Serenity Now

On Losing Virtue, Part 2

2011-05-31T23:58:00.000-07:00

A while back, I wrote an article about the modern cultural fluency that governs sexuality. I argued specifically that our secular humanistic culture exalts sexual gratification out of a conspicuous pandemic of impatient self-indulgence. With this seemingly cavalier attitude toward sexuality, we attempt to “cheat” and acquire a level of intimacy we haven’t truly earned. In other words, we try to get it cheap, and like children having just succeeded in some grand misbehavior, we revel in the freedom from any accountability inevitably tied to the sex act. In biblical Christian doctrine, however, God is glorified by preserving sexual intimacy for the marriage bed, where the solemn promise of fidelity has already been secured, and the requisite emotional attachment, devotion, and all the responsibilities implicit in sexual congress (including the possibility of pregnancy and all the rest of it) are guaranteed, having already been pledged ceremonially through the blessing and sacrament of marriage. Many try to downplay the significance of such ceremony, as if their hormonal impulses alone were blessing enough. We try to get sex cheap, without having to earn it by winning someone’s love and respect and promising lifelong fidelity before God. As I stated in that previous article, I think this attitude clearly reflects a depreciation of marriage in addition to a degenerate enslavement to sexual desire.

There is, however, another side to this cultural pathology. I’m aware that a great many “churched” people who may have been applauding my convictions in the previous paragraph might be suddenly and rudely struck by the assertions that follow, offensive and morally alienating as they may be. I would love to believe myself able to transcend bias, but of course, a great deal of understanding must be tinged by some degree of personal predilection. That said, whatever response this may inspire, rest assured my thoughts are constructively meant, and while I base them on many years of experience in faith communities and serious study of the scriptures, this is simply what I've distilled so far. To be sure, if what I wrote previously outlines the principle inconsistencies implicit in the enormous mess that our larger secular culture has made of sexuality, then the community of Christian believers—committed to following Jesus and to the earnest pursuit of God’s word and will—cannot overlook the genuine mess the modern church itself has made of the same.

Sexuality is among the few aspects of ordinary human experience wherein the difference between sin and righteousness depends specifically on the context and meaning by which it has been established and upon which an individual commits to those impulses to which we are, each of us, biologically prone. The deeper, doctrinal understanding is quite simply that such intimacy was designed by God to be shared between a husband and a wife. And yet, in a fractured world where things have gone miserably awry, and despite what sexuality ought to be, we allow ourselves to succumb to desire without fidelity. To make matters worse, the evil one is still more deceptive, a maker of messes, both in the human heart and thereby in the world, and what seems like wisdom and insight is often a disguise concealing a deeper layer of sin.

Many raised among church communities are certainly familiar with the “sex talk.” Of course, churches implore their young people to preserve their virginity until marriage. And why should they not, when such is the biblically-inspired directive? However, church rhetoric and “Christian-ese” often give evidence to a spiritual posture by which this lecture on sexual purity frequently becomes a kind of sanctimonious fear-mongering. The Bible itself and all orthodox doctrines verify that sin separates us from God, and it always merits death but for the salvation we find in Jesus. And yet, how many have grown up in communities where people have been some way made to feel that the mistake of surrendering one’s virginity before marriage is somehow irredeemable? Too often, for many acculturated in the church, the message implicitly conveyed is that the spiritual effects of sexual impurity are a level of imperfection to which one is permanently demoted. A church, as a corporate entity, can corporately forgive a great many things, but reconciliation with God and with people do not always coincide. In fact, they are often diametrically opposed. And in many faith communities, this same dynamic seems to poison the lexicon with which sexual sin is discussed.

To be clear, every sin merits death, but in Jesus, the gospel himself, while sin may be interpersonally irredeemable, it is never spiritually so. This bifurcation is understandable enough, but too often, personal limitations inform spiritual admonition. And yet, where else but in a church community should the redeemable quality of sin be spiritually contextualized? The problem is that too often we rationalize the unrecoverable state of perfection as impacting the recoverable state of redemption. Think of it this way. Every moment, we commit ourselves to choices—how we spend our time, our energy, our words, or better yet, how we don’t spend them. Of course, we’re tied to this existential commitment every moment of our lives, and the loss of virginity is such a moment, whose passing is likewise a commitment. And like all the others, despite what some will say about recommitting one’s sexuality or the attractive notion of becoming a “spiritual virgin,” virginity itself can never be reclaimed nor re-spent. It seems then that church leaders and members of church communities often communicate, perhaps inadvertently, that the sin of sexual impurity cannot be forgiven because virginity cannot be reclaimed, which completely undermines the very nature of redemption, since the blood of Christ is said to cover a multitude of sin. What’s more, orthodox doctrine reveals that one of Satan’s chief aims is to convince us that our sin cannot be redeemed. An insidious and serpentine thread, it occasionally creeps its way into sermons, exhortations, and sex talks. And what better weapon has the enemy than to attack believers by disguising sin as wisdom in the words of preachers, pastors, and teachers who believe they’re doing right, but who lead young people and many others to feel they might as well keep sinning since they’ve already missed the only perfect path by which God might be glorified? My argument, then, is simply this. There is a fine line to walk between convicting ourselves to glorify God with our sexuality and exalting such perfection at the expense of redemption.

And what of recommitment, the reclaiming of chastity by those who have already sinned? Most often, it feels like an epilogue, a pastor’s half-attempt at inclusiveness. Many who give the sex talk seem to treat recommitment as an afterthought, by which they attempt to include the members of their audience who have, for whatever reason and by whatever mistake, not measured up to the status of purity they've attempted to champion for their listeners. To me, this doesn’t appear to be quite so much a matter of hyper-valuing sexual purity as it is of under-valuing spiritual redemption. It takes a sincere faith to believe that our sin is truly redeemed when the secular world is telling us it wasn’t a big deal in the first place, and many in the church world make us feel tainted and blemished beyond repair. Of course, regardless of what church leaders and speakers say or do, we cannot lose sight of what we know to be right simply because we don’t feel it was campaigned for effectively. I believe this brings me full circle. What is my point, then? If some in the world are trying to convince us that sex is no big deal, and some in the church world are communicating that it’s the biggest deal of all, we must penitently commit ourselves to what is still right and true. Sex is a big deal, and sexual sin, while not physically redeemable, is certainly spiritually so. An omniscient God, who can peer into the heart of the sinner and verify true repentance from detachment and insincerity, thus makes all things new in Christ Jesus.

I’ve heard teachers and church leaders tell young people that virginity is the greatest gift you can give your spouse. Not to minimize the value of spending virginity wisely nor of glorifying God in so doing, but this must be nonsense. I can think of twenty spiritual fruits and measures of love and sacrifice that trump virginity in the category greatest gift given a spouse, and short of campaigning the threat of sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, such a statement often seems little more than a hair's width away from fear-mongering. The threat of hell, as true as it is, allows us to contextualize God’s grace, but avoiding it is not the chief aim of sanctification. Likewise, physical blemish, regret, and disease can be helpful deterrents, but they are not the principle point of chastity. To worship God is to be in awe of Him and of all He has done, both universally and individually. Likewise, by our chastity we give further expression to this by glorifying Him as He has designed us to do and exercising those intimate gestures under the protection of a fidelity and a trust that far surpass the superficial payoff of the moment, not being contingent on one’s dynamic or fleeting impulses. No, they are promised, committed, solemnly pledged. And therein is sexuality a reflection of God’s glory.

I’m sure many will disagree with me and find that I am trivializing sexual sin, whereas I mean only to emphasize that such sin is as redeemable as any other, which is not to trivialize the idea that saving oneself for marriage is precisely what God requires. But we can only encounter God through His son, and this only because the world itself is so completely fractured that the dream of perfection is only realized in the redemption he offers in himself. There is no true perfection in the world. It is a gossamer cloud and figment of the mind, a lie we entertain as we pass through the world, hopelessly addicted to the life of our bodies, which draw nearer to death each moment, and our spirits nearer the continuing opportunity for renewal.

I once read a forum post by a young man who bemoaned the fact that the girl with whom he was so taken was not a virgin, and he admitted that this might become a “plague” to their relationship. Because he had saved himself in the hope of trading his virginity with his future wife, he admitted that he would feel “gypped” because she got his when he didn’t get hers. While he conceded that she had been forgiven, it didn’t change for him that he wanted to scream because he otherwise liked her so much. I thought on it a good while and gave myself the time to craft what I felt was a respectful response to add to the chain of comments he had received, most of which expressed some combination of sympathy, counsel, or support. I think this young man’s feelings are fairly representative of the unctuous paradigm by which many prejudices of believers and non-believers alike are substantiated. Pride in one’s resume is a common trap. How hard it is to balance our moral triumphs and those things for which God Himself would commend us with the perpetual realization of our own depravity. There is never an end to needing Christ, which I always find so beautifully demonstrated in 2 Corinthians 12. The apostle Paul, excellent as he was, endured a mysterious "thorn" in his flesh, which served to remind him that in his weakenss, the power of Christ is wonderfully perfected.

My response to the young man's forum post went as follows: “You’re seeking perfection, and you may well find it. Glorify the Lord with your sexuality and remain pure. But don’t pursue perfection to the point that you allow it to undermine the nature of redemption, which is far better. Placing such importance on virginity (as opposed to chastity) can almost be like trying to get back to Eden. Jesus is better anyway. He makes all things new. Live by faith and remember that no one is spotless. You can draw too far from the spirit by exalting the state of the body.” I have no idea what the young man thought of my words, if anything, since he never responded. I’d like to believe he thought better about the young lady’s history. If, however, he chose to move on and seek out someone equally pure, as I said, he may well find it, and it is certainly to his credit to have saved himself. But I get the feeling he will one day be confronted with the very same conflict again, in another context perhaps.

Virginity is precious, to be sure, and everyone who has saved him- or herself for marriage has done right and done well. What is wrong, in my view, is to be drunk on virtue, and thereby to overlook redemption, of which we are, all of us, in need. It is wise and good to be faithful stewards of our bodies. At the same time, the body is dying every moment. So subject it firstly to what is not dying, but may be every day renewed and made more beautiful. One of my favorite movie quotes is from The Ten Commandments, at a moment when Nefretiri, the Egyptian queen, tries desperately to tempt Moses, played by Charleton Heston, to forsake his wife, drawing attention to how Zipporah’s beauty pales in comparison to her own. Moses simply replies, “There is a beauty beyond the senses, Nefretiri—beauty like the quiet of green valleys and still waters, beauty of the spirit that you cannot understand” (The Ten Commandments, 1956). If only we could each apply such understanding to marriage, and to sexuality, that bedlam and celebration of the senses, which must be directed by a spiritual beauty to fulfill its sensual purpose. What is right and virtuous is for the body to serve the spirit, not the spirit to serve the body. The spirit, as mentor, then deserves the greater care to be kept healthy, lest it be corrupted by an overly ambitious and sometimes conniving protégé, whose joy is swift, febrile, and fleeting. Seek the still water first. Lay stones in the life that is to come, instead of straw over the elusive veil behind which we now toil. As all believers must come to understand, salvation is only a beginning, and the duality of sanctification is just this: pursue righteousness, and when you stumble, as you surely will, repent and celebrate the grace you enjoy by an earnestly restored pursuit. If you’re saving yourself because you’re strung out on perfection, without realizing you’re inevitably flawed in a hundred other ways, you’ll succumb to pride. No question. And your sexual purity, while not entirely in vain, will surely perpetuate that pride. And again, what seems like virtue becomes yet another disguise for sin. To be sure, the gospel is easier to believe than to live.

Storied in a Box

2011-04-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

The summer of 1996 saw me finally adopt two notable tastes as a moviegoer. One values the advantage of letterboxing, while the other is simply the appreciation of black-and-white film. Ironically enough, the same movie happened to cultivate both appetites. My affection for black-and-white in particular afforded a rich new legacy of movies to embrace, beginning right here with Billy Wilder’s bittersweet romantic dramedy The Apartment. Not many people dare to buy a movie they’ve never seen. For me, it was one of those rare moments when I ventured out on such a limb, largely because the odds, I wagered, didn’t appear too steep, since the film had much to recommend itself, in particular its starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine and having won the Best Picture Oscar in 1960. As it was, I took a chance and struck gold; not only did it awaken the previously mentioned appetites, but moreover it became a true personal treasure, one of my all-time favorite movies.

The Apartment was shot with a fairly wide anamorphic lens, the result of which requires letterboxing on just about any standard or widescreen television set. Letterboxing is, of course, quite common these days, but I suspect a great many people still don’t fully understand the history of the word widescreen and how it relates to the viewing of movies and television programs. I don’t mean to criticize; I was once among the same ranks throughout a time when I was certainly an avid movie-goer and considered myself an admirer of film as art. So, for those who aren’t familiar, the issue of letterboxing and the novelty of widescreen TVs both concern what is referred to as the aspect ratio of an image. Since nearly all motion picture and photographic images are rectangular, the ratio concerns only two dimensions: width and height. 60 years ago, this wasn’t much of an issue, since a great many motion pictures were still shot and presented in a standard 4 to 3 (width to height) aspect ratio. With the advent of television in the 1950s, broadcasters and manufacturers adopted the same standard ratio. However, as far back as the 1920s, filmmakers were experimenting with wider-angle (or anamorphic) lenses, and by the 1950s, a variety of wide-angle lenses and film resolutions were commonly used. Eventually, the 4:3 ratio was virtually abandoned in cinema, and for many years now, 21:9 has been the widest lens ratio commonly used in motion picture photography, and is the specific ratio in which The Apartment was filmed. When I worked for Edward Cinemas during my years as an undergraduate in college, we referred to the 21:9 ratio as “scope,” which was short for CinemaScope—the trademark name for the anamorphic process of widescreen motion picture presentation. The alternative was the smaller 16:9 image, which we called “flat.” These two types of film actually required us to alternate between two different projector lenses. And if one of our theaters was presenting a “flat” movie, a switch on the projector would extend masking curtains in the auditorium, obscuring the edges of the screen not used in the presentation of a “flat” film. Likewise, the curtains would have to be opened to present a “scope” film.

Now, like many people, I initially avoided home videos presented in letterbox format, since it seemed to be limiting the composition of the image, even though the situation is actually the exact opposite; most movies actually have to be cropped on the sides to completely fill a 4:3 screen, with the image occasionally panning and shifting to comprise the characters and the majority of the action within this limited frame, which is how we got the term pan-and-scan. Whenever a video box or a broadcasting station mentions that a film has been “formatted to fit your TV screen,” this is exactly what they’re talking about, and it always means that the image has been cropped. It was my training and work as a projectionist that finally allowed me to understand the purpose and advantage of letterboxing on a TV screen. But not until The Apartment did I appreciate it. Letterboxing is nothing more than a way of “cropping” the area of the screen itself, similar to what the masking curtains achieved in the auditoriums at Edwards, and presenting the wider image of a film, thereby retaining the full composition of the frame in its complete, albeit dilated (or slightly smaller), form. Now, there was, I admit, a short period during which I continued to dislike letterboxing simply because I found the notion of a smaller image too unappealing. But The Apartment was where I began finally to value seeing everything and to ignore the somewhat reduced image. Of course, with a widescreen TV, this diminution is all the more negligible.

While presented in letterbox format, the story is "boxed" another way, too—a story, in a manner, told “in a box,” as it depicts the tale of “loyal, resourceful, cooperative,” friendless, and wed-to-his-job insurance clerk C.C. Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, who permits the use of his apartment for executive flings. Such a premise might seem almost dramatically trite by today’s standards, but the moral quandary explored here was certainly an adequate propellant in 1960, particularly when Baxter realizes that Fran Kubelik, the elevator girl with whom he’s so sweetly taken, played by Shirley MacLaine, is actually his boss’s own mistress. However, at 21, budding film aficionado that I was, what struck me so about The Apartment was only in part its subject matter. There are plenty of romances (comedic and otherwise) set to film and plenty of stories that canvas the complexities of corruption and corporate politics. Like many films, what makes it stand out is the execution, the manner in which the story is brought to life by virtue of script; performances; directing; music; and yes, despite the limited setting in the second half of the film, cinematography. In particular, what makes it still a compelling work today is the sharp wit demonstrated in the writing of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, which is legendary for being so well-crafted as to only be diminished by improvisation. These were skilled writers whose work continually bears the mark of excellence, like the tasteful use of a rhetorical refrain, such as corporate exec Mr. Kirkeby’s habitual use of the –wise suffix to qualify a statement, which becomes a kind of catch-phoneme adopted by the two principle characters and by which a number of important conversations and themes unfold. It would almost become irritating, but as with so many things in life, as Baxter himself observes at a key moment in the film, “That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.”

In addition to a sterling script, I’ve come to realize that its rather understated yet clever art direction and the manner in which The Apartment was photographed were significant factors in its having won my affection. There’s something about the setting itself that Lemmon’s character explains so simply and perfectly in the opening minutes of the film: “nothing fancy, but kind of cozy, just right for a bachelor.” Baxter’s apartment has an intimate and, at the same time, an expansive quality when delivered by the anamorphic lens and how Wilder used it. The frame is composed in such rich and stylized ways but with objects and characters of seemingly ordinary significance. The film then has the remarkable quality of drawing the viewer into its world so as to lend extraordinary significance to these otherwise mediocre people and their lamentably corrupted lives. It invites us to look closer, particularly at Baxter himself, to see a tenderness and a kindly simplicity, despite his immoral motivation and the lengths to which he extends himself for professional advancement. You almost get the sense that Lemmon’s character is simply too nice for his own good, too naïve, not quite accustomed to saying no. In another respect, a simple and unassuming goodness seems to permeate his character, which fortifies the modest and unassuming nature of the film itself.

Adding to its considerable allure is a charming score by Adolph Deutsch, at times buoyant and wry, at others jazzy and pensive, infused with a bewitchingly bittersweet theme originally titled “Jealous Lover” by Charles Williams. If ever music could inspire the tenor of nostalgia in an instant without any familiarity or association, this is it. And as the score is wound wistfully through the narrative, we find ourselves drawn into a world both sad and sweet, bitter and beautiful. And the apartment itself, specifically the manner in which it’s photographed, sets the ideal tone in which the themes of the story are so poignantly developed. The fact that the majority of the action occurs in this “box” is a testament to the narrative powers of Billy Wilder and art director Alexander Trauner, who used an array of wiles to create the cozy but shabby look of Baxter’s domicile. It was this domicile that so affected me along with the subtle manner in which Wilder continually composes the frame, with such vivid warmth and scenic charm, in tasteful combination with the contrasts of black-and-white film, creating a winning and comfortably threadbare, dog-eared kind of tone that saturates the entire story, made all the more beguiling by Lemmon and MacLaine’s endearing performances.

Perhaps the aspect of the film, then, that appeals most to me is a kind of lighthearted counterpoint between pathos and levity, which makes it feel, in a sense, very real. There is a broad menu of conflict at work here, particularly in the two principle characters. And yet the plot and its themes unfold in such an engaging way. In the hands of Wilder and Diamond, the story tackles some considerably dark terrain, including infidelity, corporate greed, emotional alienation, suicide, prostitution, and romantic angst, all with a delightfully refined wit, a teary but tasteful sweetness, and a plenitude of captivatingly mundane ambience. It’s truly as touching and tender as they come. If you’ve never seen it, do so, with my heartfelt endorsement. Take a step inside The Apartment and make a memory which, in all its treasury of toil and tenderness, will never disappoint. Invite your significant other, a sibling, or a dear friend; pop some corn; and keep on hand a tissue or two in the event your eye starts to leak.

Too often compared to its hilarious cousin Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s claim to comedic immortality made only a year before and also starring Jack Lemmon (however tempting the comparison may be since AFI crowned Some Like It Hot the funniest movie of all time), The Apartment is a preeminent achievement, multi-faceted and thematically embellished, that quite defies echelon and type. Is it comedy? Is it drama? A tale of corporate intrigue? Or your standard naïve-boy-meets-indifferent-girl story turned on its drearily optimistic ear? Well, yes. Imagine, if you will, the least likely to draw your attention in a box of adolescent pups, the most diseased and flea-ridden, mangy and mongrel, but the quiet, quirky, and wide-eyed spirit of which makes it the most ironically fitting and altogether wonderful choice to take home. Okay, that’s a bit of bias speaking. But still… It’s a keeper. Story-wise.

It's a DJ Wonderful Life

2011-02-26T21:36:00.000-08:00

A week or so before last Christmas, as first semester neared its end, I battled exhaustion, as is sometimes the season to do in education. But despite my own end-of-term deflation, like most teachers, I also faced the relentless and somewhat irksome lethargy of my students, whose behavior clearly communicated, whether done well or not, I wish only to be done. I can understand this. I was a student myself once upon a time. You begin to wish desperately to inhabit some future version of yourself who’s already finished and presently celebrates total freedom from the commitment of scholarship and the demands that compel you, day by day, to sustain your energies as you traverse a certain span of growth and learning, though to many, it’s merely a span of accountability; whether we grow or learn is often a matter of intentionality, or even circumstance. The fact remains, most high school students lack the foresight that would prevent their delving solely toward the most immediate satisfaction and the “cheapest,” least edifying path to completion. So often we prefer ease over gain. A great many of my students would honestly rather sit and multiply single-digit numbers to get an A and claim they’ve learned Precalculus than to embrace the challenge of doing so in fact. It’s human nature, I suppose. It certainly takes an open, unselfish, far-sighted mind to think otherwise.

Pondering these curious cultural agonies, I sat down to clear my mind after a long day of teaching. But instead of listening to music or simply putting my head down on my desk and closing my eyes for ten minutes, I reached for a copy of Emerson’s essays. And as I perused the table of contents, the topic of prudence caught my eye, and his reflections returned my attention to ideas I realized I’ve learned to ignore quite effectively, particularly with respect to the complacency that tends to direct our industry, not on a large scale, as would concern broad, long-term goals, but on a short-term scale, next to which the vision and span of life is like an endless road, a succession of years so numerous, we can hardly conceive of their ending. Of course, this is the state in which we live the majority of our lives. Day-to-day, even minute-by-minute, how I choose to spend my time is too often directed by some interior law of apathy, blindness, or impatience. It is, not surprisingly, similar to how my students often think, and I see in myself a refracted manifestation of their value structure and the contingent lack of maturity that would otherwise govern my thinking if not for having spent a few more choices and a few more years accruing, I hope, a modicum of wisdom.

Emerson calls prudence “the virtue of the senses,” or “the art of securing a present well-being,” which provides a way of exploring motivation. He muses on for some time, occasionally waxing so poetical as to seem disjointed and cryptic. But often enough he hits a fantastic stride of statements that resonate clearly and poignantly. The world of the senses, Emerson argues, has a symbolic character, which is revealed by three degrees of proficiency in the knowledge of the world: one living to the utility of the symbol, exalting health and wealth as a final good; one living to the beauty of the symbol, as poets, artists, scientists, and so on; and one living to the beauty of the thing signified, which represents true wisdom. He says, “The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build houses and barns thereon, reverencing the splendor of the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny” (Emerson, 158). These thoughts resuscitated my mind and drew me into a state of sober introspection. In a subsequent section, he adds, “Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or a pin, but he is not a cultivated man” (Emerson, 159). To what extent would my life, as I have lived it to this point, reflect such cultivation or rather address the true beauty of these existential symbols and the spiritual perception he describes?

This thread of contemplation gained momentum a few weeks later as I sat attempting to write a resolution on New Year’s Eve, which quickly took a sharp introspective turn, of course, almost certainly propelled by the Emerson I had been trying to digest those few previous weeks. Before I knew it, I had written a dozen or so resolutions, everything from starting and ending the day with prayer and reading for pleasure each day to more typical self-improvement efforts like getting more sleep and biking to work three times a week. But what really stood out and clearly seemed to require my attention the most seriously was something quite simple and more a matter of temperament than habit, which will, I would think, make it the more challenging to command. I’m talking about panic.

I work at a school where things move quickly. In addition to the five core subjects, having each student enrolled in a Bible class and the commitment to a morning meeting time that allows for weekly worship and a variety of school assemblies is an endeavor that benefits from a six-day cycle in which each class meets only five times and a daily schedule in which individual classes meet for only 47 minutes. What’s more, until only a few years ago, the passing time between classes was a mere three minutes, instead of the current five. Of course, limited instruction time at Oaks Christian requires both efficiency and flexibility to ensure that the scope of the curriculum and the demands of student learning are adequately met. The class period doesn’t seem to lend itself to the type of lesson in which a student’s thought, even an incorrect thought, which any seasoned teacher can confirm often yields the greatest understanding, is allowed the time to linger as it should. Often I find myself moving nimbly from one concept to the next, hardly allowing the kids the requisite time to digest a new idea. What’s more, I find it a macrocosm of my own life, both professional and personal.

I’m referring to something too many of us have come to regard as a day in the life, par for the course, what we all simply expect as Americans and members of a global society. I’m talking about that sense of urgency that governs our lives and demands of us a constant attention to task, often causing us to be so agenda-driven that some of us scarcely understand what to do with a break. Indeed, many people devote huge portions of personal time to making sure things don’t “fall apart” at work. For teachers, this means making sure lesson plans and grading are completed with some degree of timeliness. We take working lunches, use personal time and evenings to do nothing but chores and errands, and so remain in a state of constant anxiousness, the panic button perennially pressed in order to sustain the awareness of task and responsibility, awareness without respite, without relief, as if the face we wear and the manner we affect were the button-down version of a self who is each moment a frenetic mess, being constantly eroded. It’s a life that slowly kills you as you consistently bear the weight of a demand that can never be fully met.

The answer, I believe, lies in the intentionality of taking a sensible breakfast, the time to retreat, get centered, and restore a sense of purpose and vision, to renew what is green and golden in the enthusiasm that drives us to excel. Like a ship without a pilot, when persistently enslaved by tasks and agendas, we lose that vision and that zeal, and all that’s left is the burden of it. But what do you do when there seems more to be done than there is time to do it? You simply face the challenge to choose well with the time you have in order to minimize the default of responsibility and the trust that family members, friends, colleagues, and supervisors have placed in you. You face it, of course, and limit the perfection of which you might deem yourself capable. For a perfectionist, however, this is far easier said than done. I find myself at such a crossroads, a recovering perfectionist, if you will. I believe I’ve finally reached the point beyond which my continued efforts will only destroy and make a waste of my potential, as opposed to doing it justice by a prudent execution and temperance of will. How I feel replete with Emerson’s thoughts now, as I face the new semester, realizing that my task is not to scale new heights and sacrifice even more time and energy on the altar of excellence, but rather to live peaceably within its pursuit.

As I entered 2011, the temperature of my mind and the opportunity for personal growth and change found their fires stoked by a variety of new musical territories, from the brushstrokes of Beethoven, whose string quartets I’m only just now discovering in all their Everestine glory, to the wild and vigorous wings of the latest Chemical Brothers opus, Further. So DJ wonderful and full of electric zeal, their pulsating and melodic world has inspired a rapturous rampage of spirited optimism that makes me want to throw my cell phone on the ground and stomp it to an electronic pulp, grab a pair of sunglasses and commit some happy misdemeanor, embrace what William Least Heat-Moon in Blue Highways called living the “jeopardy of circumstance,” truly pacing out the spirit of Vince Guaraldi’s jazz gem “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” For me, it is not just a question of dignity, but of survival. I could go a lot crazy later if I don’t go at least a little crazy now. I find myself with daydreams of unplugging every appliance in my place and living like a castaway for a week, or jumping in the car and just driving, let the highways of America unfold as they will, till I land on some forgotten island of the world and take a job in a diner somewhere, a colorful little dive run by a guy named Joe, who shares some intriguing vignette each night before I amble home. Or grab onto a passing fire truck and hitch a ride to some marvelous emergency, where lives hang in the balance, and a man hands me a hammer or an axe and tells me to follow him into the fray. Hell yeah! I can hear Bernard Herrmann’s pounding, percussive score to North by Northwest throughout the day, as I dare demand a splash of intrepidity in an otherwise ordinary, task-infused life. But you know, all I really want is the time to dream it all up.

Of course, the balance between personal health and personal responsibility is precisely what a mature person is asked to pursue, bringing to bear the wisdom that reminds us not let our individuality and creative strife go too far. A little revolution every now and then works wonders for the heart and the mind, but a healthy dose of self-control works wonders for the spirit too. It’s the sobriety of that moment that allows one to transcend the youthful bedlam of liberality. Balance is hard. We are a species of extremes. We are Shakespearean, or rather, Shakespeare was very human, and captured something so elemental in our nature that every word rings true. We love rapturously one moment and crash our hopes and fears upon a seaside cliff the next, vehemently swearing off that very same love once driven mad by jealousy or betrayal. Goodness, I think I’ve just described the plot of at least half of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. What an adventure it is to ride the waves shaken to life by passion and portent.

So at length, I find myself seeking balance above all, tranquility in temperance, serenity in self-control. There’s contentment to be found in everyday tasks, to be sure. As the author of Ecclesiastes says in Chapter 5, verses 18 and 19, “Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God.” But in turn, we should not commit ourselves to our toil at the expense of clarity, forfeit sensibility and lose our claim to some semblance of personhood. Rather I seek now a vigorous and blatant attack of mindless pragmatism in favor of discernment and a focused attention to the beauty of what material achievement signifies. I learned a little from Emerson the past two months, as I did from a pinch of electronica. While I pace myself from here to there, and let the DJ frenzies of Chemical Thom and Chemical Ed spin my thoughts into a splendid spiritual berserk, I suppose I should be careful what I wish for, from deserted islands to burning buildings, and that ferocious fantasy that always begins with a piercing look and a running leap into a nest of villains. I think the part of me that still feels about eight years old and wearing a cape probably needs a day in the sun. I might not throw my cell phone against a wall or smash it to bloody bits, but not quite caring if I did somehow seems a good place to start.

Work Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson's Essays. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1926.

On Losing Virtue, Part 1

2010-11-14T20:10:00.000-08:00

I once dated a girl who told me her therapist had, at one point, suggested that people take sex too seriously, that intercourse in particular is “just friction.” She admitted to me, however, that she didn’t entirely buy into this view, nor did I, though at the time, I was scarcely certain as to why in any concrete sense. Thirteen years later, I believe I’m now able to fully understand the lie that was begging to be believed. I had a friend from high school who definitely felt I took sex too seriously and used to tell me, whenever I would share my romantic frustrations, that I needed to get laid. He was teasing, of course, though only in part; despite his understanding my desire to connect with a woman intellectually and spiritually as well as physically, he made it clear he believed I was elevating sexuality to a significance it didn’t truly merit and that it could indeed be at once satisfying and meaningless. Again, I had to disagree. The only difference now is that I know precisely why. I should have agreed with him at the time except for having some vague sensibility about the lie for which he seemed to campaign so lucidly. It is simply this: sex doesn’t have to mean anything, or to be more specific, it only means something if we intend it to. And by such a myth is our cultural fluency poisoned and the notion of casual sex directed, a notion that feels all too casual these days.

