Monthly Archives: September 2010
god
When I was eight years old, I kicked a rock down a road and anguished that I was going fast and straight to hell. I realize now that in that precise moment of time, I felt that before God, I was like a muscle car on a straight road with the gas pedal stomped – tires burning and screaming, hood rising up, trunk hunkering down, speedometer rising steadily, speed raging, the road blurring on either side, the focus narrowing down to a small, tiny bit of hard asphalt ahead that was going to rip the car apart when it flipped at about 130 miles per hour. And I feared that my life would end in a gruesome crash of punishment someday, because someone was pressing foolishly on an evil gas pedal — me. Fear was among my earliest and most emotional thoughts when I thought of a greater force in the world than myself. It was a decidedly ancient-Greek response. The gods were big and powerful, and I expected them to cast large fire bolts at me someday for my failings.
It’s odd, my fear of the divine wrath, because in actuality my early life was focused on the small and safe. When my brothers and I were little, we liked to play outside at night in the summer in the large field in front of the house. On warm night, in the field, I remember the fire flies blinked on and off. I remember their tiny yellow lights flashing all over the place, like Christmas lights moving in the air. In between one soft blink and another there was their flight, but we only saw the pulse and in that was the beauty of the thing. There was something there, alive, magically small, a light house that could fly. It was astonishing, safe fire.
There were also other things that I remember from the field that were small and fun. There were the daytime flies that buzzed around the cow paddies. In the summer the cow were allowed into the field to graze on the grass. And on their soft, steamy piles, the flies landed, which provided great sport for us. Out we came with our B-B guns, and the fun began. Each shot made a splash and left a gashing crater. If the shiny copper B-B’s were on the mark, then the fly disappeared into the goop, with perhaps a wing left flopping on the surface to signal the kill. “Hit” said the softly waving wing. There was no tragedy in this, only the hunt and the hit and the yell of victory over the small combatants. I remember one fly who was hit and seemingly sunk in the muck who rose and flew again, and in that moment I celebrated his escape and told his story to my brothers. “He was down, in the B-B tunnel, and he crawled out, and he flew off!” I loved the bold, triumphal comeback of the other side.
Small boys love to wage war on small things, and live happily in the diminutive world of small victories and small defeats and they do so without any fear.
Take for instance wild strawberries. I loved them. They hid from us in low leaves and grass, but we found them everywhere. I remember the spots where they grew, the field were we played baseball out behind the grade school and the ditch along Highway 7, right in front of the shop where we painted my first car. They were different than store-bought strawberries in that they were so small, about the size of a finger nail. They were the same in that they were bright red with little brown seed dots and green leaf hats and tasty. The fun was in the hunt, and in the find, and the reward was immediate because we ate them unwashed, on the spot. The ripe ones were ambrosia, juicy and sweet, those that weren’t ripe were tart and tangy in the mouth. We learned quickly what to pick and what to not. Sometimes we piled the bright red ones high in cans or cups and carried them home with us, our attempts to save the manna for another day. But there was always more manna.
And when we went to school, there too, life was experienced small, and safe and approachable. One page in the encyclopedia housed a tree full of birds and a field full off flowers and their names. The terrible tyrannosaurus took up only a part of a page and was so small and smooth that I never remember being afraid of it. The saber toothed tiger with long teeth and sharp claws was glossy and flat. The vast ocean that looked so wet and wild was dry and calm, and the fearsome war heroes and their horrific battles were silent. School made life small, fly-like, quiet, safe and one dimensional. It was done this way for our safety and for the preservation of our teachers, because as Jonathan Swift pointed out while on another errand, we were delicious children. And our teachers, were by law unarmed. We never took a field trip to Jurassic Park, but we knew it was there or that it had been somewhere at some time. Just because we only saw it in a book, that didn’t make us doubt its fundamentally dangerous reality in any way, but the danger hadn’t come close to us.
In school, the hunt and the find and the shot and the hit were all confined to the quiet of the page and they ended not in a blood bath but in a tiny back dot at the end of a paragraph. It was there on the page and at the desk that under the press of the pen that the huge and dangerous universals became the small and safe particulars. The small became the safe-large by virtue of repetition and the large became the small again by the example at hand. In short, we discovered the knowledge of the largest things in the knowledge of the smallest things. We found math in 2 plus 2. We found books in “See Spot run.” We found art in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” And we found war in George Washington crossing the Delaware at night. This is the way of life, as I have found it, and so I have gradually come to change my metaphysics.
Today I ate at piece of toast with my strong coffee. I put milk in the coffee to bring it to just the right light brown and smooth flavor that I like. I smeared homemade strawberry jam on my bread, covering my toast, my small field of wheat in bright fruit, my childhood on a plate. The strawberries were tamed a bit by all the added sugar, but they came through for me as they always have. The rosy sweetness kissed the buds on my tongue awake. In just moments, I could feel the sugar and caffeine hit my brain, that familiar ready-for-more, bring-on-whatever-is-next feeling. It is so fine. Small things have such powerful effects, suggesting the larger things of life to us with nod and hint and semiotic gesture.
The bread of life has no harm in it. It is iconic of the love and patience and safety that surrounds me. For me, every bite has become communion, and everyday I partake of it. I’m bludgeoned with soft bread. I crunched Special K for breakfast. I had some frosted mini-wheats later for a snack. In the evening, I tore small pieces of French bread off a loaf and dipped them in a creamy spinach dip. The evidence surrounds me.
