” this image of levity and harmony is quite fitting.

(originally published in Illinois Wesleyan University's newspaper, The Argus)

A Chilling Stroll Down "Revolutionary Road"

Shock value in art is generally something I frown upon because, if for no other reason, it is a cheap attempt to elicit a visceral response from the audience. There is superficial shock effect, as might be seen in a low budget horror movie or an absurdly avant-garde flick (see: “Vampiyaz”), which pale in comparison to subtle, unnerving aspects woven into works that effect long after leaving the museum, after pulling out of the theater parking lot, after closing the cover. Emily Dickinson claimed, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it is poetry.” If her description holds true, then the movie “Revolutionary Road” is, no doubt, a lyric told from multiple perspectives, often without words.

Sam Mendes tells the story of an unrecognized, or unspoken, emptiness of the American dream in a way similar to his 1999 release “American Beauty,” though this rendition lacks Kevin Spacey’s lighthearted quips that assuage the bluntness of the broken lives exposed in the movie. Revolutionary Road pulls no punches while maintaining a certain calculated tact throughout, illustrating the nightmare that often haunts those stepping into adulthood: the perpetual routine of a dull existence. Mendes holds a magnifying glass to the deterioration of the Wheeler’s, DeCaprio and Winslet, lives, crumbling within the suffocation and apathy that result from the dynamic of their relationship.

John Givings, played by Michael Shannon, is the one breath of fresh air in the story, a character that incisively exposes the reality of the Wheeler’s dysfunction and seems to be the only one in the movie to see things as they truly are. "Plenty of people are on to the emptiness," John says to Frank and April, "but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness." It is a curiously perfect surprise to see Shannon receive an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, as he is onscreen for no more than twenty electric and revelatory minutes.

As the movie displays continually more unnerving callousness and unresolved conflict in an intimate relationship, it becomes clear that April and Frank are trapped not by their environment but by one another and the disappointments and fears they harbor. They each seek escape, though it is from the cages of their bodies and minds – not a particular situation, as they suppose. Revolutionary Road is a meditation on human fragility and the futility of changing another, or oneself, with one’s own self-interested hands.

No obvious resolution emanates to ease the hearts and minds of viewers as they sit watching the credits, trying to muster the strength to rise from their seats after having trudged through the complex swamp of emotions and implications conjured by the movie. It begs the questions, What would have changed had the Wheelers left suburbia? What is it inside of us that longs for escape, for freedom from routine? Seeing the holy in the mundane has to be more than a trivial desire in life because we live in particulars: parking in the same garage after work each day, seeing the same neighbors through the kitchen window. Revolutionary Road is a call to find meaning in seeming emptiness, in the un-romanticized aspects of life, to search inside one another and realize the deep mysteries and beauty that yearn for discovery.

(originally published by rednoW)

Preach Beauty Always and, When Necessary, Use Words

The difficult part of writing on, or discussing, a meaningful experience is that we run the risk of diminishing what was more amazing for us than we can attempt to match with the words at our disposal. “Awesome” is overused. “Crazy” sounds too frantic. “Righteous” rings a bit too much of the eighties. Though I don’t doubt your lexicon reaches beyond these clichés, a movie, a book, a poem, a concert that moves us (higher) incites some innate, beneficent desire to share, to want others to know the tingle, the warmth, the “a ha!”, the inside joke, the connection, the lift. This business of communication is an important one, indeed, and we constantly, consciously or otherwise, probe the limits of language when sharing what happens in our lives with others.

Seeing Explosions in the Sky is an experience beyond words, causing one to wish that there were some beauty-language (Hopelandic) that would successfully express to another a taste of what this band is about, what they create onstage, weaving wonders of aural alchemy that turn to some kind of gold when spread about enraptured audiences. The Texas-based instrumental band(connect to website) visited Congress Theater in Chicago on July 2nd. The day marked their ten year anniversary as a band which, with the difficulties that artists working together often face, quietly impresses. Standing at the lone vocal-microphone at stage right, Munaf Rayani, one of the three guitarists (there isn’t any obvious spotlighting of a frontman) softly spoke his traditional and ever-perfect introduction for the band: “My name is Munaf, and we’re Explosions in the Sky from Texas, USA,” walking toward the band to the rumble of an audience already roaring with anticipation.

For the next hour and a half, they soared, climbed, ventured into the sky, giving off radiant explosions of harmony the whole way. Not a word was spoken during the set – the band is entirely instrumental – yet their performance was evidence enough that meaning is deeper than words. Craig Detweiler, co-author of A Matrix of Meanings, says of ambient music, Sigur Rós in particular, “Without learning a new tongue, listeners get involved in the moods created by the music. Interpretations begin from feeling, not thinking, engaging “sentences of harmony.” The word “sentence,” after all, comes from the Latin verb “sentire,” meaning “to feel.”

For music void of lyrics, the possibilities for connection with the listener are as infinite and intricate as the tiny refractions in his personality and disposition, as intimate as the impact of words spoken and glances exchanged throughout her day. This approach makes the recipient the sole interpreter of the material, and each listener brings a different interpretation to each song. While it makes discussion difficult, this difficulty reminds us that music is about music, about a shared experience, not about our ability to dissect or describe or translate.

Language is not an absolute, nor is it static; it combines infinitely subjective and particular definitions, which is both its mystery and beauty. As I continue in life, I find that words are continually redefined and shaped: beauty, trust, faith, love, friendship. Language finds itself at a curious crux: we have “objective” definitions, what one might find in a dictionary, that give us some point of reference. However, the word “family” in your mind may be radically different from the concept I have in my mind, based on our diverse experiences, which outlines the importance of intentional communication, and the peril of assumption. We have to constantly learn one another’s language. As Carl Sandburg wrote, “When will we all speak the same language?”

The music of Explosions in the Sky leads to a necessarily idiosyncratic experience, one that all I was with at the time agreed was “Awesome.” Sometimes “Awesome” simply has to suffice for something so, well, explosive.

(Thanks to BA for the helps in editing this one)

PS - This passage is from Wendell Berry's essay, "Local Knowledge in the Age of Information," and, if I were a better writer I'd revise my essay to weave this one in, yet I think you'll make the implied connections and not mind the add-on approach:

"There is in addition for us humans [concerning knowledge], always, the unknown, things perhaps that we need to know that we do not know and are never going to know. There is mystery. Obvious as it is, we easily forget that beyond our sciences and arts, beyond our technology and our language, is the irreducible reality of our precious world that somehow, so far, has withstood our demands and accommodated our life, and of which we will always be dangerously ignorant."

Mm.