In the apologetic opus Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis identifies chastity as “the most unpopular of the Christian virtues,” and reflects that we’ve inherited a world filled with propaganda favoring unchastity. This seems at least as true today as when it was first published in 1952, though I believe it is perhaps more so now; broader media restrictions and the ease of access to information through technology and the internet seem to have exacerbated the enormous mess we’ve made of sexuality, drawing it to the attention of younger and younger ages and encouraging ourselves to believe that the self-control necessary to lead a chaste life is not only somehow perverse, but virtually impossible. Lewis makes a valid point, too, when he says, “There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance” (Lewis, 99). This always makes me smile, it’s so true. Then again, while I can think of many benefits to entrepreneurial vigor and commercial ingenuity, the exploitation of lust is not one of them.

To clarify my own view, I see in the present age an obsession with sexual gratification that seems to annul all sense, though I admit it is perhaps merely symptomatic of a larger cultural pathology, which is an obsession with both personal fulfillment and freedom from accountability. For now, however, I restrict myself to a discussion of sexuality, in which the current moral temperature seems uniquely characterized by a determination to divorce ourselves completely from any traditional wisdom in the matter. It is now considered highly antiquated to remain sexually pure, particularly if you are in a committed relationship, and particularly one that seems headed for marriage. Proponents of chastity, then, find in one another a kind of fellowship in being generally regarded by the greater population as zealots who favor self-deprivation out of some senseless religious dogma, suppressing an impulse that is perfectly natural and healthy. Hedonistic culture currents aside, however, chastity also seems quite frequently viewed as quaintly old-fashioned, an endearing and somewhat Victorian relic of an option—which places the couples who practice it in some hyper-romantic vein of sentimentality—as opposed to a vital, reverent, and sober degree of self-control and spiritual obedience with universal benefits that bind us to the will of a benevolent Creator. To a vast majority of the ordinary, down-to-earth people in the world, and even to some Christians, such a principle is completely ridiculous.

A young woman I once knew was dating a guy who tried to convince her that fornication was not in fact a sin at all, quoting 1 Corinthians 7:36, in which the apostle Paul discusses the merits of marriage, not fornication: “If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry—it is no sin.” The guy’s purpose was predatory, of course. This was not a young man soberly considering the truth revealed in Paul’s letter, but rather using a text in which he had no faith himself to attack the faith of my friend in the hope of fulfilling his own thoughtless sexual appetite. He was quick to follow her refusal by remarking what a shame it was she would allow her religion to keep them apart. In other words, if appealing to her doctrinal allegiance proved fruitless, he was more than happy to ask her to reject her faith completely—a move which, of course, smacks of desperation. Every horny guy is liable to act desperately, but so is every love-starved girl. Together, the two are spiritually volatile. One wants desperately to be loved and appreciated. The other wants desperately to be physically gratified. Both sides of the stereotype can be understood, but neither can be excused. And in fact, even among couples who have agreed to a mutually superficial exchange of affection, it doesn’t hold up. Sexuality is only casual to those who have tried to divorce themselves from the mystery of true intimacy. In other words, they have given themselves permission to believe a woefully permissive and thoroughly comfortable lie.

There is nothing casual about sex. Consider perhaps the most superficial and seemingly innocuous form of “casual sex”: pornography. And let us not waste too long on questions like is porn degrading to women? or is it art? Of course it’s degrading to women, but it’s also degrading to the person who looks at it. Of course it’s not art. The purpose of porn is nothing but to excite sexual desire, and so it cannot be art, because its purpose is not artistic. Let’s rather proceed to the simple issue of indulgence. As Lewis further reveals in Mere Christianity, “Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based in truth—the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’, and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humour, and frankness. For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing” (Lewis, 100). The argument is perfectly fair, and pointedly delivers us to the most important issue concerning sexual immorality, which is the questionable validity, or rightness, of the propensities and excesses of human nature. Porn, by many accounts, is entirely natural, though only as natural as any other human vice. Lying is natural. Vengeance and even murder, under a variety of circumstances, may be seen as natural. On a larger scale, the human race seems to have come by war quite naturally and quite regularly for thousands of years. Lots of things are natural. Let us not allow human nature to wear the guise of virtue any more than a court of law, for instance, may wear the guise of justice. Despite their purpose, courts are corruptible and laws abused and stupidly interpreted, because a court of law is no better than the people who operate it. Likewise, a human being can never be of unilaterally good instincts. So, as Lewis illustrates so clearly, the argument that sexuality is natural is a genuinely poor and altogether naïve justification for such as adultery, promiscuity, fornication, casual sex, and audience with pornography. Some would undoubtedly argue that sexuality in fact requires no justification, that it simply is what it is and that we shouldn’t try to moralize it with sophomoric religious dogma. Never was a view more sophomoric than to believe that the potential for human frailty and vice can transcend moralization, and once again, I believe such persons have attempted to divorce themselves from the hard-won reward of complete intimacy in deference the more immedate payoff of partial intimacy. They have allowed a very comfortable lie to supplant their capacity for wisdom, because all people, when able to transcend their primal appetites, seek completion—that communion by which we may achieve a transcendent spiritual peace, which is an echo of the divine in each of us and a fundamental understanding of righteousness apart from one’s own instinct. Denial of this is simply a matter of postponement. The young man who attempted to pervert the meaning of the 1 Corinthians verse is simply too far from that stage of life at which he is able to recognize his truest need. Or, he is so acutely aware of it that he believes fornication is his best hope in contrast to a level of intimacy he suspects he may never achieve. In this way, sexual immorality may be a simple matter of impatience. Sexual desire is part of being human, to be sure, but unless we’re able to govern it, like other human passions, it will govern us. And it does. The young man I’ve mentioned criticizes his prey for allowing her religion to upset their prospects as a couple. Asking her to carry the entire blame is, of course, sheer hypocrisy, since he is the one who deserves it; he himself is, at least for a time, in pious deference to his own kind of doctrine, a devotion entirely accountable for impeding a right and balanced relationship. His religion is libido.

It is a matter of passion. No sex is casual. The truth is we don’t get to choose what’s sacred and what’s profane. Something in us knows the difference, and while we so desperately try to legitimize the sinful employ of the sexual appetite, it is my belief that those who claim to have emancipated themselves from the traditional ethics of chastity have simply disguised their own weakness, fear, or impatience, which is not emancipation at all, but total enslavement to these motives. The traditional ethics of orthodox Christian doctrine do not condemn sexual passion. The sin rather lies in the enslavement, and human beings are likely to attempt all manner of ways to rationalize their enslavement to sin. Sexual hunger is elemental, God-given, to the person of faith, but like all things in our nature, it is susceptible to corruption. Our hope is that if we can trivialize sexuality, we might be able to disguise how much we want it. “Just friction” nothing. The fact is, we want sex so badly that we’re willing to lie even to ourselves, to pretend it doesn’t mean what it really does, and we clearly wouldn’t want it so badly if it didn’t. We’re eager, in fact, to entertain such a lie, since it allows the experience of physical pleasure in isolation from accountability and the hard work of building intimacy. As such, sexual immorality may also represent a kind of emotional sloth. In lieu of addressing the true meaning of sexuality and establishing its righteous context in the bonds of a commitment, many would rather just fire some neurons in the skin and call it a day.

As Lewis illustrates, “The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again” (Lewis, 105). To people of faith, such self-control is difficult, but not impossible, certainly not with the help and strength of the living God, who desires right relationships, not clumsy, ill-conceived ones. Chastity then goes hand-in-hand with acceptance principally of a universal moral law, which, according to Lewis, is known to us and yet transcends our instincts. Instinct, then, cannot be universally trusted. There’s a good reason sex feels right, even when it’s wrong. If human impulse cannot be universally trusted, our trust, or faith, if you will, must then be in a higher source, a God, and in the words He has spoken to us. But if our desire and God’s are one and the same, which is to intimately commune with a single partner, why then is sex wrong for those headed for marriage? Rather, I would ask, what level of passion or impatience directs the previous question? Certainly, it is not a sober one, but rather, once again, the unbridled urge to indulge without check, without commitment. And we have a word for the commitment: marriage. The evil of food lies in excess, but the potential sin in our sexuality is not a matter of mere temperance per se, but rather one of context and purpose. Adopt the true purpose of sexuality, and you’ll quickly realize that the legitimization of an unchecked and uncommitted sexual lifestyle is impossible. My opponents in this issue will surely ask, why is commitment necessary? Who is hurt in a situation where two people already in a committed relationship allow themselves to express that commitment by engaging in sexual congress? My response: Sexual intimacy, despite the immediacy of the pleasure it affords, demands of us, by its very design, an enormous degree of accountability in terms of the mutual exchange of trust, and the inherent safety implied by that trust; the complexity and depth of emotional attachment; and naturally, in the case of intercourse, the potential for bringing into the world a new human life and the overwhelming duty to bring that child up in, one would hope, a responsible and loving manner. In fact, we’re required to go to great lengths of contraception to avoid the potential for pregnancy and, subsequently, an entire life, which is the natural outgrowth and clearest biological function of sex. We have to intercept gametes in ways that admittedly defy sterling reliability. Of course, instead of leaving these things haphazardly to one’s physical whimsy, what’s right is to work them out ahead of time. Again, it’s called marriage.

The depth and importance of these issues, which surround the most intimate physical connection, as a reflection of the emotional and spiritual connections that justify it, ought to inspire a gravity and a reverence that supersede, in one’s judgment, the immediacy with which physical passion might otherwise be gratified, and it disgraces both parties to supplant commitment with immediacy, to take such intimate measures beyond the protection of the soberest and most sincere promise. In other words, the only reason we insist on asking the question is because we’re too intemperate to wait. There are many reasons to wait, but only one reason not to.

The isolation of sexuality then also signifies a salient depreciation of marriage. The two go hand-in-hand, the one with the other. As my good friend and colleague Jim Altizer has often said, “Passion without fidelity is adultery. And fidelity without passion is captivity.” The deepest measure of commitment validates the deepest measure of physical intimacy. Likewise a lack of such commitment forfeits such intimacy. And let us not kid ourselves that we are fully committed simply because we say we are or because we’ve entered into exclusive relationships. Such alliances are transient. But marriage is a solemn promise and a blessed endeavor. Without such blessing, we are captives in sexuality. As Lewis says, we’ll have to resist a great deal in our own nature to find peace or contentment. To the devout Christian, this is largely a matter of obedience. Such a person is aware that chastity is the only way to glorify God with one’s sexuality. For many, however, even a variety of Christians, this is a tenuous incentive. What would the world be like if all of us were of the requisite humility for it to be enough? However, I believe my point here is to address the person of the second type, the one who isn’t satisfied not to touch the boiling pot because mom or dad says no, but who needs rather to understand that the reason is because it is boiling and quite harmful to touch, or worse, who must actually touch it and get burnt before the understanding is achieved. Spouses might think that their sexual indiscretions prior to walking down the aisle were harmless, but the harm is in their believing so, which seeds must necessarily breed further sin, whether it is in their own actions or those of their children, having inherited the same structure of belief and the subsequent potential to debase themselves by equal or worse degrees. Either way, firsthand experience of sex with your partner should, in my belief, never be a determining factor in your decision to, in fact, become their partner. Don’t bother with a question like what if the sex isn’t good? The best sex you will ever have is with the person whom you love and adore deeply and truly with all your heart, and if that love hinges on their expertise as a sex partner, it cannot be a very deep love, nor a lasting one.

The cultural diminishment of sexual virtue addresses not merely the antiquation of chastity, but also, in my view, that of humility and supplication, which are the seeds of true wisdom and both necessary to lead a good life. Not that actually practicing chastity isn’t terribly difficult, but rather, imagining it outdated, quaint, irrelevant, or pleasantly beyond the scope of moral consideration is not well and good. What’s strange is that even many Christians seem to find chastity so unpalatable that they prefer to ignore it or deem it quaint—yet another indication of how insidiously we’ve been convinced that our want is so great as to seem foolhardy to control. But who is the more foolish, the one who lies or the one who believes the lie? Hard as it is, I would rather have an insoluble, ageless faith than a conventional one that hinges on the climate of the culture in which I find myself. Likewise, I would rather practice abstinence than give myself over to sexual desire completely, which enslavement is precisely what a “casual” approach to sexual ethics requires. If it isn’t fashionable to be chaste, it certainly isn’t honest to oneself not to be.

Work Cited

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. HarperCollins, 2001.

Sweet as Carbonite

2010-08-19T03:01:00.000-07:00

My earliest memory is of seeing the original Star Wars at the drive-in. Specifically, I have an image of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, with the cinnamon rolls on each side of her head, looking anxious and worried, perhaps during the TIE fighter assault on the Millennium Falcon. It’s distant, but it’s certainly the earliest picture in my mind. Some memories are murky and muddled, made of images like old photos reposed beneath layers of dust on a closet shelf. Others are crystal clear and ready to surface with arresting authenticity at the slightest trigger, perhaps precipitated by another memory or idea that scurries across the desktop of the mind. Still other memories stretch out like streams of garland gently wound about the interplay of one’s thoughts and experience, transcending any specific instance or set of images. This is such a memory, and such a feeling. It encompasses an enormous family of occasions, images, and sounds that fill a place of the imagination and a space of life. It begins on Wednesday, May 21, 1980. I can’t rightly recall if we were there opening day, but we could not have made it past that first weekend. I do remember entering the old Melody theatre—which used to be located in a shopping center at the intersection of Moorpark Road and Janss in Thousand Oaks—with my dad and my older brother Anthony, and my tiny self was aquiver with anticipation; I had not only been exposed to a variety of puzzling photos in the pages of the double-LP original soundtrack recording my parents had bought me, but had been fed a variety of disturbing rumors by Anthony and his friend Billy, who had supposedly already seen the movie, things like Luke dies, Han gets his arm cut off, or C-3PO gets blown up, all of which worried my five-year-old mind considerably. And among the pictures in the aforementioned soundtrack was the above screen shot, on which I remember fixating, wondering who Lando Calrissian was and what provocative conversation was being had between Darth Vader and this Boba Fett. I had briefly debated which main character—Han or Luke—was indeed the subject of those dark and terrifying photos of having been frozen in something called carbonite. And Han certainly appeared to be the one dipping the princess in some curious, romantic gesture, an image transfigured among other story elements and brought to life by Roger Kastel’s artistry comprising the original “A Style” (or Gone with the Wind manner) one sheet for the film. I remember standing outside the Melody, while Dad bought the tickets, staring at it quizzically in the poster case near the entrance, wondering, with some irrepressible combination of distress and excitement, what would happen, what strange and mysterious fates awaited the heroes we had met in the previous film and whose countenances were borne upon the many action figures we had been playing with for at least the two previous years, which, as you know, is a considerable epoch to a little kid. I believe I felt I had grown to know and love the characters in the Star Wars universe, and the anxiety bred by the dark dooms that awaited them in this second installment was alarming, for sure, but at the same time, electrifying, perhaps the most rhapsodical curiosity this miniscule Moya had ever known.

The film holds such a place of honor in my heart that it’s difficult to separate the various aspects of its technical and aesthetic excellence from my own nostalgic attachment. I remember being hospitalized when I was five for some kind of stomach ailment, and one of the things my parents did to cheer me up while I was there was to bring me two of the new action figures that had been released: a Han Solo in Hoth outfit and Luke in Bespin fatigues. I was delighted, of course, and slept that night in the hospital with both figures reposed happily on the pillow next to me. I remember, after my hospital stay, browsing the toy section of our Simi Mervyns with Anthony and happening upon what appeared to be the last Yoda action figure in stock. I had never seen it before and stood marveling momentarily. But before I had actually reached for it, another little boy went to take it off the hook on which it so happily rested. I can’t remember anything about this boy. But I do remember my brother asking him to let me have it, because I had already picked it out and had my heart set on getting it. By any standard, the playground charter of kid-dom or otherwise, I had positively no right to this action figure, but my brother was adamant, and the little boy let me take it.

The year or so that followed the film’s release was filled with even greater heights of play than had been waged in the era of my childhood that followed the original Star Wars and preceded Empire. I spent several years attempting to construct the Millennium Falcon and various other spaceships and scenes using only the immense cache of block-style and space series Legos from the early 1980s that lived in a giant storage box under my bed and got dragged out and spread across my bedroom floor sometimes several times a week, especially in the summer and over Christmas break. Quite simply, the story of Empire, more than either of the other two episodes in the original trilogy, became a focal point of my young imagination. By the release of Return of the Jedi three years later, I was still into it and continued to play with toys, Star Wars toys especially, for several years. And of course, I’ve never grown tired of watching the films. But there’s something special about Empire which has stuck with me.

I found myself rather recently on an Empire kick, and what a marvelous coincidence that 2010 is the 30th anniversary of its release. It’s always been my very favorite in the series, though I would like to go so far as to crown it the best beyond any sentimental preference of my own. In fact, I would rather call it one of the finest films ever made. This perhaps comes as no surprise, and I might start to seem quite the stereotype, given the enormous popularity of the classic trilogy—and of Empire in particular—among thirty-somethings. Some would roll their eyes, I imagine, particularly those who tend to reject a franchise simply out of the reactionary impulse to oppose what is widely appreciated. Incidentally, while I intend no offense here, resistance or objection to something due solely to its popularity has always seemed to me a characteristic of youth, perhaps a sign of either latent rebellion or residual immaturity. Such contrary feelings that lack sensible justification reflect the impulse to reject established norms and credible ideas in an effort to claim a unique identity. Too many people roll their eyes at Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Twilight fans for this reason alone, when in truth, all three franchises explore time-honored ideas in a unique, exacting, and authentic way. Even if they’re not your cup of tea, few can deny that the ideas are good and build on universal human themes in a legitimate and compelling way. For certain, part of Empire’s unique claim on my interior landscape is pure nostalgia. But as many would agree, it is a superior cinematic achievement for a number of reasons. It is certainly the darkest and most compelling installment in the original trilogy, and, one could argue, in the entire series, not merely by virtue of a powerful and emotionally resonant story, but also due to excellence of craft and aesthetic. Director Irvin Kershner, in particular, can be credited with broadening the performances of the actors and helping to create the grave and eerie ambience that permeates the story.

The film even opens with the ominous dispersion of Imperial probes and the descent to the icy bleakness of Hoth, followed rather quickly by the mauling and abduction of Luke by the wampa. And in the subsequent two hours of story, we find our heroes subjected to the most harrowing series of misfortunes and pummelings—delivered blow after blow by the dastardly Empire—that their plight becomes more real than in any of the other episodes, and the operatic nature of the entire saga seems almost defined by this one film. From the defeat of the Rebellion on Hoth to the relentless failing of the Falcon’s hyperdrive; the blasting apart of C-3PO; Lando Calrissian’s betrayal and being nearly strangled by Chewbacca; Luke’s monumentally unwise and impetuous departure from Dagobah, the severing of his hand, the crushing discovery of Vader’s paternity, his pathetic pleas to Ben while dangling helplessly above a fatal plunge from an antenna beneath Cloud City; and of course the torture and subsequent freezing of Han Solo in carbonite, as entertainment editor Dalton Ross says, “It’s tough to be a hero in Empire” (Ross, 39). And though it might not exceed Revenge of the Sith in its tragic proportions or its effects, it does far exceed it by virtue of script, direction, performances, and the moody atmosphere pervading its brilliant art direction. We find in Empire a very different kind of sequel. Or perhaps we find the very notion of a sequel reimagined; this movie was perhaps the first in a series of prominent sequels over the past 30 years to significantly outdo its predecessor, and given the seminal achievement and success of the original Star Wars, that’s saying something.

There are three major segments to the film: the Hoth segment, Dagobah and pursuit of the Millennium Falcon, and the Bespin segment. In these three chapters, Empire happens to contain just about all of my favorite scenes of any Star Wars film, the first of which is the Battle of Hoth and the escape of the Millennium Falcon following the Imperial penetration of the Rebel base. Countless afternoons as a child, I played out some variation of this scenario, as my play persona, whomever it may have been that particular day, raced frantically aboard a spaceship, pursued by nefarious forces, just as Han, Leia, Chewie, and Threepio rushed aboard the Falcon, narrowly avoiding the clutches of Darth Vader and his coterie of snow troopers. The Battle of Hoth is lauded to be one of the most riveting battle sequences ever set to film. Each of the three original Star Wars films contains a single large-scale battle between the Rebellion and the Empire. Another aspect that sets Empire apart is that this battle occurs not at the end of the film, like the Battles of Yavin and Endor in Star Wars and Return of the Jedi respectively, but rather at the beginning. It is also the only one of these three battles in which the Rebellion is engaged—and essentially defeated—by the Empire and not the other way around. The entire sequence is a marvel of entertainment, a classic treasure of movie-making drama from beginning to end. I remember how frightened I was for the Alliance and for the main characters when the Rebel soldiers signaled their retreat.

Another aspect of Empire that merits my devotion is that it is, by far, the most Falcon-intensive film in the original trilogy. I admit I was no different from any one of the thousands of other kids in the world who thought the Millennium Falcon to be the coolest spaceship ever to grace the stars of any space fantasy. And not only is Empire the most Falcon-intensive film, in which we are treated to the most elaborate and comprehensive exposure to the spacecraft’s interior (cool as it is), it is also the first time we get to see it darting, spinning, and dodging in all its acrobatic glory, unlike the action shots in the original theatrical version of Star Wars, which, majestic as they are, really deliver no more than somewhat static impressions of the Falcon charging either toward or away from something. The Empire sequence in which the Falcon braves the asteroid field to elude Imperial fighters is arguably one of the neatest, coolest space melees in movie history. That’s right. It’s just neat.

The central section of the film, in which the Falcon is pursued by the Empire, also details Luke’s fulfillment of Ben Kenobi’s instructions to seek out Jedi Master Yoda. As Lucas has mentioned, much of the film’s success rested on this puppeted performance, which, if not entirely believable, could have been an epic disaster under which the entire project would have collapsed. This is because Yoda is truly the emotional centerpiece of the film, and in this segment, we find something unique to all six episodes. Luke’s stay on Dagobah, during which he meets and trains with Yoda for a time, occurs in a series of rather slow-paced interludes, during which their conversations take on a languid, reflective, almost poetic quality. These scenes act very much like an emotional fulcrum by which Luke’s maturation is propelled and a variety of revelations about the Force and its duality are revealed. Yoda himself gives perhaps the most rousing and impressive speeches of all the films while describing the crudeness of the physical world and the nature of good and evil—topics of sufficient weight to have made his performance so crucial. It is in this thought-provoking middle section that we find my very favorite scene of all the Star Wars films. Luke’s failed attempt to retrieve the sunken x-wing from a dense morass on Dagobah leads to one of Yoda’s most stirring speeches and one of the most pivotal moments in Luke’s education. Luke simply cannot believe that what Yoda says about the Force is actually true. Rather he thinks the little green master is demanding something out of sheer autocratic stubbornness. In the subsequent moments, Yoda delivers more than just words and wisdom. He proceeds to retrieve the giant ship himself through the use of the Force, setting it securely on dry land. When an incredulous Luke utters, “I don’t believe it,” Yoda’s response is simple, affecting, and didactic: “That is why you fail.” It is a critical moment for Luke and one of the most moving scenes in the film. There is no easy, well-packaged success for Luke in these scenes, and we begin to empathize with how dearly he struggles to learn the ways of the Force. It is not an easy task, and these are not easy scenes. But all the better, for they lend greater weight and a true sense of realism to the difficulty inherent in the training of a Jedi knight, particularly in a swampy forgotten backwater of a war-torn galaxy in which the age-old Jedi tradition is but a faint and feeble memory.

This reflective centerpiece is, of course, interrupted by Luke’s vision of Cloud City and his premonition of the suffering of Han and Leia, at which point he foolishly cuts short his training on Dagobah in the hope of coming to their aid. What a stroke of narrative ingenuity. Luke leaves. He does exactly what he shouldn’t, and you feel a deepening sense of some terrible doom that awaits him. The moment of initial confrontation between Luke and Vader in the carbon freezing chamber is indeed one of the most epic and riveting moments in the entire saga. How can this go well? It doesn’t. And in fact, we’re left almost with a sense of gratitude at the good fortune that Luke even escapes this encounter with his life, since it quite easily could have gone the other way.

The entire Bespin sequence draws us further still into the circle of calamity that engulfs our heroes. Lando’s betrayal and the torture of Han Solo were intensely disturbing to me as a child, though I was practically glued to the screen throughout the ordeal. And following the last kiss between Han and Leia, in those fateful moments as he’s lowered into the carbon freezing pit, and Leia follows his eyes in tender desperation, Lando stares in agonizing conflict, Vader and Boba Fett “glare” ominously through the smoke, Chewie howls passionately, and the music soars above it all in a canticle of anguished majesty, at the tender age of five, my heart hung faithfully on every note, every moment. And Empire has you in its grip till the very end, as Darth Vader orders a boarding party for the Millennium Falcon, soon to be in range of their tractor beam, and it appears the ship and its passengers may well be captured. Only through the efforts of the conscientious and stout-hearted R2-D2 does the Falcon, carrying what survives of our exhausted heroes, narrowly escape.

I must at some point discuss the impact and significance of what is, in my opinion, one of the film’s most outstanding ingredients: the music, which is among John Williams’ finest and most poignant scores, sweeping in its dramatic scope, exhilarating in its punctuation of the action, and both touching and monumental in its emotional depth. This is the score that gave us, for the first time, the “Imperial March,” which is among the most recognizable movie themes ever written. It came to define the character of Darth Vader and is, to a great extent, a sonic banner for the entire saga. This is also the score that delivered what is, to me, among the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music ever written and one that conveys both a passionate brilliance and a tender gravity which enable the viewer to transcend the story’s wealth of conflicts. It is “Yoda’s Theme.” Lest my reader believe me only too conspicuously attached to anything tied to one of my favorite characters in all of cinematic literature, while I admit to a miniscule degree of personal bias, one need only listen to “Yoda’s Theme” to feel the transcendent beauty and emotional grandeur John Williams gave this film through its music. It is the same score which also gave us a theme called “Han Solo and the Princess.” At once lofty and tender, this sweepingly romantic theme becomes a central motif, repeated at various points and in a variety forms, a theme so beautiful and, at the same time, so versatile that it might be credited with the majority of the story’s resonance, impact, and appeal. It is, in fact, the theme played in the very final moments of the film, in a powerful and grandiose incarnation, as the Millennium Falcon departs and the Rebel fleet sails into the cosmic horizon in the hope of some future triumph, and the viewer’s heart is left to swell at the scope of what has happened.

For me, Empire is the apotheosis of Star Wars and a sterling example of the sheer delight in being truly enraptured by drama and danger, the dance of mind and plot, both beautiful and terrible, wherein characters dear as old friends are brought to a simmering richness of peril and the bitterness of their conflicts alchemized in the carriage of a sweet and fragrant story. This place of the imagination, this space of life is the complete package of artistic fulfillment: the music, the images, the themes, countless hours of playing with toys, a sense of being part of the story and going with the characters through the fray of jeopardy and their arc of feats. And particularly as a child, you partake of their heroism in a way that is very different from any other time of life. Just as childhood goes with you, as subtext to what you experience and understand as an adult, so the story of Empire has gone with me, and more than any other chapter in the Star Wars saga, it shaped much of my childhood and continues to impact my understanding and appreciation of great storytelling, fine movie-making, and epic drama. Whereas the prequel trilogy can rightly be considered a different species, though I personally find Revenge of the Sith to be a genuinely good film, whether we consider the classic trilogy, in all its unaltered glory, in isolation or with its admittedly inferior prequels, the zenith of the Star Wars franchise, the jewel in this crown is The Empire Strikes Back. Even as the classic trilogy goes, all three are great, but the Force is strong with this one.

Work Cited

Ross, Dalton. “The Empire Is Back!” Entertainment Weekly, 16 April, 2010: 39.

A Tale of Two Skivvies

2010-07-09T21:59:00.000-07:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of relief, it was the epoch of irritation, it was the season of Support, it was the season of Neglect, it was the spring of elastic, it was the winter of jersey, we had convenience before us, we had exasperation before us, we were all going direct toward Comfort, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest sensations insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. For many, the choice was clear when these superlative comparisons arose. And this conflict of comparison sprang from two households, both alike in dignity, but distinct in fundamental conviction. For to one, there was no greater claim than that of stability, which some have called restrictive, and its devotees held in contempt the negligent audacity characteristic of the liberty the other called its creed, which some have called reckless, lacking the security that sufficient support would undoubtedly provide. And while this age-old feud between houses—or let us call them parties—ultimately precipitated a third provision that attempts to offer the best of both, it seems otherwise to have justified the superlative degree and required all of the male persuasion to choose their allegiance.

As a man, I have faced such a choice, carefully weighing the platforms and relative qualities of each party, and while others might consider it with equal sobriety, some would suggest it lends quite literal significance to the off-hand remark, by which it is so often trivialized, urging one to get neither party “in a twist.” For others, however, degree of comfort can truly make or break the day. And personal tastes in outer apparel are of a nature totally distinct from those thereunder, especially those nearest the sub-equatorial region. It is quite true that for many, discomfort “down under” can dramatically impact the course of a day from beginning to end, potentially poisoning one’s attitude and making him pervasively moody. On the other hand, being truly at peace “down under” can be such a joy that a wide variety of inconveniences (both great and small) become less impactful, less overwhelming altogether, and one discovers himself able to endure more and fret less given the indwelling satisfaction of being privately serene.

There are other factors to consider, however, among the foremost of which is a physiological theory that has been widely substantiated by practitioners in the field of medicine. The party of the first part (let us call it the Secure Party) is known for its tendency to hold the sub-equatorial treasury of one’s assets and other valuables close to one’s interior. And by this hearth, while surely protecting the valuables (let us call them jewels) from disquieting and occasionally dangerous movement, it is believed the ability to sire, or to yield a greater rate of return through investment, may be negatively impacted. The party of the second part, however (let us call it the Freedom Party), is believed to ensure the return on such an investment by sufficient regulation and balance of certain delicate yet critical degrees. If this is truly the case, it would be well to favor the Freedom Party if a man is of a certain age and situation wherein a profitable investment is timely and sensible. Otherwise, in many cases, favoring the Secure Party, though it ensures the safety of the jewels at the party, or at any party, regardless of the degree of commotion or revelry, may risk a state of the union wherein even the tiniest assets—however abundant—yielded by the investment of said jewels are rendered worthless and ineffective. In such a case, no investment of these miniscule assets en masse merits much hope in the quest to yield a sure profit beyond one's principle. At this point, the Freedom Party becomes the imperative standard by which to revive such conceptive prospects. Long considered a kind of legend of the urban variety, this quandary has occasionally been addressed in the arts. One particular American sitcom dealt quite pointedly with the issue, though clearly not in the lucid tenor of a TV news magazine or afternoon special. In this program, a certain major character (let us, for the moment, refer to him as Kramer), in one particular episode (which could be called “The Chinese Woman”) of a specific season (perhaps six), vacillates with respect to said choice when confronted with his own unprofitable assets, at one point, in devotion to the Secure Party, remarking to his friend and neighbor Jerry, “My boys need a house.” Of course, just a few scenes afterward, this same Kramer leaps to a boycott of both parties, a rather nihilistic option often referred to in honor of a swift and aggressive military, or “commando,” unit. Most men, however, would agree that such is a better object of laughter than a sensible and realistic practice, for reasons that, in truth, seem too self-evident to be here addressed; as the saying goes, ew.

Perhaps a more common and immediate concern is that of simple, everyday convenience and comfort. The Secure Party continually jockeys for a sound and snug conveyance, or carriage, of the previously mentioned treasury while ensuring its convenient accessibility by way of the vertical, horizontal, and y-front edifice, or “fly,” as it is known in common usage, a term that seems to reflect greater resemblance to that of a tent than the door to a barn, as has often been suggested, though this is largely a matter of perspective and less a matter of debate. And yet, the proximity of jewels and assets not only threatens the viability of one’s profitable enterprise, but may on occasion deliver a state of either abrasive or raveled distress, a state which demands the continual and altogether vexing task of carefully repositioning, or juggling, one’s assets. It has often been said, familiarity breeds contempt, and like rats in a cage, stallions in a corral, or yuppies trapped in an out-of-service elevator, the treasury does not always profit by exceedingly close quarters, thereby compelling the emancipation offered by the Freedom Party, the trunks of which are capacious enough to lend swift resolution to the crisis of proximity. Many, myself included, have been tempted by such controversial defection, a conflict that can only be truly resolved through a conscientious and painstaking sojourn in both houses. Yes, I have indeed been an intermittent member of both parties, by which efforts I have realized that, to a great extent, time is key. As with so many ideological and pragmatic issues, if you spend enough time in that house, you begin to understand its point of view and to fully appreciate its amenities. In addition, much depends on the brand and size of each party. And these, too, must be carefully considered and resolved so as to maximize the potential for peace and freedom, for justice and the collective good.

Certain mutinies and the attempt to maximize opportunity eventually led to the fusion of platforms and the founding of a third house, which employs a unique balance of desired characteristics. Some have found this suitable. But in truth, this third party candidate, again depending on brand and size, may still bear the drawbacks of each predecessor, including the occasionally unsupportive as well as abrasive despondencies. Can these ever be overcome? Every man must labor to answer the question for himself. Each must wrestle, on his own, to solve the perilous riddle of Comfort. For myself, I will say only this. I have found it a simple and irrefutable truth that for all things there is a time and place, a season and a country. I see before me a balance of power in a land of opportunity. Let justice prevail. Let freedom ring. I have found in this vision my own choice, and it has made all the difference. Yes.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. Hehe.

Peaks, Parks, and Politics

2010-06-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

If there were an Olympic event for the slowest bona fide effort to read through a particular book, article, or other text, I would be a promising contender, a quality which occasionally leads to the lamentable state of failing to read at all; depending on the density of the language, I can often spend considerable time reading and not feel as though I’m really getting anywhere. Yes, you can imagine the difficulty I had as an English major at Cal Lutheran. Two plays per week in Dr. Murley’s Shakespeare class was enough to drive any undergraduate to sweat a few beads and shed a few tears, but for yours truly it was altogether Herculean. That my slowness should at times deter me from reading is personally stagnating, I realize. And yet, my library is full of books I have yet to read, because I genuinely enjoy reading and wish I had the time to commit myself to all of them. I fear I may never complete the library I’ve built, by which I mean to read it exhaustively. Plenty of my books are for reference, of course, but a great many are literary works of some length that would require considerable spans of my life to take in completely. Over the last year or so, I’ve read large passages of some, but few have I finished, the most recent of which is Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Bryson is the author of a wide variety of humorous memoirs and books about travel, and this particular opus chronicles his endeavor to hike the Appalachian Trail. It was a fantastic read, thematically balanced, enticingly paced, and thoroughly enjoyable. One of the best things about it is the skillful manner in which Bryson weaves together the narrative of his journey—including several anecdotes that made me literally laugh aloud—with a wealth of historical, scientific, and political information seasoned with just the right dash of social commentary and personal reflection. He writes in such an entertaining style, drawing together arresting statistical trivia with his own affecting ruminations that not only educate, but make you feel a part of the journey. You go with him, partaking of both the pervasive vision and the intimate details—each stinging scrape, each rain-soaked sock, the smile-inducing moment of his "first refreshment in the wilderness" when toilet paper proved an effective coffee filter, and each immeasurably splendid parachute back to the comfort of everyday life, from the taste of a cheeseburger and cream soda to a warm shower and fresh laundering after a week’s deprivation, each encountered with almost virginal gratitude—through Bryson’s clever and charming turn of phrase, by which he manages to be both cavalier and eloquent, both shrewdly educative and verbally spry. He is at once beguiling storyteller and artful scribe. I only wish I could write like Bryson, and bring my thoughts and experiences to life as vividly and readably as he does.

The book is about a hike. So naturally, a thematic mainstay of Bryson’s account is the tremendous variations in landscape and terrain, including a vast diversity of mountain ranges and individual peaks, many of which become points of focus for his musings and encounters. The Appalachian Trial, or AT, which he describes as the “granddaddy of long hikes,” stretches some 2,200 miles across 14 states, from Springer Mountain in Georgia all the way to the glorious and forbidding northern terminus of Mount Katahdin in Maine’s Baxter State Park. Between these points, we find Bryson and his colorful companion, the rotund, recovering-alcoholic, and almost delightfully profane Stephen Katz, scaling a multitude of peaks in a dizzying spectrum of weather, both inclement and fair. Blood Mountain, for instance, the highest and most formidable peak on the Georgian stretch, is followed by the descent into Neels Gap, where we genuinely feel their sovereign relief in returning to civilization—a paved highway, the sound of passing cars, postcards and refrigeration. As Bryson writes at one point, “It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread” (Bryson, 55). They so carefully negotiated the jostling wind gusts and frozen streams of Big Butt Mountain, followed closely, via Bearpen Gap, by the fierce winds of Albert Mountain. They ambled across the lofty peak of High Top in Tennessee to the “hallelujah moment” when they first beheld the “sudden new world” of the awesome and muscular Smokies and began to grasp the dense magnificence and challenge of Great Smoky Mountain National Park, with 16 peaks above 6,000 feet, including Clingman’s Dome—at 6,643 feet, the highest point on the trail. They hiked the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park, which Bryson owns to be his favorite part of the trail, with its gentle grades; twittering birds; the palpable tranquility of spring; and yes, believe it or not, its cheeseburgers. Later in the trip, after a brief hiatus, Bryson returns to the trail, this time without Katz, and faces some of its toughest territory, including that jagged “sea of rocks” known as Pennsylvania and the frighteningly stiff winds of Mount Washington in Maine. He also encounters the quartzite majesty of Kittatinny Mountain in the Delaware River Gap, where the reader partakes of his brimming delight at being in the “cartographically thoughtful hands of the New York–New Jersey Trail Conference” maps. We follow Bryson as he discovers, both directly and with the help of the “indispensible” Thru-Hiker’s Handbook, the true difference between Vermont and New Hampshire. As he says, “New Hampshire is hard” (Bryson, 221), and in the company of his neighbor Bill Abdu, he tackles the “beast” Mount Lafayette before moving on to the “commanding summits” and “unpredictable and downright pernicious weather” of White Mountains National Forest.

Bryson devotes an entire chapter to Mount Washington. I figured I might as well give it an entire paragraph. The region, which apparently owes much of its infamously severe weather to the interaction between northern and southern weather systems that differ dramatically in both altitude and moisture, is startlingly perilous, even, as he shares, for seasoned, well-equipped hikers. Despite this, the fair-like mountaintop is a tourist phenomenon. Bryson’s account of the Summit Information Center there borders on the surreal, particularly his amusing recollection of the meteorological marvel “Breakfast of Champions,” a short video he apparently had to view twice, it was so good. “It was filmed with a fixed camera on one of the summit terraces and showed a man sitting at a table, as if at an open-air restaurant, during one of its famous blows. While the man holds down the table with his arms, a waiter approaches against the wind with great and obvious difficulty, like someone wingwalking at 30,000 feet. He tries to pour the customer a bowl of cereal, and it all flies horizontally from the box. Then he adds milk, but this goes the same way (mostly over the customer—a particularly gratifying moment). Then the bowl flies away and the silverware, as I recall, and then the table starts to go, and then the film ends” (Bryson, 232). From here, Bryson takes us through the Hundred Mile Wilderness of Maine (with its stout devotees and plenitude of slopes), once again alongside the ultimately lovable Katz, and finally to the roof of Mount Killington, from which panoramic prospect he was able to behold the entirety of New England’s eminent peaks, and was “acutely aware of how providence has favored the land into which [he] was born” (Bryson, 272).

In addition to documenting his journey, Bryson provides a brilliant and hilarious expose on the quality of local culture in towns and hamlets bordering the AT as well as a fairly comprehensive history of the trail itself, beginning with the vision of the well-meaning but somewhat ne’er-do-well forester and conservationist Benton MacKaye, whose friend Charles Whitaker originally published the idea for the trail in Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1921. The Appalachian Trail Conference itself was founded in 1925, but as Bryson reveals, while much of MacKaye’s original vision and spirit survives in the AT, it was actually the somewhat disagreeable Washington lawyer Myron Avery, despite his strained and ultimately doomed association with MacKaye, who is essentially responsible for the trail and began to make actual progress toward its development around 1930. It was under Avery’s direction that the trail was extended from 1,200 miles (as originally envisioned by the conference) to over 2,000; was constructed, through mountain wilderness and with entirely volunteer efforts; and was officially completed on August 14, 1937. Bryson and Katz began their footwork almost 59 years later on March 9, 1996.

In the course of the book, he also discusses just about every conceivable peril of solitude and the wilds, including an entire chapter devoted to that “gradual and insidious sort of trauma” known as hypothermia and a chapter that was both chilling and at times facetiously foreboding on the history of bear attacks along the eastern seaboard. But aside from hosts of deadly animals, such as nests of lethally venomous snakes, relentless fire ants, and parasitically deranged moose, Bryson coyly reports a cornucopia of potential dangers to which the wilderness sojourner is susceptible, including flash floods, strange and debilitating diseases (many of which have no known cure), and “loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex.” Honestly, when his elucidative efforts aren’t so disquieting, they’re enough to make you explode with laughter.

And there you go. Bryson is also a humorist. One of the most amusing aspects of his style is the personal transparency with which he recounts his interaction with the various personalities he comes across in the course of the journey, beginning with his thoroughly relatable tale of feigning knowledge to Dave Mengle of the Dartmouth Co-Op (a local outfitter) and continuing with the introduction of his companion, the Welles-ish Katz, who had effectively become “Iowa’s drug culture” before joining Bryson on his epic jaunt and whose devotion to every potentially unhealthy faire, including sausages, bags of cookies, bricks of cheese, and the “imperishable” spectrum of the Little Debbie label, is enough to give any reader more than a few Snickers. Bryson shares such delightfully candid details, right down to his avoiding equipment that seemed to invite ridicule, including a designer ground cloth, sewing kit, emergency whistle, and orange spade for burying your personally manufactured fertilizer. Oh, the incomparable treat of a sincere and personable anecdotist! He treats us to this same forthright and quirky approach throughout the story via a series of sometimes suspenseful, at times rapturously funny, and on occasion absorbingly poetic vignettes that relate his entire journey, spaced out by a series of chapters and partial-chapters that deliver the scoop on the AT itself, revealing its biological and ecological breadth to a tasteful and satisfying degree, for instance, never spending too long on scientific discourse as to be tedious or prosaic, but imparting enough so as not to leave you feeling conceptually hungry or dishearteningly curious. Bryson is, I believe, a master of such dynamic prose, which is the cornerstone of taking a potentially mundane enterprise and tailoring a narrative of capital entertainment. One of my favorite parts is Bryson’s astounding illumination that nearly the entire living portion of a tree is comprised of just a few paper-thin layers of tissue that rest between the bark and the mass of dead heartwood. More remarkable still, a tree's delicate yet powerful anatomy allows it to lift enormous volumes of water—in some cases, several hundred gallons per day—from roots to leaves and otherwise to perform its every other living function by way of this modest sleeve of moist tissue. As he says, “Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water” (Bryson, 122).

One of the most hilarious sequences in the book involves a parasitic and richly annoying trail acquaintance named Mary Ellen, who latched onto Bryson and Katz for a few days. Direct and continuous interaction with such a person would prove agonizing, for sure, but through the comfortable distance of readership, as the bane of Bryson and Katz through ridiculous chatter and a remarkable lack of consideration, she is truly a comedic high point. In asking Katz his sign, for example, only to such a pathetically clueless person might “cunnilingus” refer to the zodiac, at which point, you could almost kiss Katz for his deft and delicious sarcasm, though it sprang from acute irritation.

Bryson’s treatment of local characters and culture is a tongue-in-cheek tour-de-force, adding more treasure to the trove, as in the description of their arrival at Mull’s Motel in the “palpably weird and unsettling” Hiawassee, Georgia, and its chilling resemblance to James Dickey’s description of Southern highlanders in his novel Deliverance. A short spell later, Bryson delivers a visit to the hyper-commercialized “shock to the system” called Gatlinburg, where the first stage of the journey ends, after which he and Katz resolve not to hike the entire trail, but to pick it up in Roanoke. Gatlinburg, with all its overweight tourists consuming “dribbly food,” motels, gift shops, and wax museums, becomes an apt focal point for some thought-provoking social commentary, since all the merchants, attractions, and other random diversions are continually replaced, like rows of shark teeth, constantly moving forward to take the place of previous generations of commercial miscellany. As Bryson says, “… that is the way of America.... I know the world is ever in motion, but the speed of change in the United States is simply dazzling” (Bryson, 103). I thought about this recently when the one of my many alarm clocks began to fail and could no longer go off at its set time each day. I’ve only had the thing for about three years. My mom, on the other hand, recently replaced a simple digital alarm clock that lasted more than 30 years. Such is the way of America indeed, at least modern-day America. From a profiteering standpoint, the only problem with manufacturing a sturdy, reliable, long-lasting product is that the consumer stops buying it. Solution: don’t make your product so well that the average person won’t need another one within five years. And so, things aren’t built to last anymore. Things are made to be routinely replaced, not due to a sensible degree of wear, but to feed an economic system that is forever scrounging the bottom of the American pocketbook for untapped gain. And Gatlinburg is, I suppose, a microcosm of this system, a chorus line of alarm clocks, each ready to wear out and be made obsolete at any moment. Of course, I can’t think of a better system. I certainly wouldn’t choose to put the whole economic behemoth in government hands. No, I would rather have 20 independent commercial corporations vying for my money than one government entity, evasive to accountability, taking it without asking. And until there’s a serious market for a lasting alarm clock again, I suppose we’ll keep pouring our money into the poorly-made, hyper-replaceable ones. Unfortunately, as Bryson later observes of the perished resort culture of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, America has entered the age of the “retarded attention span.” Perhaps quality manufacturing was doomed the moment industrial America discovered our culture’s pervasive appetite for selective amnesia. A wholesome actress who’s just caught a break poses in her birthday suit, and people are shocked. But five minutes of infamy later, she’s a household name; everyone is ready to see her in any role whatever; and no one remembers or cares what disgraceful, demeaning, or exploitative steps she may have taken to get there. Given our proclivity for cultural amnesia and rampant consumerism, Bryson certainly makes an excellent point—the enduring attraction of the Appalachian Trail, still quietly faithful to its founding tenets and, to a certain degree, to Benton MacKaye’s original vision, is indeed a kind of miracle.

A Walk in the Woods also touches on the political and industrial issues associated with the AT, all of which reflect the pervasive cultural response to the trail at different historical junctures since its birth. Bryson demonstrates, through a number of historical anecdotes, that the trail has had a checkered history and gone through phases of popularity and pending concern, both socially and politically. He gives us thorough, enlightening, and occasionally disturbing indictments of the Appalachian Trail Conference (and its “monumentally useless” maps), the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and a variety of private organizations, whose policies, procedures and general wastefulness often seem to border on (or to traverse intolerably) the ridiculous. The shortage or, as Bryson puts it, the “chronic misapplication of funds” in the Shenandoah National Park is a perfect example. But more than this, he delves, with engrossing detail, into the ecological transformation and bereavement of the American woods and of the eastern U.S., which is reflected in the AT’s history. During the sequence in which he and Katz trek through the Chattahoochee Forest, he reveals a wealth of disquieting information about the “multiple-use” policies of the U.S. Forest Service. According to Bryson’s information, despite the fact that approximately 191 million (about 80 percent) of the 240 million acres of American forest owned by the government is held by the Forest Service, the law allows for a wide variety of potentially devastating industrial efforts, including mining, oil and gas extraction, housing developments, ski resorts, and of course—logging. More specifically, the Forest Service is principally a road-building entity, the world’s largest in fact, the avowed aim of which is to build an additional 580,000 miles of forest roads by the middle of the 21st century for the purpose of allowing private timber companies to access stands of trees previously out of their reach. Bryson clearly believes these efforts to betray the original aim of the Forest Service, which was to allow the extraction of minerals and harvesting of timber in a sensible and sustainable way, which seems to form the crux of the conservation-industrialization debate. Bryson holds that the efforts of agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service are tantamount to ecological rape and—given the “sumptuous inefficiency” it demonstrated in the 1990s—industrial suicide, were it not a government agency, and thus able to pleasantly avoid a large degree of capital accountability. Personally, I assume that most environmentalists realize that the lumber used to build their houses and condominiums, restaurants and shopping centers, tables and chairs, picture frames and pencils doesn’t magically appear from nowhere or get left under the pillows of lumber tycoons by faeries or wood nymphs. In the same way, I imagine people who love to criticize the oil industry do so, I hope, with a certain awareness of their own culpability, as they complain about the environmental dangers of oil spills and drilling and of greenhouse gasses and the effects of the internal combustion engine while careening down the street in their Suburban, Civic, or Prius. Natural resources are a necessary part of civilized life in the present age. But what is sensible, and what is sustainable? Perhaps it’s best Bryson doesn't attempt to answer these questions, as it would certainly have the potential to dramatically derail his narrative. He does, however, offer plenty of criticism, enough to spark much political curiosity and, one would hope, self-awareness, even a helpful dash of culpability, in the conscientious and contemplative reader. If I had one criticism of Bryson, it is that he seems to lack such awareness, or to ignore it. He criticizes heavily and shows severe political biases that seem at times unbalanced by sense and information. And of course, there’s a flipside to every coin.

In truth, what Bryson seems to appreciate most is a rustic setting, a balance of nature and cultivation. At one point, he even laments the fact that the Appalachian Trail Conference seems almost “phobic about human contact,” and weighs his experience with a charming hike he took with his son through Luxembourg, where the landscape delivered an almost seamless integration of unbridled nature and rural cultivation. In other words, what he really wants is a stretch of woods followed, every so often, by a conveniently placed stretch of farmland, with a few quaint bakeries and country inns here and there for convenient measure.

Bryson mentions, at one point, the degree to which the National Park Service itself has a history of causing extinctions, with 42 species of mammal having disappeared from national parks in the 20th century. The loss of species is unfortunate and in some cases potentially devastating, both aesthetically and ecologically, but it takes more than a simple correlation to demonstrate that the Park Service is responsible for these losses, either by initiative or neglect. As any statistician or logically trained person will tell you, correlation does not imply causality. In fact, the budgetary neglect Bryson mentions and the subsequent lack of evidence is perhaps better support for suspicion, since funding for research in national parks would indeed help to demonstrate such correlative relationships. But lack of such research is hardly conclusive in itself. Either way, Bryson seems convinced, like so many, of the evils of government. I can’t say I wholeheartedly disagree, but as is always the case, painting with too broad a brush leaves us susceptible to ignoring valuable information. Bias is blinding. It forfeits the objectivity that might otherwise reveal the truth. And like all of us, Bryson is wearing his own blinders.

He furthermore asserts his distaste for hunting with justification that's downright clumsy. For instance, Bryson, who’s been quoting biological trivia and population numbers in the wild, from who-knows-what-source, throughout the book, suddenly objects to the increased lottery for Maine hunting licenses because the dramatically recovered population of moose in the state to 30,000 is really “just a guess.” “Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses” (Bryson, 242). Like many, Bryson seems to trust statistics when they suit his purpose or align with his bias and to distrust them in most other cases. I suppose we’re all human, even masterful authors. Another notable prejudice rears its head in the dinner sequence at Shaw’s guesthouse in Monson, Maine, where Bryson notes he would remember to lock his door upon the realization that two thru-hikers who were also lodging there were devout Christians. You get the feeling they took a little too long to say grace, at least for the famished Bryson and Katz. I suppose appetite is liable to betray anyone’s bigotry.

Perhaps the principal and most convincing of Bryson’s reflections is that there is something ethereally beautiful and somehow unimprovable about the American woods, and while you needn’t press your physical limits by scaling mountains, braving blizzards, and wading through mud and water to appreciate its elemental allure and complexity, as he says, it helps. At one point, he remarks, “…the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things—processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation—fill you with wonder and gratitude” (Bryson, 55). The same idea is alive in the practice of religious fasting. From the “awesomely unlovely” bunkhouse at Rainbow Springs or the dark and cramped mice battles in the Birch Spring Gap Shelter to the “restless funk” of their snow-induced holiday in Franklin, North Carolina, and the “strangely agreeable” state of going without in the wilds, the theme of longsuffering is lucidly championed. It’s the same dichotomy that so deeply affects Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. The experience of deprivation causes you to view the world through a dramatically different lens. Bryson uses this framework to celebrate and campaign for the strained syndrome of the hiker, beginning with the “hell” of the first day of something for which you’re so incredibly ill-prepared and the “dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill,” a burden to make one, as Bryson once says of Katz, “almost cataleptic with displeasure,” but leavened with moments of sweet arrest at the sensational vistas unfolding before them and evolving into a kind of serenity, a hypnosis of habit and transformed understanding of distance. “The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret” (Bryson, 71). As he distinctly conveys, the understanding breeds community as well, a sense of being part of a “sympathetic affiliation” of people of so many different ages and walks of life who all experience those discomforts tempered with moments of supreme hallelujah and the weariness that cultivates an understanding of the “colossal scale of the world.” He naturally begins the book by imparting his initial inspiration, his desire to cultivate eyes of “chipped granite”—in many ways, a perspective among the same romantic notions inspired by the writings of naturalist John Muir and, as Bryson later references, the grandeur portrayed in Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits. Though neither Bryson nor his companion from Des Moines hiked all 2,200 miles, he surely acquired the angle of true awe, the “granite eyes” bestowed by having done so. And the experience shaped him, and shaped him richly. The mileage wasn’t the same, but the shift of mind and spirit certainly was. He was no longer a “cupcake,” but rather one who could look at the beckoning wilds with a masculine sniff and utter, “Yeah, I’ve shit in the woods" (Bryson, 4). It’s enough to make anyone, in the words of John Muir, want to “throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence.”

Work Cited

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. Broadway Books, 1998.

My First Mania

2010-04-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

My mom has shared with me on multiple occasions since I was a kid that in my earliest years, I was easily entertained, and because I walked and talked so late and seemed otherwise content with little attention and minimal stimulation, she came to suspect in me a somewhat deficient mental capacity. In other words, she supposed I was retarded, or as we now say, mentally challenged. I was at the very least, by all accounts, a rather mellow baby. Apparently, I could occupy myself for considerable spans with just a handful of toys rolling around the interior of the play pen. She recalls, "Sometimes I even forgot I had you," because I remained so quiet in whatever contained space she had placed me.

The photo at the right shows me in November of 1976, lounging rather contently next to my dad. The next, just below, was taken on December 22 of the same year and shows me handling one of Dad’s LP recordings of the music of Czech composer Leos Janacek. Apparently, not only did my dad have few hang-ups about which of his personal possessions (however cherished) we could play with, but it would appear I’ve likely been a classical music enthusiast since roughly egg, that my fanaticism is something of a genetic inheritance. Now, even in the elbow-propped photo with Dad, I do at least appear a bit older than a mere 22 months. And still, as the story goes, I’ve not yet spoken. I’m tempted to believe I was simply holding it in, waiting for the right moment to reveal my true aptitude. The photo to the left is from January of ’77 and shows my older brother Anthony in the foreground, either before or after brushing his teeth, and me belly-flopped on the bathroom counter in a feigning endeavor. Apparently, there was nothing quite like imitating Dad and getting a clean, close pretend shave. But even at this point, no talking.

My mom maintains that while she had heard my voice and known my cry, infrequent as it was, my fledgling self had not uttered so many individual words as to suspect me capable of actual speech. I had not, in other words, sufficiently pieced together bits of gibberish or tripped through phonemes, like most children, attempting to draw the semantic connection between language and reality. Odd as it may sound, I’m told that when I first "spoke," it was in a complete sentence. At almost two years and three months, perambulating the outskirts of the kitchen one day, I finally revealed my faculties. My brother had entered the house from playing outside. As the story goes, he asked my mom for a cookie, and she handed him one, at which point I said, "I want one, too." Mom was startled, to say the least. Supposedly, she and Anthony exchanged looks of disbelief, and in the subsequent weeks and months, it became clear to Mom, Dad, and Big Brother that I was indeed in possession of all my wits. Though I don’t remember it at all, the tale always makes me smile, not merely because of the quirky satisfaction in relieving Mom’s suspicions concerning my intelligence in such a cavalier and off-hand way, but more to the point, I’m rather proud to have spent my first words on such a noble request. I’d like to think I was simply waiting for a topic worthy of my first intelligible utterance. And what better to have spent it on than, of all things, a cookie? I believe I did indeed wait for the most worthy subject, perhaps my first fixation, and one that has since proved one of my greatest obsessions, my kryptonite, if you will. I tell my students on occasion, "My professional integrity is secure. I can’t be bribed, cannot… But your best shot is homemade chocolate chip cookies."

Now let us be clear. The rather mundane sweetness and derelict flavor of a store-bought cookie should offer no confusion here, as it has absolutely no intersection with what I truly crave. Call me a snob, but in truth, I have been known on occasion to enjoy the Famous Amos, Mother’s, or Chips Ahoy cookie families. I use the word enjoy here somewhat liberally, however, since a conspicuous distinction between this enjoyment and the ethereal and euphoric bliss brought on by the homemade cookie should be clearly understood. What’s more, let us clear up the issue of alternative recipes, which may include anything from oatmeal raisin, white chocolate macadamia nut, and peanut butter to the occasionally pleasing melody of tastes and textures in the chocolate Mallomar, the Pepperidge Farm Chessmen, or the renowned and ever-popular Oreo. Even the oft-glorified snickerdoodle, in all its tartar cream and cinnamon-laden glory, pales in comparison. All these may be "enjoyed," but to be clear, at no point do they contend. Never do they approach, by a deficit of miles and miles in the annals of sugar-hood and cookie cuisine, the irretrievable glory; the majestic and luminous charm; the symphonic harmony of sugar, flour, egg, butter, and chocolate, fresh and warm from the benevolent hearth of a well-tended range brought to gorgeous life in a homemade chocolate chip cookie. O Heavenly realm! O me! O life! Of the questions of cuisines recurring, of the endless trains of the flavorless—what good amid these, O me, O life?

Given the intensity of my affection for chocolate chip cookies, it might be surprising to discover that until last Christmas, I had lived the entirety of my adult life and enjoyed two kitchens of my very own without having personally owned an actual cookie jar. But this term of deficiency was brought to an end the moment I opened the best gift I’ve ever received, my first bicycle at around six years old being a distant second. In the annals of human generosity, who doesn’t try, as best they can, to "hit it out of the park" when it comes to gift giving? We all struggle, and quite frequently, to determine what gift may best suit our family member, our co-worker, our friend. Often we default to a last resort of some kind, a good example of which is the one gift that so seamlessly rides the line between the tackiness of cash and the sentimentality of personal preference—the gift card. No other gift holds such a striking dichotomy of purpose and appreciation, for no other gift is so avoided by the conscientious and thoughtful giver while being so unilaterally enjoyed by the honest receiver. Sometimes, we’re able to avoid these last resorts and achieve some degree of genuine feeling or sentimental charm. But rarely do these qualities so perfectly coincide with so supreme a degree of personal resonance so that the gift is truly something the person would never buy for themselves, but would sincerely adore and cherish not simply by virtue of the thought and feeling put into it, but also for its connection to their own interests, passions, or pursuits. It’s tough to hit it out of the park, but my good friend Gina did just that, two days before Christmas of last year, when she placed in front of me a gift of considerable size, which I unwrapped and discovered to be a ceramic Yoda cookie jar! Truly, I believe, there has never been one so uniquely touched by a gift as I was at that moment. Stunned at first, but attempting repeatedly to utter a series of exclamations that might convey the extent of my incredulity, but which inevitably began and ended solely with "No way!!!" I found myself at times having trouble breathing, and at others, nearly hyperventilating, almost unable to contain my excitement or maintain my composure. I may love chocolate chip cookies, but I’m also a Yoda fan through and through. What’s more, I will forever live in admiration of my friend Gina, who accomplished that triumph to which every gift-giver aspires but rarely, if ever, achieves. Indeed some live their whole lives without giving anything even near the perfect gift, and regardless of cookies or little green Jedi, this in itself is worthy of awe, a feat at which I would consider it quite sensible of the average person, so generally considerate and conscientious of the charge in giving a good gift, to stop and marvel.

But I digress. My love for chocolate chip cookies has long been known to family, friends, colleagues, and students. But how tremendous it is to find oneself the beneficiary of happenstance, which occasionally has the effect of seeming divinely-conferred? And well, who’s to say it isn’t? Might not the Almighty aim at one an exquisite share of benevolence in the form of a tasty treat? A couple of weeks ago, a member of the café staff at the school where I work offered me a bit of surplus – a rather large chocolate chip cookie that had been broken in half and was therefore unsellable. "I just don’t want it to go to waste," she said. At once, I thought, Praise the Lord! What a divine and marvelous dividend. This wonderful woman truly had little understanding of what a good turn she had done, what an inadvertent blessing she had been by happening upon one so uniquely designed to love and appreciate what she sought to relinquish and the subsequent allowance of joy she had bestowed.

Now, let us consider carefully to what extent my enthusiasm may warrant concern, as you might be tempted to think me an addict. You might think I’m known to be drawn in so deeply by my enjoyment of a homemade chocolate chip cookie that I lose all notion of place and time, of setting and situation. Yes, you might be tempted to believe me capable of losing all recognition of where I am and whom I’m with, all that I know or understand lost in the deliciousness that awaits me in those precious moments before each bite. You may ask, might I even engage the cookie(s) in conversation, simply to help them understand that the people who stare at us aren’t jealous and that they needn’t feel self-conscious about the communion that must occur between Chris and cookie? Should it be possible that this dessert of the soul should inspire belief in a heaven, and that such a heaven should contain some sweet antechamber I might one day enter and spend a few million millennia basking in the enjoyment of a cookie supply that never diminishes and a flavor that never wanes upon whatever palate I might possess in this paradise of the soul? (O Lord, must it be a fiction?) You might believe me a nut. But let us be clear, no nuts! Seriously, they just get in the way. The true glory of a chocolate chip cookie is its dough-to-chip ratio, which should be as evenly balanced as possible. With that, aside from the exclusion of nuts, the right cookie should also not have too many chips. I believe many a great recipe has been spoiled through the use of too much chocolate. Yes, you might believe a variety of disturbing and socially disruptive potentialities in the nirvanic zeal I’ve described. What’s more, can my love be so extreme as to hinder temperance, to disrupt the dietary self-control I might otherwise attempt to exercise? Students and friends have been known to prepare entire plates of cookies for me for various occasions, most especially for my birthday. Are these difficult times, as the irrepressible lure of these platefuls is inevitably likely to eclipse all other sensible considerations in terms of weight gain, sugar-induced illness, or potential hospitalization? It is a challenge, I admit, a test of will, but that’s all. One or two cookies is not a big deal. Others of weaker will and lesser fiber might, by three or four cookies, cross into the realm of gluttony, at which point their thoughts become far more deceiving. Much like an addict, who can only think as far ahead as his next "fix," the difference between five cookies and six seems rather negligible, and the difference between seven and eight even more so. But alas, I believe myself free of danger, free of such pathetic, absurd, and insidious reasonings that whisper to the mind like devils in the ear. I’m simply in love, and the object of my attachment, my devotion, my solicitude is the homemade chocolate chip cookie. One would not consider a husband pathetic or absurd to declare himself in love with his wife. Though he may crave her every morsel of delicious beauty both inside and out, would he ever be called an addict? Would he be deemed unfit, as a result of his yearnings, to own property or to hold a job? I think not. Now of course, a spouse is entirely different from a cookie, both in terms of importance as well as lifespan. But still, we do not, as a rule, deem that a person’s wealth and variety of passions must necessarily compete for equity in the mind, but may span the gamut from the vital to the trivial, and certainly not call into question the mental stability of said person. Rather we exercise the understanding that these passions may coexist peacefully in a healthy and well-balanced mind. Yes. Yes, they can. Yes… Quite so… Without question. Yes… …No doubt… They definitely can……… You believe me, yes?

Without a Country

2010-03-12T20:31:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I attended the dance concert at Oaks Christian—where I work—on the same night, it turned out, as a group of young female teachers who happen to be friends of mine as well as colleagues. There had been a cursory discussion between myself and a couple of the teachers about going to dinner beforehand. So, the afternoon before the performance, I sent an email to one of them to see if any dinner plans had crystallized, but received no reply. I then approached the other to see if she had made any plans. Seeming to have forgotten any mention of dinner in our discussion from a few days before, she said she had already agreed to go to dinner with one of the English teachers along with the other young women in the group. And I got the distinct feeling that I was not welcome, and more specifically, that it was a girls-only affair. I also started to realize, from having seen them congregate in various contexts and places around campus, that this group of about five young teachers had become a kind of clique. In truth, it makes a lot of sense. These young women are all friends, and it’s entirely natural for them to bond and to wish to spend time together apart from friends and colleagues outside their situation, gender, and age range. The connection is totally understandable, and I certainly don’t mean my recognition to sound like criticism. Nor is this a pity party for Moya. What I noticed simply brought into bold relief what is now so hard to ignore and just as hard to bemoan. My exclusion from the dinner plans that night was nothing more than a tiny waving flag helping me to see something I believe has been perfectly evident in my life at Oaks for the past year or so, and that's this: things just aren't like they used to be.

Once upon a time, maybe six or seven years ago, I was among a group of young teachers at the school who spent a great deal of time together both in and outside of work. It used to be that weekends, afternoons and evenings before long breaks, or evening performances like the one I’ve mentioned here were a time to decompress with the other twenty-something teachers at the school. Excursions to coffee shops, happy hour and meals at local restaurants, and browsing the intellectually edifying aisles at Barnes and Noble were a way of life for us. But things are different now. For me at least. As British novelist L.P. Hartley once said, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Whatever paradigm of camaraderie may have governed the relationships of which I partook just a half-dozen years ago, a little time has passed, and things are different here. Even if I had not been sensible as to the boundaries now petitioned in my mind with respect to my age and situation, the past has its own customs and concerns, its own network of relationships and cultural awareness that breeds a hierarchy of importance. And these are wholly distinct from those we have here and now. A different time is a different place. This is as true for a person as it is for people. And the night of the dance concert, aside from the fact that I quite simply have no business imposing my company on a group of young female teachers seeking to bond, I was acutely aware of having reached the expiration of my membership in the young teacher clique. I’m no longer welcome in that space of vibrancy, the exhilaration of a new career, a new life, and the fresh appeal of being suddenly adult, suddenly responsible, yet retaining that playful and somewhat sophomoric spark of juvenility, the electricity of being formerly though still recently an adolescent. I’m not welcome there. Truth be told, nor should I be. For me, the stir of these neighboring seasons of life has passed.

Now, for sure, one can always remain a youthful spirit, and I believe and hope I will always be young at heart—very much a boy waving a wooden sword in celebration of the ridiculous, eager to laugh heartily at complete and utter nonsense. Such will always be a facet of who I am, “cultured but accessibly goofy,” to quote my friend Gina. And yet, still unmarried and thus without children, I’ve not yet entered that intermediate province of life wherein family and the stock of being professionally seasoned are the primary personal currency. I am, as my colleague Nancy Thompson put it a few days later, a “man without a country,” though, I believe, quite different from the protagonists envisioned by Edward Everett Hale or Kurt Vonnegut in their works of the same name. I have entered a time of life in which I must cease to be young, though without the traits and circumstances—the “status,” if you will—that allows me to find, in my peers, a sense of equivalent demand, a fellowship of purpose. (This, by the way, is exactly why those who are married with children, as kindly as they may intend to include their single friends in their lives, seem to get along so much better with others who are, like themselves, married with children.) It was the disconnect that startled me, not any small though salient exclusion, as the opportunity for any potential hurt was so quickly transformed to understanding. And this epiphanic moment was not necessarily something to lament, I realized. I didn’t find myself wallowing pathetically in self-pity. Instead, I understood that what has happened is natural and reasonable, thoroughly apropos of who I am and where I am. What’s more, these in-between days will themselves come to an end at some point, perhaps sooner than I expect. And in the bittersweet interim, my hope is to forbear, graciously and with a serene attention to the tasks at hand, until the day I may face new glories and challenges: the delights and travails of marriage and parenthood, a more skilled and thus revered status as a professional, or perhaps some welcome combination of these. For all I know, such things are imminent. It could be that tremendous change is just ahead. As much as we like to plan, as much as we hope and expect things to happen, life manages to catch us unprepared. But the order of the day is always contentment, a diligent devotion to what sits before you.

So until I enter this new and future country, dwelling indeterminably in the strange land to which I’ve now come, my tasks are evident and my purpose clear: to lend a patient ear and a caring hand to family and friends; to do right by my students in striving to be a better teacher; to explore God’s word and allow the wisdom and mysteries therein, wherever they may emerge, to root themselves in my heart; to serve others to whatever extent I’m called; to improve myself by partaking of the intellectual and spiritual pursuits that foster growth; to rejoice in the music that fills the landscape of my interior; to straighten my tie and act like a gentleman; sip my coffee and relish the simple things; to bear each day with serenity; to weep when it all feels like too much; but otherwise to smile, to laugh, to breathe. This is life, not what we idealize, but what we embrace. Though it’s very crucial we continue to dream, so as to shepherd hope, I’d like to think it takes courage—a courage I may yet possess—to embrace what’s given as opposed to what’s imagined or sought. Life is heroism. The individual saga, it is to each of us the singular and continual accretion of understanding and perspective and how we each acquit ourselves in the face of a unique amalgam of complex, adverse, and occasionally tragic episodes that lead us inexorably to some future destined self. I may yet be more. I may yet enter some new province, though it will likely bear little resemblance to what I’ve imagined. But for here and now, I’m here. And now.

Confessions of a Triskaidekaphobe

2009-11-13T23:52:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 13, 1996, I found myself driving eastbound on Los Angeles Avenue in Simi Valley, on my way to a Carl’s Jr. to order food for myself, my friend Andy, and several other coworkers at Edwards Simi 10 Cinemas. And as I approached the intersection of L.A. Avenue and Sycamore, I suddenly realized I was in the rightmost lane and would soon miss the left lane that would allow my approaching turn. In a moment of haste, I began to merge left having checked only my side mirror, but not my blind spot. No matter what anyone says, it will forever be the case that the one instance you fail to check said blind spot during a lane change, it will be hiding an enormous Peterbilt, with a bumper wide as a bulldozer blade and front grill like the grimace of a giant Halloween mask. Murphy’s Law, it seems, in all its permutations, holds true, and such was the case for me that fateful afternoon that noticing this vehicular monstrosity, though I immediately reentered the rightmost lane, it was too late to dissuade the other driver from justifiably slamming down on his brakes, causing the truck to spin out, knocking itself and another car over the center divider into the path of oncoming traffic, leading to a lamentable series of subsequent collisions. The result of all this was that even though my vehicle had not come in contact with a single other car, I had been to blame for the whole thing. Fortunately, no one involved was seriously injured. Yet, regardless of the larger blessing of darker fates avoided, such things have a way of dampening an entire day, or week, or month due to the subsequent shock, regret, remorse, anger, or some arduous combination of these. But on what reasonable grounds should I allow myself to fixate on the day and date? Truth be told, I’ve surely had other accidents and unfortunate events occur on perfectly inoffensive dates. But for some bizarre reason, the mythic pall of a Friday’s intersection with the 13th calendar day has its hold on me. I recently discovered such to be called paraskevidekatriaphobia, the pronunciation of which is not for the verbally faint of heart, and in truth, I wouldn’t recommend attempting it, as it took a bit of research to accomplish, and even then, I was kind of dizzy afterward. Though it’s difficult to gauge which fear bore the other, a more general triskaidekaphobia definitely better characterizes this idiosyncratic malady. I admit to being occasionally prone to situational counting. So, the 13th step of a ladder or staircase is certainly worth hopping over, wouldn’t you say? As a math teacher (yes, as one who works professionally with numbers every day), I prefer to avoid 13 as a coefficient or test response. Writing 13 is uncomfortable. Bookmarking at the 13th page of a novel is unthinkable and, in fact, seems best to read through it as quickly as possible. The absence of a 13th elevator button in a high-rise seems perfectly appropriate. Receipts or dinner checks that come to 13 dollars give me the creeps. A game score of 13 feels downright calamitous. Goodness, how did I ever adopt so irrational and almost pathological an apprehension as this?

I believe I’ve been a triskaidekaphobe since childhood. The first association that comes to mind is the television promo that accompanied, oddly enough, the release of the original Friday the 13th in 1981. I believe I was mesmerized by it for some reason or other, and though I didn’t actually see the film until I was an adult, the promo was enough to inspire a terrified fascination. Now, I’m told I sat through the original Jaws at three or four; never took my eyes off the screen; and, strangely enough, never had nightmares, not of sharks, wicked witches, or any other ghoulish or otherwise frightful characters with ridiculous proboscides. My older brother, on the other hand, was not allowed to watch The Wizard of Oz for many years due to an arresting fear of Margaret Hamilton’s performance that would keep my parents awake half the night, despite his protestations beforehand. And though I’m certainly not immune to such sleepless bouts myself, some part of that mesmerized kid still dwells in me. And you know, I’m not gonna lie… Every once in a while, for no particular reason, I’m just in the mood for some gold ol’ schlock horror.

In the absence of a redemptive aesthetic, which involves a work of significance or meaning, the viewing mind simply defaults to an intermittent taste for diversion. Oftentimes we long simply to be humored, amazed, thrilled, even shocked. And what is it about the human mind that occasionally embraces fear for fun? Though a great many people have no such appetites, I myself admit to feeling the occasional bug for such mental popcorn and to capitulating every now and then to the seductive power of a terrifying tale. The original Saw is a perfect example, though the film proceeded to haunt me throughout the fall of 2004. I went in with an appetite for something gruesome and creepy, and came out thoroughly freaked and in dire need of a psychological shower. I came home and tried to get my mind bathroom fresh with a few innocuous episodes of Seinfled and the agreeably un-sinister duration of Finding Nemo. And still, I went to bed that night unable to rid my brain of those images, lines, and scenarios, continually fearful I would open my eyes and peer above the shore of my bedding only to find some diabolical figure hovering over me. This is the problem with a truly twisted tale like Saw. It doesn’t just thrill you; it poisons you. What’s more, I awoke the next morning, having gotten all too little sleep, and made the chilling discovery that I had accidentally left the front door of my apartment completely unlocked the entire night. Surely no bolt of lightning could have commanded the hairs of my neck with such force as such ominous irony thus disclosed. For months afterward, I found myself obsessively turning on lights upon returning home, repeatedly checking cupboards and closets for predatory invaders, and basically working myself into a simmering paranoia. However, despite my viewing of Saw and the paralyzing trepidation it inspired, I found myself wanting more. Sometimes, nothing would suffice but a run to Blockbuster, where I would casually peruse the gruesome disc covers that line the horror aisle. After a while, even the laughably low-budget, straight-to-video, cheesy romps with poorly-portrayed prom queens and badly-puppeted night creatures started to look good. What would it be? A demon-possessed ventriloquist’s dummy that threatens an entire suburban neighborhood? A vampire motorcycle gang? A psychopathic transvestite with a sudden affection for farm tools? Or the typical bump-and-jump haunting of a typical American family? There’s something to be said for curling up with a cozy stretch of expendable characters who foolishly investigate strange noises and stupidly explore dark corridors. And of course, now-a-days, whatever slaying is done must be achieved with almost operatic gore. Nothing like a good disemboweling, decapitation, or sudden loss of appendage with some implement of cleaving wielded with an almost endearingly awkward ferocity. And I’m ashamed to say, there were many an evening spent on a Friday the 13th or a Texas Chainsaw Massacre after which nothing would get me out of a damp and darkened basement or a fateful meat locker but an hour and a half of pure, unadulterated Pixar or a mindless sitcom with jokes too trite and agreeably superficial to allow the sinister gloom of the previous fare to linger.

But you know, after a while, I found I had had enough. You can only let yourself get freaked out so many times before the cycle of craving and regret starts to make you feel pretty ridiculous. I seemed to myself rather like those unwitting janitors and cavalier boyfriends who stupidly investigate the strange noise or careen down the dark corridors to their dooms. So what’s next? I asked myself. In truth, some part of me yearns for the bygone days of the harmlessly macabre, of Hollywood movie monsters, the original House of Wax with Vincent Price, Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend without a Face, and other B-grade cinematic pulp like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or The Blob. You know, there’s just something about a teenage Steve McQueen and his best girl fleeing an absurdly portrayed gelatinous thing that took an asteroid taxi to Earth and becomes an ever larger mold of Jell-O as it virulently consumes the human fodder of a quaint 1950s Middle American small town. I realize that my goofy little penchant stems primarily from the nostalgic datedness of the film, which only in retrospect allows its subject to appear amusing, and brings me finally to the point of this expose of my darker appetites, which is simply this… A horror parody is a glorious thing. What is so wonderful about The Blob is the distance granted by time, production cost, and relative quality. I discovered that what I really and truly love is a good horror comedy, in which the genre is turned so ineffably on its blood-soaked ear that the cloud of fear and anxiety that would otherwise pervade your thoughts is forbidden to interrupt the ensuing laughter. This genre is nothing new, of course. It seems to have begun with the macabre humor of The Addams Family cartoon, created by Charles Addams and first published in The New Yorker magazine in 1938, and continued with those jewels of classic network television The Addams Family series and its less-revered competition, The Munsters, both of which, oddly enough, ran for only two seasons in the same two-year period from 1962 to 1964. And of course, the trend continued with feature films like Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’ downright hilarious satire of the Boris Karloff original, and 1984’s fantastically popular Ghostbusters. A somewhat more severe example of horror comedy is Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy. While the original Evil Dead (1981) tried quite earnestly (and in many ways succeeded) to be a horror film, it’s 1987 sequel, Evil Dead II, is a comic romp of the grotesque and the terrifying, and the less gore-infused Army of Darkness gave the saucy series a charming twist of slapstick and mock-heroism. Oftentimes almost poking fun at its predecessor, Evil Dead II, in particular, was one of the most aggressive horror comedies until Shaun of the Dead in 2004.

This brings me at last to the paragon of horror comedy, likely the very best of every possible marriage of terror and humor: the zombie. The origin of zombies as the subject of modern popular horror goes back to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Let’s just say, I’ve seen it, and in all honesty, it’s really nothing to write home about. But as the initiator of an entire sub-genre of entertainment, a great deal of which has been made by Romero himself, it has its place. Romero’s 1978 follow-up Dawn of the Dead was actually a far superior film, despite its noticeably low budget and forgettable special effects. But even in those early years of zombie stardom, George A. Romero quickly found ways to showcase the inescapably ludicrous in the zombie’s situation. Yes, I must admit to a deep and wondrous joy in lampooning the undead as a subject of horror, a genre which came to my attention with Shaun of the Dead and has

continued with a variety of zombie parodies, all of which seem to reignite in me the irrepressible bliss of the grotesque yet satirically quaint. What is so endearing about a zombie? Having no truly sinister intent, but simply an insatiable craving that seems almost pathetic, zombies are the lovable buffoons of the horror world. With the movements and mannerisms of a nearly-articulate Keith Richards, their vacuous state and simplicity of motivation make them deliciously conducive to farce. How delightfully droopy they are, how absent in reason, how destitute in faculties, in form and moving how clumsy and single-minded, in action how like a fool, in apprehension how like a terrier. They have the marvelous capacity to inspire both fear and amusement, such that the grisly business of decapitation, evisceration, disemboweling, and limb severing becomes somehow campy, droll even, and I daresay hilarious! They’re not villainous, just hungry. I mean, it’s almost cute. Zombies are, in this sense, the perfect subjects of horror parody, and Shaun of the Dead was the first film to earn my affection for such a notion. Starring Simon Pegg and directed by Edgar Wright and brilliantly marketed as “a romantic comedy… with zombies,” it is a little cinematic treasure, delivering a fresh and unique comic experience by drawing satirically on both the schlock horror and the romantic comedy genres and propelling the story through a lovable host of small-town characters in modern-day Britain. One of my favorite scenes involves the truly hysterical attempt of the main characters to cross a street full of zombies by emoting them—drowsy, limping, and moaning, so as not to arouse the suspicion that food is in their midst. Laughed like a kid the first time I saw it.

I heartily acknowledge the need for more zombie comedies. I recently purchased the new novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a rather adorable retelling of Jane Austin’s classic romance interwoven with a variety of hilarious melees with the undead set in the nineteenth century English countryside. And in the same trip to Barnes and Noble, I found a marvelous nugget titled The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead, a delectable self-help guide from which the average person is able to learn the zombie’s secret to happiness, how to slow down the pace of one’s life, and devour those who may try to thwart your professional ascent. And a purchase I absolutely could not resist, both as a poet and as a zombie buff, was a small collection of side-splitting zombie haiku. Filled with delicious little gems written by and for the undead, this silly little anthology quickly earned a place of honor in my heart and gave me one of the heartiest laughs of my life with the following haiku, written by the protagonist zombie in the perfect syllabic meter of five, seven, five:

Brains, BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS.
Brains, brains, Brains, BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS.
BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS, brains. (Mecum, 32)

Remarkable—even a simpleton from the ranks of the undead can contribute with such tremulous eloquence to haiku literature. The book, which is configured like a zombie’s scrapbook, tells the almost touching story of personal decay for an individual whose descent from infection to demise is documented quite poignantly, though with biting frankness, complete with mementos and souvenir snapshots taken by the zombie himself. O generous hilarity!

Most recently, my zombiephilia was treated to the release of the apocalyptic comedy Zombieland starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg. Like Shaun of the Dead, it delivers a story that relies on the horror genre for a situation and setting that propel other plot points involving the relationships of the characters and their various quirks. Of course, low expectations often yield surprising enjoyment. As I was hesitant to expect the level of comedic glory achieved by Shaun of the Dead, my viewing hopes weren’t too high. But Zombieland turned out to be exactly what I might have hoped for: a charming little comedy with a dash of zombies and a little piquant bloodletting thrown in for good measure. I mean really, why let the truly twisted tie you up? Rather, ridicule the ridiculous. Oh yes, more zombie comedies are most certainly the order of the day. Why not a family sitcom where the wacky next door neighbor who drops in at any hour just happens to be undead? Or a romantic comedy in which two zombies lock eyes from across a crowded wasteland? Why not a coming-of-age story about a kid whose lust for brains makes it tough to fit in? What about a zombie soap opera? Imagine those uncomfortable and melodramatic silences interwoven with the standard absent glares and drooling. And why not more classic literary characters happened upon, for no apparent reason, by zombie hoards? Why not a documentary in which some discuss their pain at being so unilaterally judged and discriminated against for their unquenchable bloodlust, while others boast boldly about how much they can put away at a potluck of personal remains? Oh, the possibilities are truly endless! And yet, as a friend once said, a fad can give rise to too much of a good thing, and perhaps the luster could be somewhat lost for Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland if subsequent efforts lead to nothing but inferior imitation. So for now, let us be patient and thankful, content with the few undead comedies with which we’ve been thusfar so magnani-mously blessed, and look forward to the laughable mock-horror and fetchingly mindless bumbling of undead throngs that may be yet to come.

To the right, you'll find a snapshot of a caveat guarding a rather winsome zombie physiognomy sketched on my white board by one of my summer school students who happens to drop by my classroom every so often just to visit. I have to say, it’s so nice to be appreciated.

Work Cited

Mecum, Ryan. Zombie Haiku. How Books, 2008.

A Flowering Moment

2009-10-12T19:56:00.000-07:00

The evening of Friday, May 15, 2009, was a most auspicious point of felicity. In one of the final performances of the 2008/2009 Los Angeles Philharmonic concert season, I heard a resplendent work performed under the baton of the composer himself, John Adams, who, it so happens, is now the philharmonic’s new creative chair, which not only enriches the artistic potential of the orchestra, but might also bless future concerts with Adams’ music, attendance, direction, or perhaps all three.

The program consisted of A Flowering Tree, one of Adams’ most recent operas, based on an extremely old South Indian folk tale of a beautiful young peasant woman named Kumudha, who discovers herself endowed with the magical ability to transform herself into a tree, the flowers of which are sold by her sisters to support their impoverished family. A love burgeons between Kumudha and a rather selfish young prince, who happens to witness the transformation. The prince’s father eventually consents to their union, and on their wedding night, Kumudha discovers the prince quite obsessed, having almost “fetishized” her ability. After a cruel incident plotted by the prince’s sister, who also discovers the ability, Kumudha is left in a grotesque state of mid-transformation and subsequently disappears in horror, leaving the prince in shame and despondence at having driven her away. Kumudha is later discovered by the queen of a neighboring city—another of the prince’s sisters, as it turns out—and is brought to her residence in an attempt to raise her brother’s spirits. Upon being reunited, Kumudha and the prince recognize each other at once, and the prince uses two pitchers of water to return the young woman to her human form.

The opera was commissioned for the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, for which the festival director and longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellers had invited a variety of artists to respond to the late work of Mozart in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Adams used The Magic Flute as his thematic impetus for A Flowering Tree. Both works use fantastical narratives to explore universal human archetypes, and both occur in far-off locales seen as somewhat exotic to Western minds. The premiere of Adams’ work, however, demonstrated an unprecedented cultural alloy—an opera on an Indian folk tale in both English and Spanish premiered by the Joven Camerata di Venezuela, performed by Indonesian dancers from Java, sung by the Schola Cantorum Caracas chorus, and written by a composer from California. Peter Sellers, who co-wrote the libretto with Adams and is responsible for the stage direction, remarked at Upbeat Live before the performance that opera may be the art form of the 21st century, simply because it begs the question, how many people can we fit in the room? Unlike the multiculturalism that characterized the 90s, in which it was common for people to share their culture with one another, in our present era, we find that people actively participate in each other’s cultures, and opera involves a unique degree of artistic collaboration that reflects this. A Flowering Tree, then, shows how such an aesthetic can yield a result at once grounded in tradition and, at the same time, fresh and original.

The music of John Adams has captivated my spirit and mind ever since my dad first played the final movement of the pseudo-symphony Harmonielehre on the stereo in my parents’ living room some 15 years ago. Adams’ music has a relentless ethereal quality, as of dreamscapes continually unfolding. And though he has used the language of minimalism as rhythmic subtext for much of his work, it is far more organic than pure minimalism, a la Philip Glass, Steve Reich, et al. Harmonielehre was my first significant exposure to a minimalist aesthetic, however peripheral, and my first moment of intense adoration for Adams’ art. The final movement is a thing of ebullient sublimity. I remember my dad describing the first few minutes as so euphorically beautiful, it reminded him of the soul’s wonder at entering paradise. He used this analogy, I remember, in reference to four different works, of which the other three were the Verdi Requiem, Death and Transfiguration by Strauss, and the Second Symphony of Sibelius. As with so much of Adams’ music, however, the movement doesn’t remain long at this point of transcendent beauty, but is gradually transformed into what my father described as a “wall of sound,” pounding, shining, and spiraling its way up to an expansive tumult and a final plume of blazing brass. This is music at once introspective and majestic, music that reaches deep into the heart and stokes the fires of the imagination with harmonies and instrumentation of a singular, otherworldly nature. Few words can describe the awe with which I approached this piece. And so began my odyssey with the music of this remarkably gifted composer.

My first experience seeing Adams in the flesh followed a performance of Harmonielehre at the Barbican Centre in London. I attended the performance with my parents, and none of us expected him to actually be there. So it was a real treat to see him take the stage to be recognized during the applause. I saw him again six years later, the afternoon of January 21, 2007, at an L.A. Philharmonic performance of one of his more recent symphonic opuses titled Naïve and Sentimental Music, which had been commissioned by the philharmonic. Esa-Pekka Salonen led the orchestra in a splendid performance of the piece following Beethoven’s Second Symphony. I have to say, as wonderful as Beethoven is, Naïve and Sentimental Music was exhilarating beyond measure. Adams ascended the stage just prior to the performance and offered a few words about how it came to be and what it means to him. It’s tremendous when composers and performers enrich the concert experience in this way. He said the piece was meant to evoke a journey of gradually-shifting musical vistas. The second movement, for example, he described as a desert landscape in which more massive forms, such as mountains and canyons, gradually take shape. The steel-string guitar in that movement, gently weaving through the string accompaniment, was particularly beautiful. The third movement was a rhythmic riot, full of thrilling pulsations and a transcendent, explosive conclusion, after which I was so moved, I started clapping and thought I would never stop. The Upbeat Live that preceded this performance was conducted by a music professor who shared some interesting insights. Apparently, Adams himself had found it meaningful to think of the haunting, plaintive melody that opens the first movement as the protagonist of a Dickens novel, who wanders into the story and, through a series of developments, pursues his destiny—an altogether satisfying analogy given the deep affection for David Copperfield I’ve been harboring these past few years. What an experience! I remember leaving the auditorium that night thinking, thank God there is such music to quench and renew a thirsting heart.

The evening on which the opera was performed, this sentiment was crowned with a new and richer experience. The score of A Flowering Tree is intensely luminous, and the performance was magnificent. Adams himself conducted the philharmonic, a handful of soloists and dancers, as well as the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Furthermore, my mom and I had discovered at a performance the previous week that Adams would be on hand in the Grand Avenue lobby afterward to sign copies of his CDs and his newly-released memoir. Needless to say, I was aquiver with anticipation. And after the shimmering glory of Kumudha’s final transformation and the transfigured embrace of husband and wife supported by the irrepressibly sonorous fire of the orchestra had brought the opera to a gorgeous, arresting conclusion, we clapped fervently for what seemed like an eternity, then headed downstairs and ended up only third or fourth in line in the lobby. It was astounding. Not only had I sat less than twenty feet from Adams before the performance while he shared thoughts and details about the opera and his craft, I even got to meet the man and shake his hand, a moment of transcendent delight, to be sure. I told him how greatly I enjoyed his work, and he asked me if I played an instrument. I shared that I was a percussionist, to which he smiled and simply replied, “Well, we need you.” It was a rather ordinary and pleasant little conversation, reminding me of course that he was simply a person like anyone else. Mom and I shared how much we had enjoyed the performance of Harmonielehre at the Barbican Centre some years before. He seemed so appreciative, so benevolent, and even allowed us a quick photo before we left. However extraordinary, Adams is simply a man. And yet, I'm doubtful as to whether residents of the 19th or 20th centuries felt any less a spirit of adulation in the presence of greatness having met and shaken hands with Beethoven or Stravinsky, and this was certainly a moment of equivalent quintessence.

I cannot convey my excitement about attending the upcoming November 29 concert at which the philharmonic's new music director Gustavo Dudamel will conduct Adams' latest work, City Noir, a piece commissioned by the philharmonic for the new season and also as part of a celebration of California music titled "West Coast, Left Coast," which is being curated by Adams. But rather than speculate or paraphrase on what might await the audience and myself at this momentous offering, I should like to defer to the man himself. This is a video I took of Adams during Upbeat Live, just before the May 15 performance of A Flowering Tree, in which he elaborates on being commissioned and the dark side of L.A. that drove the aesthetic of City Noir.

My father once remarked, after we had finished listening to Adams’ Violin Concerto one evening, that he believed John Adams could turn out to be the greatest composer of his generation. Truly, I find nothing in the present life of modern music to contradict this notion. Here’s to you, Dad.

It's a Randy Newman Thing

2009-08-14T03:38:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, a shroud of disillusionment having settled on the evening one Sunday night, my best friend called suddenly and invited me to a movie. It’s the same sort of thing that’s happened a hundred times before, but I came to realize what a sobering effect it tends to have on me. And on the way home afterward, thoroughly recovered from what I had been feeling earlier, I began to reflect on exactly what had occurred the two or three previous hours. A guy’s best pal is a cache of leaning, a kind of muted trust. The connection often acts like subtext—unspoken but totally understood, totally true. I’m not talking about machismo or golden parachutes, secret handshakes or scandalous secrets. No, I mean true friendship, which doesn’t vanish or seem disquieted by delicate matters or moments of vulnerability. My best friend has stuck by me no matter how I might act or sound. He’s let me pour out my deepest concerns and still paid truth for truth, offering frank but compassionate feedback mingled with a tasteful hint of flippant irony, a curious brand of counsel that might seem like teasing one minute and resonant wisdom the next. Does it reject candid trust or moments of cathartic grief? Not at all. I’m talking about something so deep that nothing need be said much of the time. But when something is said, it is received, though with a rather impish sincerity neither of us would trade for all the world.

Throughout elementary school, my best friend was a pearl of a kid named Bryan Motzel, and thick as thieves we were—a friendship full of countless guffaws, homework stints, lofty imaginings on the playgrounds of Pinecrest Elementary School, sleepovers that poured an arresting delirium of late-night absurdity into the crisp and sober air of Saturday morning cartoons. Through junior high and high school, it was a great guy named Danny Menther, with whom I had some of the funniest moments as well as the most insightful conversations of my adolescent life. And as an adult, beginning with a four-year turn as projectionists and assistant managers for Edwards Cinemas, Andy Yocum has been not only my greatest friend, but also one of the best and coolest guys I’ve ever known. He’s shared in some of my ugliest moments of weakness or despair. For example, if I spent half the night in gloom and lamentation over some girl, despite his own understanding that she was a twerp who wasn’t a bit deserving of me, even when he would try to cheer me up and I just smeared my depressive trauma over the whole thing, he would simply shrug patiently, never letting his frustration get the better of him. In return, I’ve offered a mindful ear to his tales of discontent and tried to edify him with honesty and encouragement. I believe each of us often ends up providing sound advice in areas where the other may be either inexperienced or insecure. In this way, we pay each other the compliment of sharing issues neither of us would likely bring to another guy friend. And yet, truthfully, I don’t tell him everything. I confide quite a lot, but what’s best about it all is what happens when I simply take in his company, listen to his crap, and he listens to mine. It’s really just the hanging around each other that’s so valuable, in many ways, so vital. It seems like so much of a deep and lasting friendship is in the mortar between the bricks. He’ll never know how many jams he got me out of by calling me out of the blue and asking me to go hang out or take in a movie. Emotionally speaking, that stuff is like a hundred thousand little rescues that add up to one enormous blessing, a psalm of life that ferries you across troubled waters in a thousand tiny oar strokes. He’ll never know the solace and how he made it that much better, when I had hit a rough patch, by sitting next to him in a darkened theatre and laughing till it hurt, or standing in a parking lot discussing something totally unrelated to whatever I was dealing with, but knowing, in my heart, he would understand if I told him.

We met in the summer of 1994 as co-workers at a movie theatre in Simi Valley. And while we were friends almost from the very first, one interesting factor poured into the foundation that was laid in those early years was the camaraderie built around satirizing—secretly of course—a common supervisor, a man we both worked under at the same time and whose flair for ridiculous and imbecilic self-importance had been unmatched in our lifetimes. It sounds terrible, but it feels as though we built a sort of comic empire out of making fun of this horrifically pretentious man, whose management style quickly became the stuff of legend and lived gloriously in our hearts somewhere between the tempestuous desire to rip out one’s hair and the mad hysterics that make you feel like you might be swallowed whole by a laugh too big for your soul. The rest, of course, is history—15 years of jokes and innuendos that could never be uttered except between us; bouts of simulated and/or unrestrained flatulence; sarcastic badgering tossed back and forth between sleeping bags the morning after freezing all night in a camping tent; terms of endearment that parade as insults and looks of disappointment; countless rants in the middle of parking lots on everything from politics to feeble and incompetent retail cashiers; and of course sincere confessions comingled with tender or pithy accusations of effeminacy. Oh it’s a grand thing, a best friendship, a choice stew of the mindfully charitable and the ferociously witty. Though deeply rooted in the former, how can we resist the primal urge to make a merry farce of how well we care?

In the end, what we say in reference to our own friendship, albeit in jest much of the time, is still a deep and brotherly affection that simply likes to profess incivility, love in a leather jacket you might say, a facetious fete wherein a good box on the ear, verbal or actual, is as good as a tender hug or a kind expression of sympathy. So ironically, when Andy eventually reads this, something like “Dude, that’s so gay” can be translated, in fact, as "Dude, quite right"; "very cool"; or "excellent, now moving on." This curious grade of synchronicity is the mortar I mentioned. Best friends are quirky pairs, like oddly-matched socks, book-ends, or salt and pepper shakers. He’s like Lennon to my McCartney, Sam to my Frodo, Sheriff Woody to my Buzz Lightyear. You know, as ridiculous as this might sound, it’s absolutely worthy of that little jalopy of a song from Toy Story. Imagine a slideshow of all the sacred and profane moments throughout the last 15 years of friendship scored with the delicious medley of equal parts gleeful randomness and sincere devotion that permeate every line of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” Can you hear him crooning his way through it with that silly, sauntering voice of his? “And as the years go by, our friendship will never die…” Even if I had no other way to describe it, let’s just say, it’s definitely a Randy Newman thing.

Painting the Carcass

2009-08-09T04:18:00.001-07:00

A good friend and colleague of mine once referred to plastic surgery and other age-defying measures as “decorating the carcass,” which she has made perfectly clear to her husband she will never do. And while I certainly want to keep myself attractive to my future spouse if I can, I have to agree with her stance, since the sacrifice of money and risk for these cosmetic endeavors does seem a bit drastic, and catering to the superficial preoccupation with beauty and appearance can definitely draw us away from the improvement of the spirit and the mind. Admittedly, most of us do spend a good deal of time maintaining our appearance, which has the effect of projecting a certain attitude and, in some cases, a particular worldview. Façade or no, the manner in which we present ourselves does, at least in part, define our character and personality, not only to others, but to ourselves. Hairstyles, jewelry, make-up, and even clothing are some of the most obvious examples. And in recent years, tattooing has become a more popular facet of this cultural disposition.

Body art among performance artists and more eccentric types is nothing new, and tattooing in particular is an extremely old practice. In the Western world, it has its roots primarily in the impact of Polynesian culture on the European explorers of the eighteenth century. Recently, however, tattoos have become far more common among average folks. And like so much of popular culture, this phenomenon often seems more like a trend, or fad, and less like self-expression. So much of how we present ourselves seems to stem from our identification with a particular group or subculture and less to do with true individuality. Adolescents seem especially susceptible to this contradiction. How many times have you known a young person with some bizarre outfit or outrageous hairstyle remark that they look the way they do because they don’t care what anyone thinks of them, when it’s ridiculously obvious that nothing could be further from the truth? In our youth, we all wrestle with the issue of identity. A teenager is a person in transition, often attempting to decide on the particular group or stratum of society with which to eventually be identified. And for the time being, a young person might choose to rebel and embrace an anti-fad, in other words, to identify with a group characterized by its own set of conventions and sensibilities that simply run counter to the mainstream. Some never outgrow this phase and wrestle with identity their whole lives, whereas for others, it becomes a genuine expression of who they are. But a teenager with spiked green hair and knee-high leather boots seems generally to be doing one of two things, either nursing a grudge against a parent or authority figure (perhaps even society as a whole) or simply trying to conform to the styles and conventions of the subculture they’ve chosen to join, in other words, to fit in. I admit, I can’t see into the minds and hearts of every young person, but you know, at the same time, there’s a reason you don’t see many people over 40 with spiked green hair and knee-high leather boots, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on culturally, especially for an adult, who has the benefit of hindsight and knows what it’s like to be young. So, all in all, at no point do the fashion choices of a rebellious teen seem to reflect a genuine or unique form of self-expression.

Often this seems to be the case with tattoos, though admittedly, I often find that many people get them as a kind of emblematic signature of some impactful experience or life lesson. Either way, the tide definitely seems to have turned for this anti-fad, since so many people are getting them now. And even this notion of marking oneself as a permanent reminder of some crossroads or benchmark in life can be seen as a fad in itself, since so many seem to credit this brand of reasoning as the basis for the decision to tat themselves. It’s the same reasoning that sometimes brings about other drastic changes in appearance, like the dyeing of hair or the ever-popular sudden chopping-off, from long to short, by many women. The belief is that a major shift in appearance will precipitate a shift in perspective, changing either how they see themselves, how they are seen by others, or both. And sometimes it may.

So what’s wrong with this? Nothing, really. Generally speaking, adults have the freedom to do with their own bodies as they please. And yet, it does reflect, to some extent, the dangers of conformity and the prevalent difficulty we have transcending the codes of culture; truly rising above the significance of physicality and appearance; and allowing ourselves to be distinguished and defined by the growth of spirit and mind, by our quality of character, and ultimately by our actions. Some people have biblical objections to tattoos, though no such argument has ever made sense to me personally. I myself have two objections, neither of which is a moral one. The first is aesthetic and totally subjective. It is simply a personal preference, which admission will hopefully prevent my being labeled a prejudiced coot who judges character solely by appearance. No, this is a chemical matter, an issue of taste. Different men, for example, are physically attracted to different aspects of a woman’s appearance: legs, hands, eyes, hair, and so forth. I’m something of a leg and ankle man myself; those who know me well know I have a soft spot in my heart for a woman with a shapely ankle. However, the physical trait of a woman I find perhaps most attractive is complexion and skin tone. I happen to be one of those weirdos who prefers the European look. But tan is en vogue, of course. So while the majority of the Western world braves the leathery appearance of premature aging and the possibility of maybe the most deadly form of cancer in a desperate attempt to look like a Polynesian islander, I’m trying to find the few needles in the neo-Caucasian haystack that still retain some small degree of their natural complexion. My best friend, knowing full-well my preference, has even gone so far as to coin the phrase “Moyafied,” in reference to women he knows I would find attractive by virtue of a fair complexion illumined with a gentle rosy hue. I bring this up only to help frame my aversion to body art, which, regardless of its artistry, certainly obscures that complexion to some extent.

Let me see if I can frame it more succinctly. I once knew a girl who had gotten a very small tattoo of an orange butterfly on her ankle, of all places, and maintained she felt it amplified the beauty of her legs, ankles, and feet. The problem for me is that as nice as a little orange butterfly might look, I know myself, and as her boyfriend or her husband, I would always wish it wasn’t there. You see, in the eye of this beholder, a beautiful woman is truly poetry in motion, a living work of art. Without indulging a lustful or irreverent thought, when sighting a beautiful woman, I often find myself looking to the sky and saying to the Big Man Upstairs, “Lord, you do good work.” I look at creation and find that God is like the ultimate Rembrandt or Michelangelo. And woman is without a doubt His masterpiece. So to me, a tiny orange butterfly on the ankle is the aesthetic equivalent of painting a cute little teddy bear in a corner of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Sure, little teddy bears are cute, adorable even. Love little teddy bears. But on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it would be totally out-of-place, and no matter how you slice it, it would obscure, however slightly, Michelangelo’s gorgeous work. Again, just a matter of preference. What I happen to find attractive is the unembellished skin of a woman as God bestowed it, or rather, as God fashioned it, to coin a more artistic term.

The young woman with the little orange butterfly on her ankle challenged my objection by comparing tattoos to make-up, jewelry, and other self-adornments. But to me, this isn’t a fair analogy, because make-up, for example, only “obscures” in order to enhance a woman’s natural beauty, to accentuate her eyes and lips, liven her complexion, and so forth. A tattoo, on the other hand, obscures the commonly exposed areas of a woman’s skin, something which is already beautiful in my view. The key word here, I suppose, is commonly, which just shows how conventional, or old-fashioned, my own taste tends to be.

Now what about tattoos on men? My mom still recounts how the night my older brother came home with his first tattoo, she cried all night long. She loved him so much and was heartbroken at the thought that a sophomoric impulse had caused him to permanently modify his body in a way that was, to her, so unsightly, trashy even. And while I was very different from my brother anyway, I’ve always felt I shouldn’t do to myself anything that might potentially diminish my appeal in the eyes of my future wife. I’m reminded here of a Season 9 episode of Seinfeld called “The Apology,” in which Jerry attempts to make a point about his girlfriend’s casual nakedness by himself parading through the apartment without any clothes, at which point she tells him, “This isn’t good naked.” Elaine later substantiates the claim by commenting that while the female body is like a work of art, “The male body is utilitarian. It’s for gettin’ around. It’s like a Jeep.” I have to agree with this Elaine’s take here. Might my hair-covered, barbarous, utilitarian form be somehow comparable to the ethereal, curvesome, statuesque glory of a woman? By no means! But still, if I don’t want it on my wife, I certainly don’t intend to put it on myself. Not that I have any desire to paint myself, even were I never to marry, which leads to my second objection.

This is a pragmatic concern and largely speculation, mind you, but it seems to me that tattoos, depending on the size, position, and number a person has chosen to get, have the potential to force perspective. For example, someone who’s “decorated” the entirety of his or her forearms might eventually come to the conclusion that job opportunities are being missed because the tats are just too conspicuous or trashy-looking in the eyes of a potential employer. And having already spent the decision to get them, the person may likely adopt whatever attitude is necessary to avoid regret, to sidestep, in other words, the recognition of any lack of judgment, foresight, or wisdom. One thing life inevitably teaches us is that maturity brings changes in our hearts and minds we would never have expected. And though it may happen all too slowly, we ourselves change throughout the course of our lives as we accrue experience. Yet, our current generation seems governed by such a proud and relativistic paradigm that to grow into a mindset that requires admission of a mistake is so unbearable that perspective can be, in a sense, forced, since the alternative to disappointment is basically total commitment to the choice and all its ramifications. In such a way, it seems like a tattoo may even cause someone to identify with a particular cultural group characterized by that perspective. The person with the decorated forearms might, for example, choose to embrace a kind of anti-establishment attitude characterized by resentment toward employers, toward those with power and authority in general, and toward the social framework that might reject their decision to tat themselves up as a polarized reaction against the understanding that their irrevocable choice might have been a mistake. But of course, they’re stuck. No matter how you might feel later on, a tattoo is a decision (albeit a physical one) you can never undo, correct, or outgrow; you have to live with it the rest of your life.

There are many advantages to being young, for sure, but there are also a great many disadvantages. Some young people have the caution to own this and try to exercise self-control despite their lack of wisdom and experience, whereas others suffer from a naïve impulsiveness and the inability to envision the long-term effects of their choices. Many young people seem to live their lives without any understanding that tomorrow will happen. This shortsightedness seems to go remarkably well with the tattoo trend. I’m not saying, mind you, that all will or should regret their decisions to tat themselves. Again, this is not a moral objection, but simply an acknowledgment of the quagmire that may likely, or at least possibly, coincide with these decisions. Unless you want some hideous scar in place of the thing, once you’ve painted the carcass, there’s really no unpainting it, not even when it is a carcass. But today’s generation seems to make decisions so recklessly and with such a lack of caution or self-restraint, simultaneously demanding the rest of society forego all criticism, fully espouse their choices, and not “judge” them. Fair enough. I try not to judge a book by its cover, especially when the book is a person, and particularly since appearances are often deceiving. But you know, they’re still the first thing we see. And I freely admit to being human, so a book with an uninteresting, off-putting, or unattractive cover is admittedly less likely to draw my interest and cause me to pull it off the shelf and begin to read. On a romantic level, this is the advantage an “unpainted” woman has with me. And of course, friendship or otherwise, it seems like life tends to put us in the same room with people rather like ourselves. So, I have a sneaking suspicion my future wife will understand. Someone who’s painted the carcass is simply in a different room, I suppose. The problem is, if how we look even partially defines us, then socially speaking, it’s a room you can never really leave. I’ve already stated my position on defining oneself through spirit, intellect, and action, as opposed to appearance. Don’t want to be judged by how you look? Start by, yourself, really believing you aren't defined that way. Then see if you still need the ink.

On Synergy and Sound

2009-07-26T01:13:00.000-07:00

My name is Chris, and I have an addiction, not to alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, opiates, or prescription pharmaceuticals, but to music. The shaking of air as melody, harmony, and rhythm is one of the primary ways in which I experience the divine, a portal through which to glimpse the eternal; music stimulates my imagination almost instantly and speaks to that part of my spirit that dreams of heaven. And in this age of information, how fortunate that we should enjoy the ability to have music digitally enshrined in compact discs, iPods, and other media that allow for perennial accessibility with almost no generation loss. And yet, while media such as the commercial record, or album, have entered a period of either ensuing or latent obsolescence, I still buy compact discs and tend to associate songs, tracks, and larger works of music with those collections. Perhaps a phrase such as “top five albums” makes no sense to today’s fifteen-year-old, but to those of us who still remember the era of vinyl and cassette tape, it still has some relevance, and the album to which I now refer is possibly among my top five, or at least, ranking alongside triumphs like U2's The Joshua Tree and a dearly-loved collection of Vince Guaraldi tunes recorded by George Winston called Linus and Lucy, it is certainly a favorite. This collection of piano concertos is among the first classical music CDs I ever owned, and it holds an important place in my heart not just because these works profoundly impacted the development of my musical and artistic sensibilities, but also because of the time of life during which I discovered and first loved them. This is absolute music at its best, music in the abstract but with a strong potential to trigger the imagination and have a serious emotional impact on the listener. Aside from the fact that all three pieces are concertos for piano and orchestra, which traditionally consist of various dialogues between the soloist and the orchestra, interludes for the pianist alone (known as cadenzas), and tutti passages for the ensemble, the concertos themselves are connected by a common tonal universe, a stylistic fusion that characterizes the album’s entire 73 minutes, lending further sensibility to treating it as an aesthetic whole.

The disc is a rerelease of material recorded in 1972, with the first two concertos performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Eugene Ormandy, who led the orchestra, throughout the 1950s and 60s, in solid recordings of much of the orchestral repertoire, and the last concerto performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under Pierre Boulez, who is still actively conducting and recording. The one constant is the soloist, the French pianist and conductor Philippe Entremont, who made a number of well-received recordings with Ormandy and even performed with the legendary conductor at his debut with the orchestra in 1956. And yet, despite the age of these recordings, the sound quality and the performances are quite good. There are certainly those who criticized Entremont’s interpretations, and I don’t claim to be an expert by any means. But I will say that I’ve heard all of these concertos performed by a number of other ensembles, conductors, and soloists, and to my admittedly untrained ear, none have been as satisfying as what are on this disc. Of course, that could simply be my own sentimental attachment to the subtleties of these performances. I’m sure that’s it, actually. Even so, I feel confident in saying that these are exceptional recordings of these works. Amazingly, despite the decline in classical music sales and the sizing down of classical music stock in stores during the last several years, this Sony reissue can still be ordered new through a variety of online vendors, including Amazon.com. Not sure how much longer that will be the case, but for now, it’s still available.

The cover shows a detail from Composition with Pouring, painted by Jackson Pollock in 1943. Of course, Pollock’s work seems a fitting complement to the musical locales depicted here in that it evokes an abstract and other-worldly quality that bleeds, at the same time, a variety of urban associations, providing a graphic or imagistic referent to the sonic “cityscape” we encounter as the album unfolds. It begins with a precocious achievement by the composer George Gershwin, whose contributions to the concert literature have the distinction of being the first to so deliciously infuse classical forms with the flavor of perhaps the only uniquely American art form—jazz. And in that synergy lies the character that unifies these three concertos. At the age of 17, as I journeyed the 73 minutes of this magnificent triptych, it generated in my mind a redolent tapestry of images and memories, an acoustic asylum to which I would retreat, lying on my bed at home, trying to transcend the petty fears and humiliations of adolescence, or slouching down in a bus seat with headphones on, riding home from a field show with the Simi High Marching Band. It became to me a world not only of solace and contemplation, but also of wonder, as I lounged at the shores of those lush interludes and gorgeous cadenzas, like a weary traveler warming his feet at a friendly hearth.

The Concerto in F is Gershwin’s prodigious contribution to the literature of the piano concerto. It is not a work of jazz. Rather, it is uniquely Gershwin, drawing upon the tonality and many of the improvisatory principles of jazz, but invoking the classical principles that govern thematic development and framed in the classical sonata form. A similar accomplishment was achieved in the late 1970s by the rock band The Police, who found a wholly original voice—amidst the burgeoning New Wave and synthpop of the 80s—by fusing so adeptly and so seamlessly the stylistic legacies of punk and reggae. In fact, their second studio album was aptly titled Regatta de Blanc, or “White Reggae.” The result was a sound that could only be The Police. But what Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copland did was braved single-handedly by George Gershwin, whose Concerto in F rivals any concerto of the Classical or Romantic eras. With no formal training in music theory, composition, or orchestration, he composed the concerto at the request of the conductor Walter Damrocsh, who had heard Gershwin premiere his Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924.

The first movement begins bombastically with a four-note theme for timpani and a series of energetic phrases for woodwinds and percussion, followed quickly by an opening theme that, in typical Gershwin fashion, has the delicious flavor of car horns on a city street. What unfolds beyond these rousing and vehement passages is a world that truly turns the classical genre on its jazz-infused ear. And to a 17-year-old thirsty for something genuinely unique, listening to this infectious tonal synergy on a little Sony Walkman, as the peers around me pondered the rock phenomena of the early 90s (Primus, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and so forth), was a veritable sanctum of the mind, an alternative, if you will, to what seemed so comparatively unimaginative about modern music, which still had not been able to transport me in the way I had suddenly been by the music on this disc, of which the Concerto forms a thrilling and dynamic first half.

The landscape of the central movement is one of nostalgic contemplation. I don’t think nostalgia was ever so potent as when I was a teenager, though this perhaps makes sense given the precipice of sudden self-awareness and impending maturity faced by an adolescent. I think the blues-infused crooning of the passages for solo trumpet that wind through this movement were like a sanctuary where I felt not only the sense of escape for which an angst-ridden teen is so eager, but also a sense of solace and melancholic understanding. The trumpet itself felt like a friend imparting its own sweet tale of sadness that had the effect of making mine feel somehow more bearable. I would imagine myself standing at a window, looking down on some bustling urban thoroughfare, reflecting on the hesitations and infatuations that plague the life of a high school boy like me.

The concerto concludes with an exhilarating rondo that recapitulates many of the themes from the previous two movements. In the final pages of the work, this melodic reunion becomes a palpable celebration. The coda is stirring and lofty, filled with shimmering chords from each section of the orchestra, after which the piano delivers a swaggering ascent before a crescendo of the aforementioned chords are swallowed by a satisfying flourish of cymbals, snare, and bass drum.

The slightly longer second half of this disc is occupied by the resplendent and poignant music of French composer Maurice Ravel, who is perhaps best known for his balletic, 15-minute, Spanish-themed crescendo known as Bolero. In fact, the tastes and temperatures of Spanish culture infuse the majority of his popular works, which makes these two jazz-tinged concertos not only a remarkable counterpoint to the rest of his output, but also excellent companion pieces to the spirited Gershwin concerto. Ravel wrote two piano concertos, both toward the end of his life and around the same period, from 1929 to 1931. His Concerto in G could almost be considered a large-scale chamber work. And since Ravel was primarily a miniaturist, the fact that both concertos are of short duration is not surprising. But what I discovered was that every minute of both concertos is densely packed, evoking a rich tapestry of textures and emotions. In truth, I don’t believe Ravel ever wrote anything so inspired as these two concertos, occasionally exotic, frequently heartfelt, always unique. In fact, the Ravel concertos seem to be even more synergistic than the Concerto in F, which relies heavily on the tonal rhetoric of jazz, which Gershwin, in many ways, simply adopted and filtered through his own unique voice. By contrast, with the Concerto in G and the Concerto for the Left Hand, Ravel’s use of jazz rhythms and harmonies is less prevalent, encompassed within the larger circle of device and invention from which he drew his artistic fluency, producing music that seems to ignore any traditional mood. Rather Ravel borrows deftly from a variety of traditions to give us something of almost incomparable flavor, making the tone somewhat elusive, but always intriguing. I felt as if I had entered a world of profound ingenuity and emotional breadth, a space of being that had never been described by any artistic tradition and was now being revealed in the sounds that had suddenly traversed the 61 years between Ravel’s pen and my ears.

Like Gershwin’s concerto, the Concerto in G follows a classical plan, with the bookending of two quick movements around a thoughtful and tender central adagio. In fact, Ravel claimed to have composed the concerto in the spirit of quintessentially classical composers such as Mozart or Saint-Saens. He asserted once, “Indeed, I take the view that the music of a concerto can very well be cheerful and brilliant and does not have to lay claim to profundity or aim at dramatic effect” (Kraemer, 6). And yet, the concerto goes well beyond the expressive qualities of classicism. From the very outset, Ravel imparts an almost dizzying parade of Basque-themed passages—not the least bit surprising given the character of his other oeuvre—punctuated so tastefully by alternation of temperate reflections and vibrant exclamations for piano and instruments from various sections of the orchestra (including a delicious, swaggering theme for brass and woodblock, which, I remember, my dad found just too cool for words) that reveal his natural fluency with the language of jazz and his ability to invoke its languid and cavalier tenors in a way that is wholly distinct from the rhetoric of that language. This is one of those rare cases in which a composer manages to invoke a very specific genre in a way that is stylistically unique, consistently reflecting his own musical sensibilities. It doesn’t sound like a jazz piece. Rather the jazz motifs are interwoven with the rest of the musical narrative in a way that is characteristically Ravel, consistently defying classification, at least in terms of the tonal realm inhabited by the piece. Ravel was, of course, a masterful and ingenious orchestrator, and I believe one of the reasons this concerto holds such a special place in my heart is because of his exquisite use of percussion (my instrument(s) of choice since I was 12). Indeed, he seems to draw heavily and imaginatively on the percussive qualities of the piano itself throughout.

The second movement is one of the loveliest and most tender reveries in all of the literature for piano, which was quite a painstaking endeavor for Ravel, who tried to model the movement after the larghetto of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. The beauty is palpable as the piano’s melodic lines wind like garland about the accompaniment, which basically constitutes an enormously slow waltz, though the listener is unlikely to hear it over the hushed mood Ravel has created through the juxtaposition.

The third movement is a vigorous presto that revives many of the same devices from the first movement, including a host of choruses and glissandi, from just about every section of the orchestra, that playfully imitate chords and choruses characteristic of the Big Band music of the time. The themes and percussive dialogues between instruments culminate in an exuberant and witty close to the piece.

The Concerto for the Left Hand is the crown jewel of this disc, a single-movement work full of modulations in tempo and key. Darker and more confessional than its sibling concerto, it is certainly, in my opinion, the most wonderful music Ravel ever wrote. In its 18-and-a-half minutes, he takes the listener on one of the most diverse, most personal, most evocative journeys in all of music. Even more, he accomplished sublimity in a way that no composer had ever done before. The concerto was commissioned by and written for the famed Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during the First World War. Several composers wrote one-handed works for Wittgenstein, though it is generally agreed that none did so with such imagination like Ravel. Remarkably, he disguised Wittgenstein’s use of a single hand and created the illusion of a two-handed performance through ingeniously expressive writing that requires incredible endurance on the part of the soloist.

The concerto begins with a cryptic collage of arpeggios in the double basses that has the wondrous ambiguity of not only revealing a great deal of thematic material, but also the meditative illusion that the orchestra is still tuning. When the piano finally enters, it develops a series of deep and resonant melodic lines, a fluid and intricate sarabande any listener could hardly guess were being played with a single hand. From this point, the concerto moves organically through a variety of moods and rhythmic spectra, at times wild, at others subdued, wherein the jazz tonality is explored to such a colorful and startlingly alien degree that to me, the concerto seems to encompass a musical category all its own, truly transcending genre and drawing out of me images and emotions with no discernable connection to any memory or experience. And yet, this place of the imagination is rather vivid, and the richness of its design is still as intimidating and awe-inspiring as when I first heard it half my life ago. It produces in me the feeling of entering a variety of different rooms in a strange and beautiful dwelling, a landscape of sound in which I feel somehow a foreigner and somehow at home. A fanfare of almost Spanish character leads to an exquisite and plaintive section for piano and woodwinds. This builds to an abrupt transition to the faster central section, during which a contagious scherzo unfolds, and a cleverly disguised Blues scale soon reveals its jazzy roots, leading up to a series of wave-like, majestic fanfares, punctuated by dark trills in the piano. This spills into the concerto’s final section, an absolutely gorgeous lento. In these transcendent final moments before the buoyant conclusion, an expansive and meditative delirium of lower-register notes are unraveled by the piano, during which I feel as if wandering a great hall—the last room of this aberrant and astounding journey—in which I imagine grand columns built by a series of dark yet redolent textures in the piano’s lower octaves, sweetly buttressed by the hesitant accompaniment of the orchestra. Amidst this grandeur, my soul pauses, awestruck, given over to every note. Truthfully, if I hadn’t seen it performed live some years later by the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, I might never have believed that those passages could be accomplished with a single hand.

There is nothing like this concerto. It is a masterpiece, a nonpareil tour through a ghostly realm of mysterious joys and sorrows. If one piece of classical music ever gave me the sense of being carried through an intimate and mystical region of the heart by every single note, it is Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. At 17, I felt like a musical pilgrim, whose spirit was dwelling somewhere new and uninhabited, majestic and mystical. After the delicate pantheon of textures in the piano that pervades the final minutes of the piece, the glorious coda arrives in giant orchestral bursts, like plumes of sonic light, after which the brass and cymbals spiral upward, and the concerto disappears. My dad loved that ending, I remember, just loved it. I can recall listening to the concerto with him on a couple of different occasions when he reversed that last track a few seconds on the CD player just for an encore of the ending, and did it two or three times, I believe, almost as if he were having seconds and thirds of some delicious candy. That’s probably where I got it from. I love that he did that. I love that memory of him.

When I first began this entry, I don’t think I fully realized what I was trying to tackle. I certainly know I didn’t realize how big a task it would be to capture the excellence of this album alongside the images, feelings, and associations it inspired in me. Truthfully, this disc is far more vast and rich than I could ever capture and its impact too significant to be done justice in just a few pages of writing. I realize only now that some images and memories live in the heart like secrets, never hoping to be shared or fully understood by another person. In retrospect, I’m really unable to tell if what makes this album so resonant to me is due to the music itself or simply because of the emotional maturity I was lacking when I first encountered it, the heightened sensitivity of youth and lack of experience that makes it difficult to process feelings within a broader frame of reference, a state that would naturally cause music to feel even more impactful to one’s spirit than in later life. Likely, it is both, I imagine. Regardless, however, in the wasteland of my adolescence, I was moved beyond words, in astounding admiration of both Gershwin and Ravel, two masters whose synergistic creativity left me awestruck by the sheer breadth and cohesive perfection of the pairing. It still does. And God willing, may it always.

Work Cited

Kraemer, Uwe (translated by Gery Bramall). Gershwin/Ravel: Piano Concertos Entremont liner notes. Sony Classical, 1990.

The Discipline of Dentistry

2009-06-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

In the first act of the macabre rock musical Little Shop of Horrors, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman inserted one of off-Broadway’s most side-splitting numbers in which the character Orin Scrivello begins by revealing the sadistic childhood thrills that led his mother to believe him uniquely suited for maybe the most contemptible of all professions, the mad science, civilization’s most abject excuse for personhood. In short, he became a dentist. Specifically, he sings of his “talent for causing things pain,” and despite his patients’ distress, they “pay him to be inhumane.” Seriously, the song is hilarity itself, and highlights a cultural aversion too common for a single ounce of the satire to be misunderstood. Somehow everyone gets the joke. And why? Because all dentists are sadists, of course. Is it even a true satire to begin with, or merely an exaggerated refraction of the truth? In light of my own blatant love of satire, let me offer that it is most likely just an accusatorial projection of a culture-wide phobia. I know few people who don’t respond to the notion of going to the dentist with some anxiety, while some go aquiver with outright fear at the mere thought of a dental chair or dental instruments, with the dentist a veritable Vincent Price or Bela Lugosi, and but for a few gargoyles, some cobwebbing, and a creak in the door, the office might make a fair House of Wax or Dracula's castle, or better yet, a Frankenstein's laboratory. (Note to self: avoid any dental exam room with giant electrical coils and a family of Erlenmeyer flasks.) Honestly now, is any caretaker of human health viewed with greater suspicion of being secretly mad or of taking some hidden pleasure in dispensing trauma or relishing, in the deepest antechambers of his heart, the freakish horror his work engenders? What makes dentists so cheerful anyway? When they walk in the room, squat down on that tiny swiveling barstool, and smile from ear to ear, what dark and sinister pleasure is lurking in the mind whose education required such a sober interest in the extractor or its maniacal cousin the drill?

But all joking aside, I can only imagine the kind of personality that can study a dental extractor with total sincerity and then attempt its use unfettered by even the slightest empathetic qualm. It definitely takes a certain kind of person to be a dentist, I think. But imagine, for a moment, a world without that person. The first order of business is survival, of course, and beyond the basic requirements of safety and shelter, the most immediate need is the consumption of food and water. So, beyond the expertise of a physician who ensures general health, what could be more essential than the work of the dentist, who ensures the health of the mouth and teeth so that eating is even possible? And yet, who is more reviled in the provision of health care? Who commands the hairs on the back of the neck or the fluids of the stomach like the dentist, whose mere presence is quite enough to tip the balance of the mind and stir its flavors of tension and distress to the fore?

Despite my own personal aversion, however, I must admit that the greater part of me understands the dentist’s situation, because my profession is often regarded with similar repugnance, as the education field seems to have a cultural equivalent, its own dentist of sorts. Not the principal, nor the school secretary, the truancy officer, or yard duty. Not the requisitely androgynous female gym teacher nor the vice principal who stalks the halls and restrooms hunting contraband. No, it is the math teacher. Who else? No other role in the American high school is susceptible to such pandemic scorn. Like the dentist, math teachers are often seen through a lens of projected menace and sinister intent, as if taking some quiet delight in the agony and frustration induced by their subject. And yet, truth be told, I’ve impressed upon my students many times that, despite the importance of math, nothing they learn in school is more important than the ability to read and write. So, if we analogize medicine with pedagogy, I believe the English teacher might best be seen as the general practitioner, who provides the most vital basis for quality of life. The other members of the faculty have their respective specialties by which they might easily correlate with various specialists, but the math teacher is certainly the dentist. And the reason is simple, for what subject is more widely regarded with distaste or outright contempt than mathematics? Throughout my adult life, a new acquaintance, once given the news of my profession, frequently utters some unmistakable brand of sneer, sigh, or groan. Regardless of people’s aptitudes, it is rarely met with approval or enthusiasm. The most a good math teacher can hope for, much of the time, is objective tolerance.

I’m reminded of a season eight episode of Seinfeld called “The Yada Yada” in which Jerry’s infuriation at dentist Tim Whatley’s conversion to Judaism solely to expand his comedic repertoire leads to a hilarious counterpoint in which Jerry himself is labeled by Kramer et al. as an “anti-dentite.” What would, then, be apropos to describe the aspersive animosity leveled at math teachers, who don’t actually have their own schools, as dentists do? Are we the objects of rabid “anti-calculism”? Whatever the invective, a deep-rooted prejudice seems to lurk in the human heart. Algebra, geometry, and trigonometry all seem to offer satisfactory comparisons to the bloodletting of a root canal or tooth extraction, with all their associated terror. The hysterical phobia of drilling, crown and filling replacement, and even the basic cleaning and scraping of a hygienist seem on equal footing with the efforts of a math teacher trying to impart order of operations, the factoring of polynomials, or the properties of logarithmic and exponential functions. Our periodontal probe, dental syringe, bite block (or “mouth prop”), and host of dental burs that adorn the drill are the likes of equations, proofs, word problems, formulas, set theory, vectors, limits, graphs, charts, rates of change, complex numbers, and the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. For some, the mere mention of math brings an immediate shudder, for others, an acute attack of nausea. I admit to have sensed, at times, in the eyes of my students, the very bedlam of mind that consumed Jimmy Stewart’s character and was so innovatively captured through the use of the dolly zoom in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Something about the study of geometric proof or matrices and determinants makes one feel as if standing at the edge of some great abyss. And like the occupant of a dental chair, the student of mathematics often feels like a hopeless acrophobic stretched above the abyss by a thin and feeble thread. And the math teacher begins to feel that all he or she need do is utter some demented chuckle, and the lunacy conveyed would be nothing more than any student might otherwise expect.

But you know, the truth is that people don’t like dentists because they don’t like dentistry, and math teachers are often disliked for the same reason. Every good math teacher, like every good dentist, must eventually come to terms with this antipathy. People object to math, and so, as the agent of its delivery, the math teacher naturally incurs a comparable contempt. The discipline of the profession, then, involves not only doing your job well, but also accepting the stigma of being characteristically linked to something so widely disliked. And why is it so disliked? Well…

Math is tremendously difficult, because our minds are so contextualized, which is why it’s typically taught by example. And yet, despite any catalogue of examples and creative teaching methods, like caretakers chasing medicine with a spoonful of sugar, at the end of the day, we’re trying to give students something that’s just very hard to swallow. The challenge, then, is to stabilize the delivery so that students don’t get so frustrated that they forfeit the endurance necessary to develop good critical thinking and problem solving skills. A great part of the challenge of mathematics is to cultivate a spirit of risk-taking and the ability to persevere despite repeated failure. Seriously, math is a head game. It’s a trip. It’s hard enough to train one’s mind to think objectively, and objectivity is never so pure as in the use of logic. Most people tend to view math as being all about numbers, and they get frustrated when asked to embrace the abstraction of variables or the symbols that represent complex thoughts and operations. Actually, while math is surely the language of science and technology, however it may be applied, principally, it is a science in itself, the science of logic, to be exact, a study of pure thought. It is, in many ways, the only universal language, and despite its applicability and capacity for contextualization, it is essentially abstract. And how better to demonstrate pure thought than through the use of symbols and the exploration of quantity? The properties of numbers and arithmetic, then, become the fundamental vocabulary of this study, which is every bit an exploratory science as chemistry, biology, or physics. Unlike these sciences, however, which rely on observation and experimentation to unfold, the potential to expand our understanding of logic lies solely in the realm of the mind. In mathematics, we are asked to think on a level so universally unfettered by context, setting, and experience, that the brain almost starts to run in circles, grasping wildly for a frame of reference it can’t find. In the nakedness of this experience, the attempt to learn this thought science tries our intellectual endurance like no other academic discipline. Other subjects—even the all-important English—don’t even come close, really. To quote my colleague Sally Roberts, “I’m an English teacher. I draw connections between things that aren’t related.” She was joking of course, but the humor points to the occasionally strained capacity for objectivity in the literary curriculum, beyond, of course, the mechanics of grammar and reliance upon a notable canon of widely accepted interpretations of the reading assignments. For example, Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets are often referred to in academic circles as the “procreation sonnets,” since they seem to recommend marriage and family to an unknown male character as an affront to the onslaught of time. And yet, with sufficient evidence from the sonnets, one might reasonably contradict this claim. You might be thought ridiculous by much of the academic community, but you might still survive as a student of English. You can’t do that in math. Configured, as it is, on the basis of precision, as opposed to interpretation, it’s just too rigorously defined. And because logic is so counterintuitive to the contextualized nature of human thought, it stretches us beyond any mental comfort zone in which we tend to live.

So why teach math? What draws a teacher to embrace such a harrowing discipline? Any educator will tell you that a good teacher doesn’t merely have a passion for his or her subject matter, but also loves to work with young people. So, to be a math teacher, you have to like math, and you have to like kids. And you have to be okay as the agent of something most kids tend not to like. What made me do it, then? What made me join this ill-received profession? Two things, really: Chuck Gustafson and the joy of being a learner myself. Let’s start with Chuck (or "Mr. Gus," as many of his students affectionately referred to him), who was my teacher for geometry in tenth grade as well as algebra 2 in eleventh. He wasn’t just a good math teacher. He inspired me, particularly through the clarity of thought and simplicity with which he uncovered a variety of complex mathematical ideas. Furthermore, he had the uncanny ability to blend this task with his own captivating brand of storytelling, which had the effect of making the curriculum even more accessible. I loved his classes, and I loved him. So when, in my mid-twenties, it came time to change careers and I considered teaching math, the iconic impression of Mr. Gus fed into my aspirations the requisite heroism, a brand of integrity, charisma, and success I might at least seek to emulate. What’s more, a few years later, I actually had the opportunity to embrace him as a colleague! When one of the Geometry teachers at my school went on maternity leave, Mr. Gus, at the recommendation of several staff and faculty members (myself included, of course), stepped into the position as a long-term sub for the remainder of the semester. Not only that, but I had shared rooms with the teacher he replaced. So, for a short time, I enjoyed the honor of teaching the same subject at the same school and sharing the same room as the man who had largely inspired the whole course of my career. It was a real treat, and I’ve always been thankful for such a rare blessing.

The second reason for my joining the ranks of those who teach math was, as I’ve stated, my own personal love of learning. Though few people seem to understand this connection, I found that being a better student of math made me, in turn, a better student of English—literature and poetry being among my greatest passions. Something about the mystique of math as insurmountable by so many of my peers (my own brother included, whose opinion fed this mystique considerably) pushed me to want to excel in it. And throughout my high school and college careers, I don’t believe I put so much time into any subject as I did mathematics. I often tell my students, I know I excelled at math not primarily due to a natural aptitude, but because I wanted so badly to understand what so many others found intellectually confounding. In truth, I wasn’t half so intuitive as I was driven, and I often make a point of stressing to my students that they’re looking at someone who put in the hours himself, who put the pencil to the paper and sweated the whole thing out for years and years, as opposed to someone who found it laughably easy and has no idea what it’s like to be in their shoes, wrestling night after night with something that seems repeatedly and characteristically elusive. And so, as I wrestled my own way through definitions, theorems, and properties, I began to see that applying these principles correctly required a complete understanding of every word and without reference to unnecessary or unjustified assumptions. In other words, I learned to read for detail, not just for scope, and when I applied this same practice to my reading of literature and poetry, my comprehension improved considerably. The connection is especially evident in the study of geometry, the “word math,” where axiomatic thought and statement analysis are revealed as the key not only to theorem building, but also to using nearly all mathematical structures accurately and tenably.

Now, this otherwise adequate congruity between dentistry and mathematics doesn’t completely hold water. No one ever asks a dentist why they need their teeth looked after. However, students of math are very fond of begging the question “Why should I have to learn this?” or “When are we ever gonna use this in real life?” I want to acknowledge here that a great many intelligent adults aren’t immune to such questions. Many, in fact, are very fond of criticizing the school systems for insisting on a curriculum that so many kids “don’t need.” To be fair, when asked these questions, as I have been numerous times in the classroom, I do entertain them long enough to answer clearly and honestly, which is to say just this: “I don’t know. I really don’t know how or when you’ll have to use this in your life, because I have no idea what you’ll do with your life. And furthermore, neither do you, for the most part.” And this is principally true. What we plan for ourselves in our youth is most always challenged and often transformed by maturity and experience. What students need to understand is that until college, school is not about specialization or fulfillment. The high school student is getting a classical education, a tour of the disciplines that provides them the foundations of cultural fluency, and whether they like it or not, math greatly expands their understanding of the world in which they live. However, in return for the concession of time spent addressing those questions, I always insist my students entertain my own response question, which is this: What makes you think that the only things worth knowing are those that benefit you personally? In other words, ask yourself why you’re asking the question to begin with, and you’ll quickly realize that it’s born out of a cultural climate that stresses personal fulfillment over community and progress, both of which depend heavily on the scope of one’s understanding about the world. It is deeply bred into our minds, whether we realize it or not, that a selfish devotion to our personal prosperity is exalted over every other potential motivation. And it is the responsibility of educators to deal with this as well.

Hence, the final prospect of an already arduous profession is convincing the student of the value of virtuous thought: charity; compassion; understanding; and the transformative joy and empowerment of learning, even learning things that don’t necessarily increase the size of your wallet. This is the hardest lesson to learn, and surely the most difficult to teach. And although I would all my students had the joy that brought me to be their teacher in the first place, were it part of my job to be liked, I should feel defeated the majority of the time. A dentist’s work has a conspicuous benefit, as clear to see as the benefit of one's next meal. And yet, how well do we value the nourishment of the mind and the spirit? What of the amplified perspective and potential for community and growth in a newly discovered idea? This is true wealth, personal and corporate; the splendor of civilization; and a liability of every teacher.

Twelve Angry Words

2009-05-24T00:54:00.000-07:00

As the current idiomatic heritage is passed to posterity, there seems a strong tendency not only to withhold correction, but also to bestow complete approbation and to characterize a blunder in speech as simply a respectable mode of expression or reflection of individuality, as opposed to a true, genuine, and wholly incorrect screw-up. The blooper reel of the human mind is certainly full of these, and for sure, there’s no shame in that, though I fear certain words may not survive the massacre of language that occurs today with alarmingly rare objection. In the years since I came of age and took to heart the subtleties of accurate usage, the beauty of language, and the true eloquence revealed by those who craft their manner of expression with care and conscience, these are a few of the words that have stood out to me (or perhaps whose ruin has just left me personally the most peevish), twelve with good reason to be irate, for they are the orphaned and abused, living in the foxholes of the English lexicon. They are linguistic piñatas, continually thrashed in the mosh pit of mental laziness by members of nearly every social stratum. Perhaps I put too much faith in scholarship, but even intelligent, learned professionals continually mispronounce these words. What’s more, I’m not speaking of dialectic errors, as with ask—maybe the most mispronounced word in the English language, most often relegated to “aks” in the parlance of whole cultural strata. Nor am I referring to slang or word slurring, as with “gonna” or “ain’t.” No, the words to which I refer are the mutated scandals of both conversation and elocution, repeatedly bastardized even by well-read people who should know better. And so, in the hope that some who visit the ideas presented here may seek to refrain from committing such verbal mutilation, or as my dad used to say, “murdering the Queen’s English,” and, like a musician who plays a wrong note loudly, embarrassing themselves by uttering falsity and asserting ignorance with caustic boldness, consider the following a kind of abbreviated language lesson, a gift to those who care to sound less ignorant in their discourse and to use these words accurately, in all their linguistic glory. Okay, maybe that’s romanticizing the issue a bit. But if this little treatise can provide the confidence and projection of intelligence and knowledge, and thus the modicum of leverage, needed to convince, for instance, a potential employer of your merit or to persuade an audience of the veracity of your viewpoint, then perhaps my efforts here are not too ridiculous. Nor futile.

Across

Let’s start with the suffix –ed, which means “having,” and which is often dropped from participles that actually need it, as sometimes happens with barbed wire. Not sure what “barb wire” is, but barring the notion that the human tongue is simply too lazy to hit the alveolar ridge just behind the upper front teeth, the problem likely has to do with one’s inability to distinguish the preposition across from the past tense of cross. Regardless, there is actually no such word in the English language as “acrossed,” though you would never know it to listen to many modern conversations.

Cavalry

Let’s just say, the “calvary” doesn’t come to save anyone, nor was Jesus crucified at “Cavalry.” Two distinct words, two distinct meanings. However, if you like, savlation was won at Calvary, and the cavalry might arrive in time to spare you either a horrible death or years of salvery.

Drown

Remember –ed? Well there’s sure no blaming this one on a semantic conundrum like across versus crossed. The bottom line: transitive or intransitive, drown is a verb, and drowned is its past tense and past participle, as in, Ophelia drowned, and thus, she is a drowned woman. But yeah, sorry, no one in the here and now is ever going to “drowned,” at least not in English.

Espresso

[Sigh] Seriously, this word really takes it in the shorts. I would almost not be surprised if blatant ignorance and sheer pandemic tenacity of misuse don’t eventually give way to a new spelling. However, until Webster, Oxford, and American Heritage decide to capitulate and defer to every broker, beach bunny, and soccer mom who doesn’t know what a shot of really strong coffee is, sorry, but how you “espress” yourself doesn’t make “expresso” anything at all. Even so, not sure, at this point, if we can excape it.

Et cetera

Okay, I admit, this one drives me absolutely bonkers, probably more so than the rest, because it seems like everyone (white and blue collar alike) wants to say “eksetera,” and I think I wince, to some degree, just about every time I hear it. So here you go. Two Latin words: et (and) cetera (so forth). Come on, Yul Brynner could do it. As if “expresso” weren’t bad enough, what makes us put the voiceless velar plosive where it doesn’t belong? The consonant sound [k] is voiceless because the voice box doesn’t vibrate, velar because the back of the tongue strikes the soft palate, and plosive because it results from the compression of air in the throat. Honestly, I don’t see what makes it the vernacular magnet it seems to be. There are plenty of consonant sounds far easier to make that aren’t as widely overused. [m] and /v/ have feelings, too. I suppose many prefer to grab their understanding and subtleties of phrasing by ear than through actual reading or study. Then again, I don’t see how you could read this word as many times as you’re like to in the course of a lifetime and take no notice of how it’s spelled. It’s actually quite phonetic, and even the abbreviation etc. shows the c (not even the voiceless velar plosive, but rather the voiceless postalveolar fricative /s/) after the t. Oh well, Latin frequently seems to get the shaft, as with i.e. (meaning id est, or “in other words”), which is constantly confused with another abbreviated Latin phrase, exempli gratia (meaning “for example”), i.e., e.g. Okay, I’m probably the only one who finds that funny. Moving on…

February

Poor [r] is the surely forgotten stepchild of the second calendar month. It seems the alveolar trill just can’t get a break. In everyday use, it’s almost always dropped by a vast majority who want to call these twenty-eight days “feb-yew-ery.” Perhaps two [r]’s connected by two distinct vowel sounds is just too much effort for the ordinary, hard-working, college-educated American. Kind of like the pile of dishes that build up in the kitchen sink, ‘cause the dishwasher that lies anywhere from two to three feet away is just too much trouble for the average joe who’s got a three-hour date with his sofa. Yes, better to ignore ten seconds of chore-dom and live in a nonexistent month. Come on, people!

Height

Contrary to popular belief, no medical consent form, application, or questionnaire ever asked for one’s “heighth,” a form that doesn’t exist in any English dictionary on the face of the earth, probably because… hmm, let’s see… it’s not a word. What’s rather puzzling, however, is that no one ever claims to provide their height and “weighth.” Not sure why the voiceless dental fricative diphthong th is so tenacious here and not there. Maybe it has something to do with the contrast between cardinal numbers and ordinal ranking, as with eight and eighth. And while we’re on the subject, in all seriousness, is there any word with a crazier intersection of consonant sounds than twelfth, which somehow seems to skip through conversations almost unilaterally unscathed? At any rate, given the frequency with which the dipthong asserts itself in this case, I see no end in sighth.

Mischievous

I would say this word lives up to its meaning, but seriously, what’s so hard? Time and again, I hear people trying to say it, but instead, using some unearthly form involving a fourth syllable. It’s so easy, too. With a root like mischief, simply change f to v and tack on an –ous, which of course means “possessing” or “full of.” This is one of the most bizarre of the twelve, because more than any other, I’ve heard a variety of educated people defend what is actually erroneous and insist with total certainty that the correct pronunciation is, in fact, “mischievious.” I guess it really is. How a third i ever got inserted into this word is a phenomenon, to be sure, but even more strange is the fact that so many otherwise well-spoken individuals should so rigorously defend a pronunciation that’s entirely wrong. One would think it more common to drop syllables than to add them when superfluious.

Nuclear

I read somewhere that the British and the Australians find the American tendency to mispronounce this word terribly quaint. Funny how so many of us feel the same way about their accents. Might that be considered a kind of cultural commerce? I’d like to think we have more to warrant regard than some ridiculous and perfectly avertable faux pas. From the President of the United States to vagrants, actors, and schoolteachers, the enemies of this word are many, and for reasons that must transcend simple word slurring in everyday conversation. Indeed, many seem convinced of a “nuculus” at the heart of this word. Its nucleus, however, is at the heart of the matter. Hehe… Oh come on, that was funny. Sort of.

Realtor

One question: what’s a “realator”? Perhaps I can answer that myself. It is a superfluious peresistance of vowowel sounds or sylyllables that people find so irresistabable, they feel an overwhelaming compulsion to rerepeat them. And I guess it’s not surprising to find the inserted sound a schwa (<ə>), probably the most frequently used English vowel sound. Now, for sure, the rules that govern the English language are a frustratingly bizarre hodge-podge of spelling and pronunciation, but what leaves us so hog-tied by the phonetically simple? Better to talk like Cro-Magnon than grabab a cluey?

Regardless

I’m guessing here, but maybe people are thinking of irrelevant or irrespective of when they attempt to say this word, but instead, add –ir where it ends up communicating precisely what they don’t mean. The suffix –less, of course, covers the fact that the speaker means “without regard.” Now, adding an –ir, meaning “not,” simply expresses “not without regard,” which effectively turns the meaning into “with regard.” This is what we refer to in semantics as a double negative. Of course, there are plenty of them in the Romance languages, but native English speakers unfortunately have no excuse.

Sherbet

The composer Franz Schubert was largely unknown in his lifetime and heard precious few of his large-scale compositions actually performed. Maybe this is one of God’s little restitutions, His way of making at least the English-speaking populace veer dramatically close to saying Schubert’s name, though I’d rather they gave his music a chance and stopped using some bastard version of his name to order ice cream made without milk. Actually, it’s made from sweetened water mixed with iced juice or frozen puree. With very little air whipped into it, unlike ice cream, it's basically just another dessert that happens to share a similar temperature. The French call it sorbet, but the origin is a Turkish word derived from the Arabic for “drink” or “juice,” none of which contain a second r. Oh well, if the alveolar trill is the forgotten stepchild of February, it’s certainly the favorite son of “sherbert.” I will say, though I’m sure people aren’t actually confusing Schubert with a frozen dessert, his music is pretty flippin’ sweet.

The annals of linguistic evolution are surely filled with bizarre idiomatic phenomena that led to transformations in usage and rhetoric. One might read the views expressed here and retort by claiming that these subtle variations are the building blocks of the very rules we apply so rigorously in academic discourse. Fundamentally speaking, if I use a word, and you know what I mean by it, then it’s a word, right? Languages are, in fact, built in such a way. Fair enough. But let us not fail to reflect on the cultural inertia that instigates change. For instance, many people actually despise poetry because to look up every word they don’t recognize, so as to glean the full scope of meaning embedded in such a densely packaged form of writing, is just “too much work.” On a grand scale, languages may be born in such ways, but for the individual seeking to establish and to maintain reputation and character and to cultivate relationships (professional or otherwise), this attitude has no place, except to reflect a flagrant disregard for accuracy, delivery, and scholarship. Now-a-days, as we stand in the shadow and liberality of postmodernism, what seems like a heightened aesthetic sensibility, a broader capacity for individual expression, can also reflect a culture of intellectual apathy. Sometimes, people seem to resist understanding in favor of convenience. Let us correct ourselves and reap the educative potential and growth inherent in such correction. In the words of that eminent linguistic referee Henry Higgins, so deliciously penned by Mr. Shaw, ours is “the language of Shakespeare, Milton, the [King James] Bible.” Should we not take care to honor such a formidable legacy by allowing some care for the manner in which we express ourselves? Lest I leave you with an overinflated impression of the importance of avoiding the aforementioned blunders, I freely admit that change itself is a thread that runs the course of history. It’s inevitable. And yet, forget for a moment the linguistic heritage previously mentioned, and let us make sure the academic and cultural heritage we pass to subsequent generations is a sensible one. People change, and language changes with them. But let us hope that the transformed idiom is not symptomatic of a decline in intellectual initiative. The problem is not that people sometimes speak incorrectly, but rather, that they sometimes don’t care, and demonstrate so little concern for how a thought is articulated. Surely there’s a difference between evolution and degeneration, the latter, exacting apprehension, and the former, a marvelous fire from which the most admirable aspects of culture are born.

Embracing the Murse

2009-04-04T15:26:00.000-07:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man, regardless of fashion sense, staunch enthusiasm for preparedness, or rigid will to ignore social convention, may not reasonably endeavor, by any acceptable standard, however alternatively framed with respect to history or tradition, to carry a bag in ordinary society, for in so doing, his appearance, mannerisms, and movement so closely resemble that of the opposite sex that the humor harvested by ridiculing him never seems to lose its flavor. In modern times, many lines can now be crossed that were, in previous eras, impassable to one or the other gender. Of course, the male practice of carrying a purse is hardly novel. And yet, in the annals of social more, there seems to have been a point at which the paraphernalia of the average guy was deemed pervasively negligible or less burdensome than that of the average gal. For me, the appeal is one of utility. As a young man, I found myself constantly forgetting things; I happen to have been “cursed” with a somewhat uncooperative memory and a mind prone to wandering, neither of which is conducive to being prepared, comfortable, or prompt. What’s more, I do admit to having a somewhat meticulous disposition. And so, the idea of having a side-kick to tote stuff around in and to keep a reasonable level of comfort in different situations has a lot of appeal. How annoying is it to have chapped lips and no lip balm, or to find yourself without earplugs in the middle of a high school assembly in a gymnasium where the chamber of cheering voices and blasting music is enough to make your eardrums bleed? And what about that supremely irritating sliver of apple rind or popcorn kernel embedded near the base of a molar, and not a strand of clean dental floss for miles? Of course, I find myself at the crossroads of convention. Were it socially acceptable for a man to carry a purse, I should be completely at ease in my partiality. But of course, there is no such convention, and as previously mentioned, derisive intolerance continues to be healthy and prevalent.

In my own life, carrying a bag inevitably summons a roll of the eyes, a shaking of the head, or both from a best friend who views it as so emasculating that as long as I bear this coquettish accoutrement purporting so authentic a semblance of womanhood, in the world of beleaguering comradeship, as they say, all bets are off, and the masculine harassment that ensues is acute, to be sure. A guy who brings along anything besides a wallet or whatever might otherwise fit in his pockets just isn’t tolerated to avoid a volley of mockery that seems to go on indefinitely from one occasion to the next. Were I to go out with a bag at my side, I believe the first words to drop from my best friend’s lips, besides the immediate tisk of disappointment, would be any of the following, marked by a distinct air of comical smugness:

“Do you need to powder your nose before we leave?"
“I’m not so sure that matches your outfit, at least not your shoes.”
“So you’re not gonna attempt to appear straight, then?”
“Hey, seriously, nice accessorizing.”
“So are there two Mrs. Moyas now, or are you still miss?”
“I don’t know which is worse, this or a fanny pack.”
“Dude, you are the next Top Model.”
“You know, you can fit a few tampons, lipstick, and your Prada wallet in something much smaller.”
“Hey what’s your favorite Bette Midler song?”
“Should we meet up later, after you get your nails done?”
“Dude, if I had known, I would’ve brought my Gucci bag and we could’ve gone to the outlets.”
“Hey, you remember that date you were telling me about? What was his name?”
“It’s good to see you aren’t ashamed of your transsexuality.”
“Hey, you didn’t tell me you were a friend of Dorothy. What else don’t I know?”
“It’s amazing how a single addition to an otherwise normal ensemble announces with total certainty, I have a vagina.”
“You know, you don’t have to be like a woman to like men.”
“I swear, if androgyny were an art, you’d be Rembrandt.”
“Dude, yer gay.”

Despite the size of the bag or however little it may resemble a lady’s purse, I find it a potent propellant to the wit of just about anyone of my acquaintance. My own mother occasionally refers to my “man-bag,” and the tone of which turn of phrase, though she may intend no injury to my pride, still seems at least moderately jocund. A close circle of my own colleagues offered the term man-purse, or murse, which calls to mind a Season 6 episode of Seinfeld called “The Doorman,” in which Kramer and Frank Costanza have their dueling portmanteaus in referring to the male-targeted support undergarment as either the “manzier” or the “bro.” It also brings to mind a Season 9 episode called “The Reverse Peephole,” in which Jerry makes use of J. Peterman’s “European carry all.” Unfortunately, these endearing comedic parallels only seem to further enhance the derisive tendencies at work—however I might posture myself or attempt to downplay what appears so conspicuous to the general population—by providing my friends a broader base of analogous humor.

“Embrace the purse,” said Sally, a friend and colleague whose energetic advocacy and youthful wisdom inspires great trust and an almost poetic individuality. I’m inclined to follow her aberrant directive, despite any objection from my other compatriots. And yet, I still find myself secretly transferring important items to my pockets and leaving the murse in the car. Is there no recourse for the modern heterosexual male who enjoys having convenient access to personals? Some might say yes, but at the same time, classify said male as metrosexual, a newfangled cultural stereotype that includes modern straight men with keen aesthetic sensibilities and who tend to be fastidious with respect to hygiene and lifestyle. It seems that social evolution has me at an impasse, to which only one point remains: do I care?

Yes and no. I’m left with a state of comfort that depends in part on setting and society. And yet, as much depends on the bag itself. For a while, I thought I was content with the Pacsafe metro bag, though the word metro seemed suspiciously euphemistic. Not that I should be deterred by the name, but ultimately, I found myself wishing it could hold larger stuff, particularly paperwork, something that typically leads to the use of a business brief of some kind. And for a while, I owned and carried various briefcases, all of which seemed a little too professional for ordinary settings, namely any besides traversing the distance from doorstep to car and car to office. In fact, for a while, I carried both the metro bag and a briefcase, the metro bag reserved for smaller things, like wallet, phone, camera, coupons, and so on, and the briefcase reserved for office-related items, such as paperwork, flash drives, and the like. This got old quickly; carrying two bags seemed to make even less sense than carrying one. Plus, due to its size, the metro bag seemed even more like a purse than others I had used, and thus was more inflammatory with respect to the aforementioned derision of family and friends. For a time, it seemed the answer was a bag of moderate size with broad functionality and an almost symbiotic vein that seems to harmonize the casual with the professional. I’m speaking, of course, of the messenger bag. Now, the top flap does present a greater challenge to accessing the main compartment than the average briefcase, which can typically be accessed through some kind of buttoned or zippered top opening. But this seemed a fair trade-off next to the stylistic fusion and universality enjoyed in the effort to simplify one’s lifestyle. I wrestled with the style and color for a while before coming to the realization that black is simply too common. That might sound silly coming from a guy with a professed desire not to stand out, but just as I don’t care for being lampooned, nor do I prefer to be a drone, a carbon copy of every other male fashion robot that fills the pages of a department store catalog. For a while, I settled on a really nice messenger bag made by Lowepro with an alternating pattern of brown and off-white.

At length, however, I came back to the question which had preoccupied me for some time: what about a backpack? In truth, I had tried to use a backpack several times. For all its convenience in the freedom of movement it provides, beyond things like hiking, camping, or schooling, if the murse seemed too feminine, the backpack seemed almost too adolescent, though it’s certain that few are likely to ridicule a guy for carrying a backpack, whereas carrying anything remotely resembling a purse means the gloves come off, socially speaking, and any and all raillery are fair game. Then, one evening as I was doing a little electronic “window shopping,” I happened upon a backpack in the same quasi-professional style and color of the messenger bag I was already using. Simply put, it is Lowepro’s backpack from the same family of bags known as the Factor series. Oddly enough, it does include a top flap. And it’s wonderful, combining the styling and utility of the traditional urban messenger bag with that of the dual-compartment backpack. Okay, I had better stop right here, lest I go on to sound even more like some ridiculous web-fomercial or one of those catalog ads I would so wish to contradict. Let me simply say, I plan to make full use of this new “murse,” which, despite the ridicule I may endure on occasion, bears no connection to my gender or sexual orientation. Yes, I have all of my male equipment. Yes, I like women. Yes, I carry a murse. End of discussion. Well … sort of. Friends can sometimes be as unscrupulous in jest as enemies can in deceit. But I like to be prepared, and in the words of Sammy Davis, Jr., “I gotta be me.” And so I say, friends, Romans, countrymen, do your worst. If imitation be the sincerest form of flattery, what reverence awaits the walking punch line?

The Most Pitiful Saga

2009-02-15T05:32:00.000-08:00

There was once a man named Jack. A Cadillac on life’s thoroughfare, he was a man of letters, whose eccentric flare for storytelling and offbeat sagacity were the stuff of legend on the campus of a small independent university tucked away in the Conejo Valley of Southern California. Now a professor emeritus residing comfortably in that same region, he has on occasion, or so I have heard, been tempted back into the classroom for a time, a great boon to those enrolled in these classes, as what they encounter is far more than a somewhat enlightening or rather piquant scholastic cruise through the wiles of Flaubert or Milton. Indeed, much more. Jack Ledbetter is a Father Time, a spinner of tales from the great Midwestern firmament of stanchion and of cow, whose Rockwellian flare for gritty characterization and ludicrous juxtaposition is a drug you scarcely know you’ve taken. I was fortunate enough to have passed through the university during Jack’s tenure there, and I managed to land before his oracular tutelage four times in the course of my undergraduate career. In those tempestuous years of self-searching, attempting to carve out a mature and well-defined identity, Jack’s youth and the tales of his relatives were an almost mystical exhilaration that left one eager to accrue those wisdoms and exertions that illumine the soul’s pantheon in later life. Be it an ale-slaked maniacal uncle in a stained Santa Claus suit who chased him and his cousin under the dining room table with a giant sickle or his tenderfooted vignettes of little Laura Lee Appleton, from whose mouth, it seemed, a butterfly would emerge whenever she spoke, the ironically-ornamented anthology of yarns spun from beneath that white Irish moustache was a mythic fire and side-splitting pastiche all at once, a veritable tapestry and Midwestern mélange of the sacred and the profane, so exquisitely interwoven as to arouse a wealth of weeping, as much from a piteous or thoughtful meditation as from a carousing of witticisms and incongruous filial depravities as to make the abdomen burn and the voice utter such shrill and helpless sounds one could never have dreamt of making but for the sheer tenor of a thought too hilarious to resist, to the point at which the body might seem to act independently of the will.

I mention Jack because his narrative prowess is instrumentally reflected in my mind as I endeavor to respond to the challenge I now face, a gargantuan gauntlet thrown down by a colleague, who shall remain anonymous (let us simply refer to her as Jenessa Bryant), to relate the circumstances of a hugely unpleasant aspect of my life and the lamentable tale of a weekday morning drive, all in a tasteful, unassuming, non-vulgar, non-nauseating way. Were the reader to see immediately the full scope and detail of what is entailed, it would be immediately clear what is at stake here, not simply in terms of my creative and literary faculties, but as well my reputation and the good opinion of family, friends, and all whose eyes may yet wander the electronic ocean of the internet and dwell momentarily here for the sojourn of a story so harrowing in its personal implications that it remains to be seen to what degree I may have risked becoming the single most ridiculous and greatest butt of any bout of laughter that was ever uttered. How will my children remember me having traversed these words and known what occurred that fateful day? With what compassion or contempt will future generations view my character and deem my contribution to the world if it came to pass that, by some chance or twist of fate, these were the last words I ever wrote, this pitiable overthrow of self-containment in which I surrendered, most objectionably, to the elements and fought the subsequent good fight of necessity? As a soldier or a prisoner of war who chooses the lesser of two equally undesirable fates and delves regrettably to his doom, I here and now brave the task of telling what might yet be the single most embarrassing moment of my entire life.

Jack could, I’m certain, appreciate the irony in juxtaposing such an honorarium to his narrative prowess and the hurdle to tastefully relate the personal warfare of that day. And to honor such a venerable flexibility of spirit as he would surely bestow, I believe it quite fitting to tell it as he would, in all its crude glory, but without the crudeness of imagery that might better become an offhand or esoteric joke. Call it my Miller’s tale, a saga of physical malady. I’m certainly no Chaucer, though to give as poetic a treatise as possible, in light of the innate objection one might feel toward the subject, is my best hope as your narrator. If nothing else, may it inspire a laugh, in lieu of a heave. Take what you will from this confession. Sufficed to say, I have had the misfortunate of living the majority of my life in a cage, dwelling in the shadow of a gorgon of the body, imprisoned by the whim of my own bowel, whose capricious tendencies do not leave me merely at the mercy of circumstance, but in a larger and more sinister sense, render me most in need at the precise moment when relief is least at hand. In other words, the least convenient time, the time at which a lavatory is least accessible to me is the very moment at which my large intestine seeks to assert itself and determines the most immediate and demanding urge to reveal its workmanship and expunge upon the world that which is held in least regard. In truth, the zeal of my bowel is almost fanatical, like an artist so keen to share his thought that his work is rendered inferior for lack of patience or reserve, though I tend to view it more as a devil, a dictator, a fascist zealot whose despotic impulse is not only expansionistic, but also cruel, divisive, working toward whichever end will cause the greatest harm and humiliation in the shortest time. What’s more, it comes like a thief in the night, stealing upon me at the least auspicious moment. What’s even more, it comes with Napoleonic force, with the weight of armies pressing their advantage on the weak and helpless of an unsuspecting realm.

How can I capture effectively the crucible of that morning? It began as many others. I had awakened around 6:30, spent roughly 45 minutes readying myself, and left for work with 30 minutes to spare, just enough time to be characteristically late, in moderate traffic, by roughly five to ten minutes. I was headed to Burbank, specifically to the Warner Bros. Ranch, where I worked as an assistant editor in On-Air Promotion, which is nothing more than a tasteful way of saying I assisted the online editors, including all manner of compliance from loading tapes and typing graphic elements to fetching lunch and preparing the coffee. It was a drab and foggy morning, with the Sun just occasionally peaking through the narrow latticework of clouds that roamed the sky. Now, this habit of being late was typically just enough to keep me in a state of subtle and short-fused anxiety for the duration of the trip. And as a physician once told me, the brain-bowel connection is no myth. Thus, you could say, my physiological constitution occasionally suffered in tandem with the psychological trauma that inevitably results from driving most any Los Angeles freeway. Mind you, experience has taught me that my personal proneness to intestinal distress is in no way dependent on the state of any freeway system, state of promptness, or the subsequent stresses involved. And on this particular day, the urge had struck the center of my abdomen like an iron mallet. My number was up once again, the sad strain having come round at last as it had at many other inopportune moments throughout my life. I began to sweat, feeling the freshness of my recently-showered self receding. And the premature onset of that broken-in afternoon self, the subtly wearisome yet livable state of diminished hygiene was now undeniable. And in that moment of discomfort, I weighed my options as I had in so many previous situations: stop and look for a public loo or continue on and try to make it to my destination, in this case, the Ranch. This interior debate was, of course, influenced throughout by the relative intensity of my abdominal discomfort, which ebbed and flowed as it typically did, the severest moments causing me to teeter on the verge of seeking out the nearest toilet, the more bearable ones inspiring me to wait. At length, as I inched my way down the 170 Freeway in stop-and-go traffic toward the 101 interchange, I realized, as I sometimes did, the cost was too much to wait. Despite that it would inevitably cause me to be even more late than I might have been otherwise, with only about ten minutes left to get to work on time, I opted to take the Burbank Boulevard exit and seek out the nearest public restroom. However, as I made my way onto the exit ramp, yet another wave of abdominal pain threw me deep into yet another wave of angst. The beast was ravenous that day, and I was held firmly in its clutches, inching ever closer to its dreaded teeth, from which, I knew, there was to be no comfortable or face-saving recovery. This is always a fierce battle, a primal melee of the will to preserve one’s dignity, to prevent a course of events that would necessarily draw the rest of one’s immediate social sphere into the embarrassing arena of the intimate details of one’s physical composure. It is the same dignity that gives individuals a vague and incomplete notion of the prevalent manner in which toilet paper is folded before use, or the commonalities by which nasal tissue is folded after use. Who looks into the bowl and who doesn’t? Who looks at the tissue after blowing and who doesn’t? These are the things we don’t talk about, the topics we typically avoid, except perhaps with members of our immediate families. And rightly so. This guarding of the weird little hygienic worlds in which we all live is a sensible dignity, to be sure. And lest I should lie and conjure some fantastic cover story to appease my superiors, in the case of an “accident,” I am faced with having to compromise that dignity, in order to avoid censure, by having to explain my true reason for my being unreasonably late.

And just as these thoughts were racing through my head, I suddenly caught sight of the car stopped on the off-ramp less than 20 feet in front of me. To this day, I can’t even remember the make or model of the car, though I believe it was white. But I know that I hit it. I had slammed on my breaks immediately, but having been at a good 30-40 miles an hour the moment I noticed the car was there, it was simply impossible to avoid the rear-ending that followed. A spasm of shock surged through me, and I immediately began to panic. Not only was I going to be noticeably late, but in addition to my pending physical needs, I had hit another car from behind. And I was irrefutably to blame. As most any insurance agent can tell you, there’s pretty much no way to spin a rear-end collision. How it happened I don’t know. To this day, I still remember it as if the car had suddenly appeared before me, proof of how withdrawn I had been, buried within the confines of my own visceral misery, an anguish that had come to pervade my entire body, now at the mercy of the legions besieging me from within. The thought of having to actually get out of the car in such a state made me want to cry. And yet it is truly amazing with what sufficiency the human body is able to meet a necessary task. And so, I got out and met the lady I had just hit. She seemed amiable enough as we surveyed the damage, which appeared to be completely cosmetic on both sides. The cars were lining up behind us. But those glaring and impatient souls seeking Burbank Boulevard would have to wait while I, without any prompting from the lady, turned immediately; flung open the door to my green Saturn SLII; and, frantically eager to be temporarily done with the incident, rummaged through my glove box for the insurance and contact information she would surely need. The lady I had hit was a middle-aged woman who seemed to be in her fifties, and despite a noticeable slow-footedness, seemed altogether a very nice person. It was this sluggish and nearly dilatory manner that heightened my sense of panic, fanning the embers of anxiety that were brightening in my brain. I found myself screaming at her in my mind and intermittently scanning the surrounding area with some incredulous pleading for a last ray of hope, as if the good Lord might have miraculously posited a lone portable toilet within 50 feet of the Burbank Boulevard exit ramp. The beast was rampant now, and time was growing short.

And suddenly, as this kind and even-tempered woman sought out her insurance information like thick molasses poured out of a cold jar, I was struck by the excruciating realization that the point of reaching a restroom safely had now passed. A great and woeful cry echoed through my soul as I understood that there was no possible way for me to make it. In that moment, as I stood panicked in the morning light before a line of cars, one-by-one painstakingly passing us by turns in the next lane, I knew one thing in my heart: I had to go, and I had to go now. I’ll not digress further over the immense wretchedness of this understanding, the sheer woeful scourge of being now face-to-face with a beast determined to swallow whole the previously mentioned dignity, except to say that I knew it must be temporarily lost. And so, solider that I was in that moment, I turned to the lady, who sat in the driver’s seat of her own car and said, “Excuse me.” She turned and looked at me as I walked directly to the edge of the exit ramp and leapt into a ravine abutting that section of the Hollywood Freeway. I can’t imagine what must have gone through her mind as I did this. The poor woman must have thought me either a complete lunatic, a felon and fugitive from the law, or—maybe the only excuse I might have preferred—a super hero just sensing some imminent danger and leaping to the concealment required for a lightning-fast change of garment, perhaps to emerge momentarily in a transformed state of prowess ready to combat the impending threat. Indeed, if she had thought to ask where I was going, I can’t imagine what I might have said in that moment. I scurried down the graveled slope into an ocean of leaves at the bottom. A few feet away, I saw what appeared to be a swath of birch trees that formed a kind of grotto, and I knew that that was my scene. Whatever animals or random ravine-dwellers might happen to pass by at that time of day on that particular morning, they were sure to see me at the most primal intersection of necessity and repellence, an action which the human race has worked for hundreds, even thousands of years to conceal within the bounds of civility. Indeed perhaps half the greatest feats in the history of architecture have been to conveniently guard alongside common dwelling places that which I was about to perform in broad daylight. I remember wondering with what frequency this sort of thing occurred in the San Fernando Valley and what stratum of society, what part of the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles I would join by my imminent act. Whatever the outcome, I immediately entered the relative shade of these overhanging trees, and in all my years and experience facing similar states of personal emergency, I don’t believe I ever unfastened my pants with greater agility as I did that morning. If ever, in the scope of the entire incident, I resembled a super hero, it was the moment I unbuckled, unbuttoned, and unzipped, for I don’t believe any iconic luminary to have ever moved across a movie screen or graced the pages of a comic book could have done it faster.

The remainder of that moment I’ll leave to the imagination, and not further disrupt the hygienic world of the individual than has already been achieved by this narrative. Needless to say, moments later, I crept my way up the gravelly slope and emerged from the ravine a changed man. Older. Perhaps wiser. The kind lady whose car I had hit now seemed a sprightly, nimble sort of creature. She never asked me where I had been off to in those few moments, but, admitting that she couldn’t seem to find her insurance information, simply gave me a piece of paper with her own contact information and commented that, while she would have her husband examine the damage further that evening, she believed upon inspection that it might be negligible, or at least enough to avoid any involvement by either insurer. At that moment, I felt a great affection for the woman deep in my heart and praised God for such a generous mercy. Even now, I’m reminded of the words of Oscar Wilde in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem in which he betrays his trademark paradoxical wit and assumes a tone of sincere compassion:

“Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?”

Put another way, he once said, “Wisdom comes with winters.” And in my brokenhearted state, I felt the sincerest gratitude for what had immediately followed the winter from which I had just been released. I had known many religious experiences within the confines of a water closet, but this qualified in a rather unique way. Despite my humiliation, I had surrendered myself, and thus had been sustained. Humbled as I was, I thanked the lady profusely, got back into my car, and we parted ways.

When I arrived at the Ranch, the only person who was in the edit bay to question my lateness was an editor named Bruce, who also happened to be a friend. At least, we had worked together extensively, and he was, I believe, more a friend to me than perhaps any of the other editors. As such, I felt at leave to impart the entire ordeal to him, with every proper embellishment, so as to convey fully the truth of the quagmire into which I had sunk and the consequent act of desperation I had endured committing. I can still see him laughing heartily as I spoke, which only served to lessen the anxiety of having to justify my lateness, however justifiable it may have been. When I had finished my tale and had painted a complete picture of my plight, he smiled warmly and had me load tapes for him, after which I went to brew us some coffee. I believe I heard the sound of church bells and angels singing in the distance over Burbank. And all was once again right with the world.

Here’s to you, Jack.

Reflections from the 19th Century

2008-12-07T05:05:00.000-08:00

For more than two years, I’ve been reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. As I’m surely the slowest reader on planet Earth, the Herculean summit of more than 800 pages is not easily conquered, and progress is further decelerated by my thirst for fragments of story and for the full experience of the world in which David’s life unfolds. For months, I’ve been stagnant, reading only a little at a time, not because I don’t want to know what happens, but because I want to dwell in that place and time as long as possible. I have a love for the characters and the world they inhabit. As with the setting of every excellent story, it has come to feel like a real place, one I will be sorry to leave when the last page is turned. The story is told in first person, so the reader views the world entirely through David’s eyes, and what a charming sense of goodness it inspires; David himself is quite intelligent, but also sincere, even-tempered, and incredibly kind. As an adult, he retains a certain innocence complemented by great sensibility, and as a child, he perceives quite keenly, despite his innocence, the truest forms of joy and qualities of character that merit admiration. The purity with which he engages the world is past endearing, past contagious, and I’ve found myself, many times, turning the page with a full heart and eyes welled with tears. Dickens describes his life, particularly his tumultuous youth, in a way that feels universally relevant, skillfully sketching some of the loveliest, most tender, most bittersweet images from any childhood. In Chapter III, a very young David, of perhaps only five or six years, relates his regard for little Emily, Mr. Peggotty’s niece, whom he meets on his first trip to Yarmouth: “Of course I was in love with little Em’ly. I am sure I loved that baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life, high and ennobling as it is. I am sure my fancy raised up something round that blue-eyed mite of a child, which etherealised, and made a very angel of her. If, any sunny forenoon, she had spread a little pair of wings, and flown away before my eyes, I don’t think I should have regarded it as much more than I had had reason to expect…. I told Em’ly I adored her, and that unless she confessed she adored me I should be reduced to the necessity of killing myself with a sword. She said she did, and I have no doubt she did.” This confession always brings a smile, as something in it transcends all manner of wisdom or sensibility, and it becomes clear that one is in the presence of greatness. And what is truly angelic is not so much little Emily, but rather David himself and his view of her. The image, in all its humor comingling ever sweetly with the genuine affection his young heart surely feels, is as irresistible as air. It is a greatness too frequently overlooked or trivialized. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus directs his disciples not to hinder the little children wishing to approach him, “…for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” And I believe it does. The vigor and exuberance excited in that time of life is the stuff of glory, and what becomes us best is to embrace it, and worst, to scorn or to disregard it.

I believe I began to read David Copperfield at a good time of life; never before have I so treasured the simplicity of youth or seen more clearly the danger in the wearisome and convoluted “wisdoms” of age and so-called “experience.” More often than not, we seem to renovate our understanding of the past in order to validate whatever ways we may be presently mistaken. Often it is the clarity of youth that gives judgment its best opportunities, and the spiritual renewal of sincerity and humility is the gateway back to that child-like mind that age and experience would otherwise bury. These reflections arrived in such a timely way, as I began to see the revelation alive in other situations. Often a thought or an idea translates easily across art forms and modes of expression; I have, in fact, heard the greatness I mentioned previously in the concert hall.

I should note that nearly everything I know of classical music I learned from my father, whose contagious love of music was a mainstay of my own youth. From him I learned the various forms of Western music, of which the symphony is among the most prominent, and which, in our time, seems to have gone almost entirely out of fashion. But in the heyday of Romanticism, the early 19th century produced some of the most memorable, deeply personal, and altogether heavenly musical scores in the way of symphonies.

The Viennese Joseph Haydn is sometimes credited as the father of the symphony, but in truth, many composers of the classical period wrote symphonies before him. What Haydn did accomplish was the adoption of a specifically classical framework, which he used to write over a hundred symphonies and which was further utilized by his pupil, Mozart. Of course, any discussion of the symphony must eventually default to the one justifiably credited as its master. Composers over the decades have moved in subtly different directions within the artistic eras and had myriad opinions of each other’s work. Both Brahms and Dvorak revered the masters of the past, whereas other Romantics such as Wagner favored the leitmotif approach, which tended to literalize musical themes and narrow the interpretation of a larger work. Brahms, in particular, was heavily criticized by composers like Tchaikovsky, who was, in turn, criticized by Rimsky-Korsakov and his prodigious student, L’enfant terrible, Igor Stravinsky. Furthermore, Stravinsky and his fellow Parisian Debussy also objected to the leitmotifs of Wagner. And so the criticism continues as one’s scholarship of Western music is built. And yet, all of them, romantics and contemporaries alike, seemed to agree on the supremacy of one, one with whom Western music, and particularly the symphony, received a level of artistry and innovation unparalleled, before or since. This composer is Beethoven. If all the great composers were a council of Jedi, he is the Yoda, the Shakespeare, the sonic sovereign to which every knee must bend, a brilliant and impervious titan, the gravity to which all minds in the musical universe capitulate. None can deny his supreme level of achievement in the majority of musical forms of his day, particularly the symphony. Beethoven wrote only nine in this form, a seemingly modest accomplishment next to the prolific efforts of Haydn and Mozart. However, with those nine, he achieved a breadth of inspiration and greatness like no other and became the first musical voice of Romanticism in music. While his first two symphonies are wonderful in their own rights and provide a variety of imaginative and individualistic passages, perhaps his first notable of the nine was the Third, known as “Eroica.” Having originally intended to dedicate the work to Napoleon, who he believed would bring democracy to France, Beethoven was enraged when the great military marvel committed his own worst sin by crowning himself emperor, at which point Beethoven decided simply to dedicate the symphony to the memory of a heroic man. At once epic and pastoral, and exceedingly greater in length than any symphony by Haydn or Mozart, the Third Symphony was a revolutionary act, a milestone many have come to regard as the end of Classicism and the beginning of the Romantic era in music. He followed this with symphonies of equal and even greater design, including the Fifth Symphony (the opening three-note motif of which is among the most memorable themes in all of music); that lovely and effervescent ode to bucolic life and lore, the Sixth, known as the “Pastoral”; the exuberant and dance-like Seventh, the closing pages of which some initial critics attacked as simply “noise” (and what a joyful noise!); and of course, the monumental Ninth Symphony, known as the “Choral” due to the final movement in which Beethoven set to music, for chorus and four soloists, the poem “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich Schiller, a work he saw as perfectly articulating the brotherhood of all humanity. Indeed the Ninth Symphony is often said to rank among the highest achievements of humankind, next to works like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or King Lear.

My dad once told me he had gone through several seasons of life during which different symphonies held the rank of his favorite. I believe he said it was once the Fourth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, an LP of which was the first recording he ever bought, at I-have-no-idea-what age. For a time, I believe it was the First Symphony of Mahler, known as “Titan.” And I distinctly remember his account, on more than one occasion, that the First Symphony of Brahms held the lead in his heart for many years. Some musicologists have referred to Brahms’ First as “the Tenth,” as though it were what Beethoven himself would have given us had he written a tenth. At any rate, having grown up beside the hearth of my father’s musical passions, I eventually came to regard this vast historical legacy of music with great interest, though it was some time before I had sampled enough of the classical canon to know which composers and which pieces most suited me and in which direction my own taste would tend.

At length, I found a deep affection for the music of another German master, Franz Schubert. Like many great artists before and since, Schubert met his end at a young age, but left behind an extensive host of universally beautiful oeuvre. Schubert succumbed to syphilis in 1828, about a year and a half after the death of Beethoven, whom he had revered from afar for most of his years in Vienna. Schubert was, however, granted his wish to be buried next to Beethoven, their graves remaining side-by-side in the Währing cemetery in Vienna until 1888, at which point both were moved to the Zentralfriedhof, in the city’s Simmering district, where they remain interred to this day, not far, incidentally, from the grave of Brahms. From the first, I heard a great universality in Schubert’s music, which came to me shortly following the death of my older brother, a time when I was hungry for aesthetic meditations on the subject of mortality (an idea that frequently inspired Schubert, given his illness). This universality seemed to be confirmed when finally I read the words of the composer Robert Schumann, who once said of Schubert: “…Innumerable as are the shades of human thought and action, so various is his music” (Cross, 675). And when I ask myself what I may consider my favorite symphony, aside from the variety of masterworks already mentioned here, one stands out for me above all others, a symphony for which my own affection is so great, I dare not listen too often; as many times as it already has graced my ears, it should not become worn or cheapened upon repetition and elude my sensitivity to its majesties. It is Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, more commonly referred to as the Great C Major Symphony. Robert Schumann once wrote of the piece in a letter to his future wife:

“Oh, Clara, I have been in paradise today! They played at the rehearsal a symphony of Franz Schubert’s. How I wish you had been there, for I cannot describe it to you. The instruments all sing like remarkably intelligent human voices, and the scoring is worthy of Beethoven. Then the length, the divine, length, of it! It is a whole four-volume novel, longer than the choral symphony. I was supremely happy, and had nothing left to wish for, except that you were my wife and that I could write such symphonies myself” (Fisk, 101).

What Schumann refers to as the divine, or “heavenly,” length seems, to me, to indicate something in Schubert’s manner of thematic development. Rarely do I find myself wishing to hear a satisfying melody in the symphony that it does not then pick up that very theme and treat me to another delightful taste. Even with its length, as with Beethoven, there is never a sense that a note is wasted or that themes and passages are needlessly repeated. There is nothing meandering or derelict about Schubert’s melodies here. Each volume of the novel seems to unfold with tremendous ease, as if the music had been written beforehand, and Schubert had simply taken down some heavenly dictation.

But I have not yet mentioned the true sublimity of this work, for this dictation is the voice of a child. And thank heavens it is so, because no other symphony sounds quite like it. Schumann wrote generally regarding Schubert’s work, and said this:

“Experiences that youth has not yet achieved are necessary to the evaluation of Bach; it even underestimates Mozart’s greatness. Mere musical studies are not enough to enable us to understand Beethoven, just as in certain years he inspires us with one work rather than with another. It is certain that equal ages exert a reciprocal attraction upon each other, that youthful enthusiasm is best understood by youth, and the power of the mature master by the full-grown man. So Schubert will always remain the favorite of youth. He gives what youth desires—an overflowing heart, daring thoughts, and swift deeds; he tells them what they most love, romantic stories of knights, maidens, and adventures; he intermingles a little wit and humor, but not so much that the basic softness of the mood is thereby troubled. Moreover, he gives wings to the performer’s own imagination like no other composer save Beethoven” (Fisk, 101).

This spirit of youth is just what I hear and feel in the presence of the Great C Major Symphony. Imagine a young boy of David’s temperament, a boy of perhaps seven or eight, somehow gifted with the skill to write an epic symphony, and the Great C Major would be the result, a work of surpassing weight, but guided by the judicious yet playful intrigues of a tender-hearted boy who sees nothing amiss in falling on a sword for the love of his maid, a little girl his own age whose smile cannot help but shame the sun and stars for all their wont of light. He sees whole mornings full of God’s praise horizoned in her eyes, and her every part so tiny, so delicate as to inspire a great honor to spare her harm with his very life.

From the time I was a young child until well into my teens, each night as I sank beneath the covers to welcome sleep, I would let my thoughts turn toward a love fantasy. I would conjure such wholesome scenarios, dream of pure and hesitant infatuations, following some elaborate plot to the moment at which the love between myself and the young lady were cautiously revealed, the fragile moment when first we acknowledged our affection, and the thrill, the euphoric joy of some great tenderness between us carefully unfolding, the gentlest whisper of a touch or a kiss in which the fullness of our devotion was so surprisingly alive. In the balm of this fanciful invention, I would fall asleep, enveloped in the peace of so rich a thought, swallowed whole by that beauteous moment for which I so eagerly yearned. It is the same young boy within me now, the same boy that resonates with the stories of David’s youth and with the Schubert who could write so grand a symphony as the Great C Major.

Even now, my heart aches to know what maid may yet lie awake as I do, dreaming of me next to her. What damsel in distress might dream of danger so wondrous that might bring me to her? And what is it in me that dreams of gallantry and rescuing, and of rendezvous that last a lifetime? Whatever age I am, I must come to her as a man, but with the spirit of a boy, for that is the purest part of me, which would seek to savor her in my arms, her hand in mine, her moments of grace and of awkwardness equally delighting—her every curve, every smile, every touch, a celebration in me; our kiss, a tenderness that breaks me. It is the man who would indulge, but the boy who would honor. How remarkable now is the realization that somewhere in the Neverlands of my heart, Dickens and Schubert have written the same novel, and by reflections of their artistry, having dwelled so richly there, I have a mind to grow ever smaller in my own aspect, despite the years that may yet stretch before me. They come to nothing. Each year, the last. Each kiss, the first.

Works Cited

Cross, Milton, & Ewen, David. Milton Cross’ Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music. Doubleday, 1962.
Fisk, Josiah. Composers on Music: Eight Centuries of Writings. Northeastern University Press, 1997.

Much Ado about Sappho

2008-11-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

This Election Day, the American voter faces a broad variety of issues, not the least of which includes the choice of candidate who will sit in the Oval Office for the next four years. There are also a number of important propositions that challenge the voter’s notion of right and wrong and how those moral convictions should play out in the voting booth. One such issue is same-sex marriage. Now, the celebration of divergent sexual activity and lifestyles is not, by any means, a novel phenomenon. In Ancient Greece, one of the nine lyric poets known as Sappho produced a great deal of erotic writing in which her narrator expresses feelings of infatuation for other female characters. Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos, which is the origin of the word lesbian. Such issues are still controversial today, and unfortunately, people can be so polarized in their views that maintaining respectful disagreement while casting a conscientious vote is no easy task.

The more I deliberate the issue of same-sex marriage in my mind, the more I realize that any discussion must eventually address the fundamental differences in worldview that govern the thinking of supporters and opponents. It is at times difficult to form an opinion that is informed, equitable, and morally right, particularly when confronted with the occasionally enormous differences in framework of thought that lead people to their moral convictions. My views certainly lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum, but my hope is that the more liberally-minded reader will understand that what I have to say is grounded in faith, as opposed to hatred or fear, and furthermore that the more conservatively-minded will regard my views with equal understanding and not presume any unwarranted comradeship grounded in mutual disgust for homosexuals in general. I do not hate homosexuals, though it seems increasingly apparent that to hold a conservative viewpoint on the subject is recognized as a hateful act.

Before getting to the issue of worldview, I suppose it makes the most sense to start at the beginning, with the issue itself. I recently read a statement written by a friend who supports same-sex marriage that went something like this (I’m admittedly paraphrasing here but will do my best, despite my own biases, to be faithful to the true spirit of what the person wrote): I just do not believe in discriminating against someone because their beliefs, personal or religious, differ from mine. That's what is currently happening. This is not new. Interracial marriages were once viewed as an abomination as well. Divorcees who wish to remarry face similar discrimination in the Catholic Church. No one is forcing organized religion to recognize gay marriage. These are civil unions. There is no more religion involved in this case than in common law marriages. There’s a lot in that statement, of course. I’ll try to break down why I believe it to be so flawed, but let me start with my own views on the issue of same-sex marriage.

First, I should say that I do not view marriage as a right per se, though I can certainly understand the frustration of those for whom same-sex relationships pose no moral qualm whatever. I admit that if I approved of gay unions, the resistance to their receiving equitable treatment under the law would be enormously frustrating, and in truth, I think the laws governing civil unions in California and in many other states still need a great deal of work before we can boast equity for monogamous homosexual couples. To me, these couples deserve the same privileges as married couples. But I will never, ever view them as married, primarily because I believe in the sanctity of marriage as a spiritual sacrament. Now, for many, that’s just too much mixing of church and state, and I’ll address that issue as well a little later on. To me, disallowing a gay man to be with his partner in the hospital simply because they are not legally recognized as spouses is a clear example of institutional cruelty. This practice, of course, is grounded in the increasingly litigious trend in our culture that has warped the health care system and other institutions into nightmares of bureaucracy. But this is altogether a separate issue, I believe. My friend was correct in the assertion that a variety of discriminatory practices have been leveled against marriage over the ages, but I think it’s important not to mix apples and oranges. For instance, opposition to interracial marriage is really an example of racial prejudice. And the universal opposition to remarriage that characterizes the Catholic Church is really an example of poor theology grounded in papal adulation. To my way of thinking, they are separate, justifiable struggles that happen to share the same context. So what is the purpose of marriage? Its history is long, and its essential purpose, spiritual or otherwise, has certainly varied somewhat from age to age and culture to culture. But the essence has always been a union between a man and a woman. And yet, I’m not writing this to defend traditional marriage on the grounds of orthopraxy. Proponents of same-sex marriage wish to redefine marriage beyond its historical definition so that same-sex partnerships may be viewed and treated as natural and normal alongside their more traditional counterparts. As far as I can tell, the controversy surrounding this issue comes down to what marriage is understood to be in the minds of supporters and opponents. And to me, it is a spiritual institution.

The next question, of course, is why should this leave me opposed to gay marriage? What is so wrong with homosexuality to begin with? Is it unkind of a Christian such as myself not to accept the lifestyle of a homosexual couple or to wish it blessed as a holy union in marriage? No more unkind, I believe, than to disagree with someone, to hold an opinion separate from theirs. No more unkind than for someone to say to a friend, I don’t agree with what you’re doing. I’m not going to try to stop you, but nor will I support you in doing something with which I wholeheartedly disagree. But why do I disagree? Why do I view homosexuality as a moral abomination? So many Christians draw on scripture to support their disapproval. This has always seemed a bit odd to me, because homosexuality is one of the few moral issues for which I feel absolutely no need to substantiate my opinion with scripture. To me, human anatomy is speaking loud and clear. There can be no doubt in the mind of any rationally-thinking person that the penis and the vagina are biological complements, in other words, that male goes with female. I don’t need the Bible to tell me that homosexuality is unnatural any more than I need it to tell me not to spit my food out of my mouth after chewing it. Of course, it is perfectly within my right to do so, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to have the rest of the world refer to it as eating. Now admittedly, the Bible says far less about homosexuality than it does about marriage. But the scriptures make it abundantly clear that marriage is a very special relationship between a man and a woman, grounded in sexual constancy and in love, not just romantic love, but sacrificial love. It is on the same basis that so many people of faith resist divorce on any terms except infidelity, whereas some people feel perfectly justified in seeking divorce when their expectations are no longer met or they simply don’t have the feelings they once had for their spouse. Such a love is not self-denying at all, but self-serving. Not that same-sex marriage has anything per se to do with the issue of divorce, but it does, once again, address the fundamental purpose of marriage in the Christian church, which is a self-denying enterprise by which to honor God and also (do I even need to say it?) to be fruitful in that enterprise, in other words, to procreate. I think many people of faith who believe in the scriptures will continue to reject homosexuality as sinful because, though it may seem harmless or victimless, it is an affront to God, as it so clearly rejects not only His purposes for a marriage, but also the design of His creation. A husband and wife may engage in a variety of alternative pleasures with their erogenous “parts,” but honestly, who can deny that, at its most fundamental level, our anatomical design clearly dictates the purpose of the sexes?

What is so frustrating to me is that supporters of same-sex marriage certainly understand these things, these truths about the basic nature of sexuality, but they choose to reject them, or to ignore them. They would rather agree not to care than to reject the current social climate. Indeed they seem nearly incapable of doing what C.S. Lewis described as transcending the microphone of the current age. Such effort requires a higher, non-relativistic view of truth, however unpopular. With this, I must finally turn to the issue of worldview, and how fundamental differences in belief structures invariably come to bear on this issue. The modern political climate in which we find ourselves is essentially humanistic. Some refer to it as cultural relativism. Regardless of how it is termed, it is a modern secular worldview that demands the acceptance of everything. Understand me correctly on this, not merely tolerance, but acceptance. A person to whom you have committed your friendship may do something you view as wrong. In such a case, you might tolerate their choice but at the same time admonish them by expressing your disapproval respectfully while still remaining their friend, as opposed to accepting their choice as if you approved of it completely. These are totally different attitudes, and the temperature of the times is not simply to tolerate homosexuality, but rather to offer it complete acceptance and approval. The problem for a person of faith, specifically faith in Christ and in God’s Holy Scriptures, is that unlike the rest of the world, you have committed your life to honoring a God that demands you behave morally, seeking to live according to His will, honoring Him in mind, in body, and in spirit. Now, in my experience, it is the tendency of modern liberal doctrine to view the world solely through the lens of social justice. Under this worldview, the only thing that matters, the only true tenet worth defending, is that all people should be at liberty do to exactly as they wish. This is at least partially in conflict with the Christian worldview, which puts a moral compass within the individual, so that what feels good is not always okay. It is sometimes okay, but certainly not always, because human instinct is not viewed as inherently good. On the contrary, the Christian worldview holds that all good things come from God, and that human nature is fundamentally sinful, which is precisely what demanded the need for a Christ. When Jesus said, in John 8:32, that we are set free by the truth, he referred to the fact that we are all slaves to sin, except by faith in the sacrifice he made for all humankind. Extreme devotees of liberal humanism seem to serve a different god. They seek freedom without purpose, failing to realize that freedom itself does not give meaning to life. Rather it simply establishes the opportunity to seek meaning. One may then ask, must freedom have a purpose? If you think about it, there is something wanting in the freedom to choose something but making no choice at all. This is what the secular world promotes every day. Must freedom have a purpose? I would argue that it does. But more importantly, life must have meaning. This is undeniable. People seek it every day of their lives. I would argue that in modern times, tenets such as the separation between church and state have been taken to an extreme that hasn’t necessarily left us more enlightened than previous generations. Rather the religious dogma that imprisoned us in past centuries has simply been replaced by a different, almost equally repressive social doctrine, which demands, rather enigmatically, that not only is each of us free to do as he pleases, but within that context, to express any disapproval (in other words, to hold that the individual should behave morally) is not tolerated, because under this doctrine, even to believe such a thing is seen as heinously “oppressive” to those who choose to deny any universal imperative and to live without the “burden” or “crime” of not being universally accepted. This is the new heresy, to believe that something is not okay. It is not enough to tolerate diverse or alternative lifestyles. You must accept them in order to be accepted under this social and political “regime.” Cultural relativism teaches that what is true and right for one person is not necessarily true and right for another. Fair enough. However, the extreme to which this idea is now applied confuses belief with truth. In fact, the term “universal truth” is essentially redundant; truth, by definition, is universal. We may believe differently, but my belief in God and the unbelief of another person have no impact on whether or not God actually exists. In other words (and there’s just no getting around this), some beliefs are wrong, or incongruous to the truth, and some are right, securely aligned with it. The moral imperative of cultural relativism, however, is the unilateral acceptance of all belief systems. I would argue that this is not even possible, not for anyone. In the comment I mentioned earlier, my friend professed a resistance to imposing one’s views, personal or religious, on another. But my friend’s view, on same-sex marriage specifically, is not different from those of homosexuals who wish their unions to be recognized as marriage. Rather their views are perfectly aligned, because my friend finds nothing at all wrong with same-sex marriage. In other words, it does not go against any part of the moral code to which my friend subscribes. My friend may have a different preference and lifestyle, but not a different view. I do not then see my friend as necessarily being more tolerant of the beliefs of others, but rather following a moral code with a broader range of acceptable behaviors.

One could argue, then, that it is culturally expedient to ignore the notion of truth altogether. I think this more dangerous than some people realize. A Christian has the same freedom as a non-Christian, but such a person has chosen to give the use of his life back over to God and to submit to His will, believing that this supplication is the only act that can possibly give meaning to life and to secure salvation in eternity. These are spiritual matters, of course. I would make the claim that proponents of same-sex marriage are not defending it on any spiritual basis, but rather on the basis of liberal humanistic doctrine, which, as previously stated, regards the unilateral acceptance of all lifestyles as the only tolerable view. Now, so that I don’t do too much mixing of apples and oranges, in light of the fact that the First Amendment does, to some extent, embrace the notion of maintaining the separation of church and state, what is so wrong with same-sex marriages recognized by the State of California and not necessarily blessed in churches? Nothing, I suppose, though admittedly it further widens the gap between the civil code upheld by government and the personal moral code followed by the individual. There are those who feel that this gap is natural and justified, though I propose that without the conscience and moral impulses of the individual, the institutional morality of government becomes like a ship without a pilot. And we may one day find ourselves wondering whatever caused us to ever believe in the importance of things such as decency, humility, kindness, purity, or hope. From where should my sense of right and wrong originate than from my moral and religious convictions?

It is also my feeling that if we decide to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, then we must be ready for other, more alternative definitions as well. How about polygamists who want to marry multiple partners? That may sound like a fear tactic, but I certainly don’t mean it that way. I mean it, rather, from the standpoint of common sense. Because I view marriage as a sacred institution, I would rather grant civil unions the same privileges as common law marriages than to recognize such unions as marriage. The scenario in which a homosexual is not allowed to see his partner in the hospital or to make health care decisions for a partner who is incapacitated is particularly disturbing because the laws governing civil unions are rather complicated, vary significantly from state to state, and generally require a higher degree of “red-tape” than the laws that govern marriage. The problem, then, is not whether the person at your bedside is legally termed your "spouse," but rather the fact that the laws governing health care have strayed so far from their intended purpose as to deny these partners access to one another. Such laws and policies thwart a compassionate response and should not be tolerated, in my view. But again, that's a different problem, and it certainly is not rectified, as far as I’m concerned, by applying the term marriage to a gay union. Am I simply arguing semantics, then? Not at all. As I said, a gay couple will never, in my estimation, be married, because, again, my definition of marriage is grounded in faith. It was created by a God who demands to be honored not only in mind and spirit, but also in body. If this is an equal rights issue, where do those rights come from? It seems to me, they must come from somewhere. Even in those oft-quoted founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, you'll notice it states that the rights of human beings are "endowed by their Creator." I see an increasing effort to "sanitize" social and judicial circles of any influence of religious thought or doctrine, when the portion of the First Amendment that guards the separation of church and state was meant to prevent an established religion that would govern law-making in this country, which is totally different from saying that the two spheres of thought should never, ever overlap. Cultural relativists would perhaps argue that they have many of the same religious convictions as I do, but that they seek not to force those views on other people by allowing them to influence their political views. My response to such an argument is that, while such a person may have religious convictions, those convictions are not nearly as strong as their conviction to deny a universal truth and to recognize all traditions as equally valid. So, who is this person’s god, God himself, or the cause of social justice, which is simply a means to pursue meaning? I honestly don't believe that human rights are the result of happenstance any more than the Earth itself is the result of such. We can try all we want to “cleanse” the public and judicial sectors of all religious influence, but I think what we’re left with then is a world in which our moral imperatives are derived from the law itself as opposed to the truth. Civil unions and marriages aside, the clear opposition to truth sought by this growing liberal and humanistic doctrine is disturbing at best. At worst, well… Let’s just say, if God exists, regardless of the specific moral imperatives He demands of us, I don’t think He takes kindly to being treated as a relativistic myth, particularly by those who claim to believe personally, but wish for the civil and judicial arenas that govern society to operate as if a perfectly decent society could be obtained by some mindless doctrine of freedom that ignores His influence altogether. Should we follow a civil code or a moral code? Or rather, to what extent should one affect or inform the other? Some people, myself included, believe that the civil code may, at best, reflect the moral code (or compass) that belongs in every heart. That doesn’t mean I believe it should be against the law to commit any immoral act or that the church and the state should be directly aligned in all cases. There is a careful balance to be struck in following the First Amendment. I admit with great satisfaction that I choose not put my faith in the civil code to dictate my sense of right and wrong. By such a standard, I could commit a variety of immoral acts, and if they were to remain undiscovered, I am not punishable. It is only an internal code, or conscience, that demands a reckoning, so that I am aware of having done wrong regardless of whether I am held accountable in a civil context.

So where does this leave us with the issue of marriage? I’m not a person who considers it reasonable to sit back and criticize our political system without offering anything in the way of a solution. Perhaps the answer is for the state to recognize all monogamous couples as civil unions with a uniform set of privileges and rights. That could then become the broader umbrella under which the spiritual institution of marriage (between a man and a woman) would simply be one example. It seems to me that this would clear up the majority of discrepancies between the relative advantages and disadvantages of same- and opposite-sex unions under the law. Unless, of course, supporters of same-sex unions intend to fight tooth-and-nail not only for a status equivalent to marriage, but also for the specific label of being “married.” Now that would be semantics. If gays want not just equality but semantic inclusiveness, I don’t think I can help.

My views are based on faith and moral judgment, not hatred, fear, or intolerance. Of course, I am not qualified to “judge,” as they say; I am no more perfect than any other person. But remember that an opinion, by its very nature, is a judgment about something. When Christ refers to judgment, I believe he means condemnation, which is totally different from having an opinion or an understanding about right and wrong, just as admonishing someone is not the same as oppressing them; the two paths are guided by totally different attitudes. So, if believing something is wrong, failing to accept it, expressing that view (however sensitively), and then voting according to that view are oppressive acts, then I have no solution to offer. On a rather sad note, I actually have a close friend of many years who feels so strongly about his defense of same-sex marriage that he recently intimated that if I intend to allow my political views to be impacted by my religious views even to the slightest degree, then I should not be voting. “Freedom” what?

On "The Edge"

2008-10-07T23:38:00.001-07:00

What is it about that wunderkind quartet from Dublin? I suppose they aren’t so young anymore, but as far as I’m concerned, their music is still every bit as quality as ever. There are, of course, those who perhaps think that isn't saying much. But U2 will, I think, always be my favorite. I would love to say this is due to some magic, some inexplicable quality such that when their collective sound is coursing through my veins, a higher power takes over me and unlocks a part of myself I would not have otherwise known. Well, there may be some truth in there, but mostly it has to do with The Edge. I say this with all due respect to the other three, because Adam and Larry are certainly quality musicians, especially Larry. And I have to admit that Bono’s majestic and occasionally almost self-adulatory crooning, as fabulous as it is much of the time, is not really what does it for me. It’s about The Edge. Incidentally, I read somewhere once that the moniker reflects a penchant for heights and perhaps some quasi-maniacal zeal to frequent the borders of rooftops, and for all I know, there’s something to that. But it seems more sensible to me that it would reflect his penchant for higher tonalities. With whatever muse-like orb he entered back the in late 70s that led him to suddenly crank up the delay around a bitingly crisp fever of distortion, he happened to find a singular, and very nearly inimitable, style of guitar playing. More to the point, it’s a sound that reaches me. I’m not typically one to enjoy music simply because of the technical prowess required to perform it. The music I like is music that sounds good, however it was written, however it is performed. The lyricism of The Edge is, to me, infinitely preferable to the virtuosity of a hundred other guitarists with faster fingers. I reserve my admiration for the mind and soul that cause the sound to exist, or rather, the vessel into which God has chosen to invest His inspiration. To me, that’s what U2 is, a vessel into which has been poured an oft-introspective sound that alternates almost seamlessly between despair and hope. This is just what people do. And that's what makes the music feel so real to me—remarkably genuine, occasionally ironic, always meaningful.

Nearly everyone who knows me, or at least everyone who knows me well, is certainly not surprised to read this. Since I was in junior high school, I’ve been brooding over albums like October, The Unforgettable Fire, and The Joshua Tree, living in those aural spaces, letting them take me on repeated tours of the interior landscape where my imagination and my emotions commingle like awkward yet willful dance partners. In fact, I’ve been taking these tours most of my life, I think, with music of various kinds. As an adult, I would simply say that the demands of everyday life have simply forced me to compartmentalize those moments into smaller spans and to enjoy them more intermittently, while driving in the car on my way to work or sitting with a headset on while writing this blog, as opposed to stretching out on my bed, fourteen years old, waiting for Mom to call me to dinner while the glory of songs like “Scarlet,” “A Sort of Homecoming,” and “One Tree Hill” poured over me like a teen elixir, as if all of life’s lessons could be learned somehow by simply soaking up the air of that sonic space and gleaning whatever visions and wisdom might surge through my heart by simply listening.

If anything is truly magical to me, it is music itself, which speaks more directly to my soul than perhaps any of the other arts. If I had had the foresight, and also the time, while I was coming of age and making my way in the world, I would have kept a music journal, pouring into it the emotional nuances, places of the imagination, and the greater significance of all the sonic spaces in which I’ve lived and toured since I was young. Now, they lie asleep somewhere in the rich tapestry of my memory. Perhaps one day I’ll get around to writing some things down. Maybe that’s what I’m doing right now. Everyone carries different associations, responding differently to certain themes and sounds. For me, these associations are especially powerful; some of them can change the temperature of my mind almost instantly. And in this hypothetical music journal chronicling the interior landscape of my life, U2 deserves several chapters. Their songs have nourished me for many years, spawned legions of dreamscapes and ideas, lifted me up when I was sorrowful, sobered me when I was naïve, brought me clarity in partnership with idealism. And much, if not most, of this is due to the ambient tintinnabulation of The Edge's guitar, which took me into those reflective spaces, triggering an entire generation of dreams within me, some modest, some grandiose, but as I said before, always meaningful. I’ve entered on the musical journeys the band has taken over the years, from the punk-infused musings of Boy, to the "chopping down" of The Joshua Tree with Achtung Baby, to the transcendently personal ballads aboard How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. And yet, in another sense, they have gone with me on my journey. And that is a very different world than the world in which the band lives. All art is like this. And I believe, perhaps a bit naively, that it is this largely subjective, very nearly inexplicable respiration between artistic intent and personal response that makes the artistic endeavor itself so important. Ironically, of course, it is the one thing that cannot be qualified or substantiated in any canonical or academic way. Fine by me. Sometimes dreams serve us better than knowledge, better than understanding. Sometimes I wonder if wisdom is not born out of a lack of understanding and the serenity to withstand the angst it brings. Is that what Keats referred to as “negative capability”? Who knows? I learned an awful lot about myself by listening to The Edge’s guitar, maybe more than I ever learned sitting in a classroom or reading a book. Not that music trumps literature or learning, but its signature in the life of a zealous listener is undeniably unique and, I believe, as with knowledge, immeasurably transformative.

What I Loved about Wall-E

2008-08-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

With the release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, it appears Wall-E has now officially left theatres, and looking back over the seven weeks of its release, it seems a good point to reflect on what is, to me, so remarkably endearing and even prophetic about this marvelous little film.

First, consider the crafting of the movie. Top notch, to be sure. Pixar, in their typical fashion, gave painstaking care to critical details of the plot, which unfolds quite consistently. There is admittedly some lack of believability (e.g. how could there possibly be enough regenerated oxygen on a future earth devastated of most of its green vegetation to support indefinitely the returning human population?), most of which a reasonably intelligent viewer can rationalize enough to suspend their disbelief and appreciate the emotional plot line as well as the movie's deeper and more significant themes. The animation is, of course, first-rate. With each new film, Pixar seems to capture a story with striking authenticity and to delve with greater zeal into the photo-realistic potential of the Renderman software. Wall-E, in particular, allowed them the opportunity to portray a rich variety of intricately adroit robots and automated technology with dizzying charm. Every wonderful and minute imperfection is faithfully maintained or modified where appropriate as the story unfolds, including the unique array of dents and smudges on Wall-E's yellow frame and the web of cracks that splinter their way across his solar charge indicator.

Next, the sound design. I really think Ben Burtt displayed a commendable degree of digitized wizardry in not only the sound effects, but also the various voice characterizations. The voice of Wall-E is a particularly good example of a believably futuristic robotic drone tinged with just the right degree of pleading personality and quirkiness to create the emotional sustainability without which the character could never have communicated so much with such a limited vocabulary. In fact, despite a few repetitive sundries, there is really only one word that was used to fulfill the breadth of Wall-E's performance, and that is the name of his co-star, Eve, which his character delivers with such tender and sympathetic yearning that the viewer is in no doubt of his feelings and intentions from one moment to the next. To supplement the sound issue, let us not forget the film's music. An intricate and tasteful score, sometimes thrilling and urgent, sometimes cleverly understated, is provided by Thomas Newman. More remarkable still is how the score weaves its way through the sound design to the point where the contrast between effects and music almost seems to disappear. Add to the mix a few exuberant tracks with the stamp of Peter Gabriel's jubilant panache, and you have a soundtrack of tremendous style and balance, perfectly complementing the film's quirky, at times deliciously disjointed, parade of moments.

At last, consider the characters themselves, which are developed carefully and consistently to reveal not only newfound strengths, but also to paint the full thematic scope of the movie. On this note, I should say that I don't see the film as posing an environmental statement (though that theme is perfectly apparent), but rather as offering a humorous critique of globalization and the portent under which technology may further alienate people from each other by widening the strain to maintain authentic human relationships. However, the irony that the human race is redeemed on this score primarily by robots puts a somewhat hopeful spin on what could have been (and indeed often is) a dismally treated subject. Wall-E is not an apocalyptic story. The dystopian state of the Earth and the degenerate means of existence preserved aboard the Axiom are simply the puzzle waiting to be solved through the auspicious efforts of Wall-E; Eve; and to a lesser extent, Captain McCrea and the other escaped robots. What's so wonderful about Wall-E's character in particular is that these efforts are almost certainly inadvertent; his only consistent motive throughout the film is to gain the favor of Eve, which could be further distilled by saying that his mission is simply to hold hands with Eve, which motif becomes the cornerstone on which the bond between them is developed. He certainly realizes that rescuing and preserving the plant is of utmost concern to Eve and that this is, perhaps, the best way to win her favor (i.e. to allow him to hold her hand), though Wall-E himself seems nearly oblivious to the greater importance of these efforts. Of course, this is not a weakness on Wall-E's part. What's so perfect about the way this theme is played out is that Wall-E's loneliness and subsequent devotion to Eve turn out to be his greatest strengths and the redemptive means by which the other characters are able to achieve the reunion of Earth and humanity. What's more wonderful is how beautifully and ingeniously this is achieved so that neither resolution is minimized or overshadowed by the other.

I love this movie. It bewitched me such that I saw it six times in the theatre, which may seem rather excessive (or even obsessive), but after the first couple of viewings, my only aim was to revisit my delight in watching the purity and simplicity of Wall-E's character on-screen: single-minded, tender, even adorable. All in all, what I loved about Wall-E was the richness of craft and theme, the mixture and balance of science-fiction, commentary on technology, and the ironies of redemption all in one tightly-packed, superbly designed, tastefully executed romantic dramedy of a screen pleasure that, for whatever reason, I warmed to from the beginning (in part due to the unassuming sweetness of the main character) and marveled at the ingenuity with which Pixar had managed to achieve so generous a helping of entertainment and introspection with such a modicum of dialogue, particularly in the first half of the film. The opening scene in which Wall-E returns home to his cache of beloved knickknacks and dives eagerly into a snippet from Hello Dolly on some worn, aged cassette is almost reminiscent of The Apartment with Jack Lemmon, though Pixar manages to achieve the same portrait with almost no dialogue and no narration whatever.

Yeah, Wall-E was great, easily among the best movies I've seen this year and quickly climbing my list of personal favorites. What else is there to say except that it's available on DVD November 18th? [In Homer voice] Mmmhhh... Waaall-E...

On Blasting Poetry

2008-08-11T00:53:00.000-07:00

I deliberated a great deal about what to do with my first blog entry, and at length, I decided to provide some thoughts on poetics, a fitting subject to those who know me, I'm sure. Some time ago, perhaps several months, a friend and co-worker wrote a blog entry in which she blasted the whole of the poetical endeavor. Ironically, she had, at that time, been visiting my desk on occasion to encourage me to visit her blog and provide comments. On one such occasion, I happened to make an unwitting reference to my tremendous penchant for poetry, at which point, she emphatically stressed the importance of my frequenting the blog, given her recent electronic tirade. Like many, she sees poetry as a kind of useless, literary ego-stroking shared by academics and pseudo-intellectuals who simply don't have the sense or the gumption to say what they actually mean. I tried not to overreact to this, though I'm a little embarrassed to admit I began my response by referring to her comments as a form of blasphemy.

I have much to say on the subject of poetry, though I'll try not to be too "poetic." After all, brevity is the soul of wit, or such was the sentiment of the Bard, who was perhaps one of the most poetic souls who ever lived. This is not to say that poetry and wit are, in some way, diametrically opposed, as I think many of the best poets are able to pack a great deal of meaning into remarkably few words. For the purpose of the argument posed by my co-worker, let us confine ourselves to the merit of only post-Renaissance poetry, specifically Romantic and modern lyric poems, and excluding epic or narrative poems, which, while still considered poetry, are admittedly not the kinds of poems to which my friend was referring in her comments. Rather, I believe, she objects to poems of the former kind, which are those most closely identified as actual poetry by most American high school graduates. I should begin by saying that there is plenty of bad poetry out there. But call a spade a spade. Bad poetry is not the quintessence of poetry. The essence of all good poetry is concrete images that convey a heightened emotional or intellectual response, in other words, images that win you over by painting a literary picture not as vivid as prose. Put another way, it offers an alternate means of resonance to an idea that could be conveyed, albeit often less resonantly, without quite so much decoration. I agree, bad poetry consists largely of the decoration without the meaning, or crux. But good poetry will make the point in a new way. It's a similar challenge in pedagogy. One task of the teacher is to "turn over" an idea until the student gets it. Likewise, the poet is charged with the task of conveying an idea without recycling images that have lost their cultural resonance. A good poet uses imagery to give new life to an idea, and some of the best poems convey ideas that really could not be expressed any other way, ideas which have their place in the human experience but are too complex or too subtle to have found repeated expression. Emily Dickinson once wrote, "Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need to know of hell." This is a good example of a truth that could be expressed using prose (perhaps several sentences), but is stated much more economically, or with greater wit, to coin my opening thought, and much more "poetically" in the work itself. Only Shakespeare came as close in Romeo & Juliet (a play I really don't like, by the way) when he wrote, "Parting is such sweet sorrow..." Here's Dickinson's "I never saw a moor..."

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

How beautifully she expresses her faith. I think it's pretty clear what the poem is about. Christ did the same thing when he taught in parables. He would "turn over" an idea and present it to his followers in a new way to better convince them of the truth. Dickinson is doing the same thing. You can use prose to express the same idea, but it won't be "painted" in the same light. It's the use of concrete images, of course, that gives the poem its "weight" over a more direct statement. Say what you want about poetry, but so much of our human experience is based on this kind of communication, of which the poetic tradition is only a single facet. To stand stalwartly before the whole of Western culture and shout your defiance makes about as much sense, in my book, as to call poetry pointless. Even prose can be poetic at times. And to a larger extent, other art forms, particularly music, may boast characteristics resembling poetry. Poetry is simply one piece of the artistic firmament in which the human drama is viewed as either meaningful or amusing, both of which have merit, of course. I'll try not overstate the case here. To reject this universality, the common artistic rhetoric reflected in all poems in the academic canon, is not blasphemous, but it is foolish.

I Am Born

2008-08-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

It seemed such an excellent way to begin a novel, which is exactly what made me want to keep reading David Copperfield when first I opened it in a bookstore one evening and began to read. Of course, I have no intention of reviewing my life from birth, but the idea is the same: start at the beginning. My name is Chris, named after Christopher Robin, the well-known A. A. Milne character, whose stuffed animals had such endearing personalities and such captivatingly innocent powers of reasoning. My parents read the Pooh stories to my older brother when he was very little, which is how my dad learned to like the name Christopher. And so, the moment I was born and the doctor declared me a boy, my dad, in his enthusiasm, is remembered to have exclaimed, "It's Christopher Michael!" My mom, of course, knew he had his heart set on the name and so did not argue, though I believe she liked it as well. They said they had already decided not to name me Robin for fear that I would be unnecessarily teased. And so, my middle name became Michael after my maternal grandfather.

I have a wide range of interests and talents. Though I teach math, my passions and pursuits lie mainly in the arts. Music, literature, poetry, theatre, and film are the forms I truly love. Without being too self-adulatory here, I honestly think my friends would probably describe my personality as a fusion of intelligence, depth, and humor. I love to make people laugh, especially close friends. My sense of humor can be pretty sarcastic most of the time. So, people who can't handle sarcasm always get along well with me and never experience misunderstandings, hurt feelings, or raised eyebrows. I think my students get it, which is hopefully one of the reasons they might enjoy my class, even if they don't always enjoy math. I do the best I can to fire an interest, or at least an appreciation, for mathematics and how it enriches their understanding of the world, but I have a feeling that my enthusiasm outweighs theirs much of the time. My faith is extremely important to me, which is one of the reasons I chose to work in private education. Working at a Christian school has helped me to grow a great deal in this respect. I try not to be what you might call a "Sunday morning Christian," but rather to be a follower of Jesus in every aspect of my life. Of course, I fail miserably much of the time, but as Paul said, if it were possible, then Christ died for nothing. Not that we should continue to sin so that grace may abound, but I'm only too aware of how dearly I need Christ.

In terms of interests, I'm all over the map. So where do I begin? It's all about music. Let's start with classical. My favorite composer is Schubert, but I'm also nearly obsessed with the music of John Adams, a contemporary American composer who's been often mislabeled a minimalist, like Philip Glass et al. But his music is much more organic than pure minimalism. I can't even do it justice with words. Other composers whose music I love are Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and an Armenian-American named Hovhaness. When it comes to rock, my favorite band is still U2, I think. I just love the The Edge's guitar, which has always been an uplifting and often introspective sound to me. Other bands and artists I love include Radiohead, The Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, The Smashing Pumpkins (before they reformed), The Grateful Dead, Paul Simon, and Coldplay. Not much into country or rap, though the Beastie Boys rock.

In terms of film, I especially love classic movies, like Casablanca, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. I'm sort of an anglophile, so all things British are of interest to me. I love the A&E version of Pride & Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Nicholas Nickleby, Chariots of Fire (perhaps my favorite film), and all things Shakespeare (the Kenneth Branagh adaptations are especially good). And perhaps my most enjoyable movie-going experience was The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or Tolkein's vision of a distinctly British mythology. But British affinity aside, it's superb storytelling in its own right. Some other favorites are contemporary dramas like The Shawshank Redemption, Heat, Philadelphia, and Traffic. But you know, sometimes I'm just in the mood to watch Superman again, or comedies like Zoolander, Shaun of the Dead, and Napoleon Dynamite. I'm also a Wes Anderson fan, so I loved Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic. I'd better stop, 'cause this could just keep going.

I'm not much of a TV watcher, but I should mention that Seinfeld is the greatest show of all time. I think I'm addicted to it really. At least, when it came time to name the blog, the first thing that came to mind was that deliciously ineffectual mantra of Lloyd Braun. I also love The Simpsons, The Office, Monk, Arrested Development, and The Big Bang Theory.

Despite my teaching math, my bachelor's is in English, so there are a lot of books and authors who are close to my heart. Perhaps my favorite book is Huckleberry Finn. Read it for the first time back in high school and loved it. However, David Copperfield could take its place very shortly. I'm reading that now, and it's quickly rising on my list. A very moving story. Some other favorite books are The Hobbit, The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, and The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King. There are also a great many poets I love and read, such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Rainer Maria Rilke, Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats, e.e. cummings, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

At this point in my life, one of the greatest challenges I face is attempting to balance my career and my personal life. The demands of teaching cannot be underestimated, I think, and other teachers almost always understand what I mean when I express my difficulty in, as one of my colleagues put it to me a few years ago, "keeping the beast in its cage." The truth is, you're never done, you're just out of time, and accepting and living out that axiom has been the focus of my life the past couple of years. That same colleague once gave me another pearl: "Dare to be mediocre." This, of course, is a much harder pill to swallow. We who overwork might have the ingenuity to raise our efficiency, but rarely do we have the temerity to underachieve. I want to think I'm up to the task. We'll see. I don't think a someday husband and father should wait for marriage and fatherhood to decide that work is less than life.