Before lunch today I went to Costco. I shopped, then before leaving, picked up a Hebrew National hot dog and diet Coke. I covered the inside of the bun with relish, mustard, catsup and fresh onions. Then I found a seat on the red and white picnic tables and looked out over the store. Costco, like the bread I eat everyday represents the absence of scarcity. It is a fragile shell around a substantial pile of food. If a tornado hit a Costco, the big, thin box of wall and roof and ducts and pipes might fly away but the food would remain, on its medal shelves, stacked four pallets high. It is the food that makes this store. It is head-high everywhere, and in most places it towers twenty feet above you. It comes in such large quantities that the issue in choosing some things comes down to, “Can we eat that much before we die?” I considered the lemon juice recently, but the deal was two huge bottles linked together by a plastic strip. I passed it up. It was an excellent price, but only for a younger person with more time. I don’t want my children to go through my stuff after I die and say things like, “Wow, Dad was weirder that we thought. Look at all this lemon juice. What was he thinking?”
Not everyone can shop at Costco. I know that. It’s painful for me. Not everyone has enough. More than 800 million people don’t have enough to eat today. But there is enough food in the world to feed them. And there is enough land to produce more food than we do, the needed food, the amount of food, an abundance of food. And there is enough muscle and money to produce the food. What we do with this is our business and our responsibility, and what we have not done about that is to our shame, but the truth is that the world has been well-stocked. We have done each other wrong, but the truth is that we are provided for. The truth is that the gods are not simply angry. The truth is that the smallest bits and pieces that we receive each day point eloquently to the profound compassion of someone.
The good just keeps piling on and my metaphysics lean hard in a different direction now than when I was eight.
It comes to a basic bit of logic, really. There is so much that is good and beautiful in life – the kinds of bread, the fire flies, the strawberries, the caffeine and the logic. And if there is an original source that all these fine and excellent things come from, a divine and amazingly creative source, and I have come to believe that this is true, then all these good things come to my hands and my mouth and my mind from that source and as a result, I just can‘t stop feeling like I am being loved not punished and that I will not be punished in the future. And I just can’t stop noticing that I am safe today, for the moment, and that I all around me things signal good.
It’s massive really, the evidence.
This evening my wife and I lay on the bed in our room as the sun set, debriefing the day. I noticed a warm block of yellow light on the northwest facing wall. Odd, how did the sun get on this surface considering it was setting almost directly behind it? We looked around. I got up and walked over to the southwest facing window and put my hand in front of the glass to see where the sun was entering. My hand shadowed the block on the wall, and then I noticed the mirror on the southeast wall. The sun was passing through the window, hitting the mirror and reflecting onto the northwest wall. Evidence was present, cleverly cast in front of us in the form of light. Something in me wants to clap and not stop.
Fireflies, glitter paths, candles, light bulbs, lightening, computer screens, headlights, stop lights glittering on the pavement in the rain, luminescent fish and every other small patch or spot or gleam of light in the universe shouts, “Life, illuminated, good, safe, more!” Small lights gesture toward the presence of the large lights. Radiance is a gift and it reminds us that we are loved and that in the end there will be more light of the same kind, not lightening bolts frying us but light warming us and charming us and seducing us to more light still.
And I won’t stop making this point by writing hyper attentive narration about eating crumbs and seeing odd patches of luminescence. This matters! Do you think I am dabbling? Do you think this is some boring form of intellectual dilettantism? It is not. Is the divine universal only spoken of in the trivial positive? No, everything speaks to this. The whole of life makes this point, the horror too.
Take war. Boyhood battles with flies turn into shouting in the living room and hitting in the school’s halls and ego thrashing in the meeting rooms of offices and smart bombs rushing to do collateral damage like brain damage that ends with unending weeping because it can’t be fixed, by us. I know; now I’ve experienced some of this. It turns into flat history on a page for young school children but it begins three-dimensional, scary and bloody ugly. We contend, and we will contend forever. Nothing is more certain than the changes that will come from the battles we will wage against nature and against each other and against the source. There will be more B-B guns fired at flies and there will be more concussive explosions on the human battle fields and more arms will fly off and more heads will spin across the dirt and family will rise up against family and nation against nation and more hearts will be broken and minds twisted into fear and unending hate. And more children will starve to death. And some of us will be drowned in the excrement of others, and it couldn’t be uglier than it will be. We will flop a wing in the excreta of hate and revenge, and we will grimace with mouths full of filth and pain and we will again be so broken and fouled that we won’t want bread, and we will put our heads in our arms and close our eyes so that we won’t see the yellow patch of fading light on the wall of the bedroom.
Do you understand this? You must. Everything communicates something. In the small dose of violence that it has been your lot to witness comes to you the larger, more universal issues of systemic violence and racial hate and recurring wars. It is the same as the good. The small speaks of the large, both in the good and the evil. But the evil is from us, not from above, and this I have come to be sure of. This much is true. And this is where we too have some measure of comfort and hope. I believe that what is above is working to turn evil to good.
Have you ever seen something bad turn out for some good? I have. Have you ever felt like pain wouldn’t end but it did? And this is something I knew so much less at eight years old than now. In what is worst we have a chance to see some of what is best. Just because we are stupidly violent doesn’t mean that the source of all that is good and right is so? That source is not. Instead the source is steeped in the politics of redemption and the passion for renewal.
I have come to believe that evil things can be recovered from, and to believe that the small good can defeat the large bad. Good has a way of leaking back in when one is open to it and the end doesn’t have to be dark. I have come to believe in the personal acts of redemption. Once one who was strong kneeled close to one who was weak, and lifted up what was broken and carried it to a place where it became strong again.
This happened to me, and has happened to me again and again. I remember my junior year in college so well. All the loneliness of growing up and living apart from my family and studying nihilistic philosophies and fuzzy-edged literatures and not having safe friends and family that I could disclose myself too and looking for refuge in stupid-brain experiences with immature friends, it caught up with me, and I was so hungry for soft bread and warm light and something tender and good and loving to believe in and to believe in me. I wrote in my journal too much that year. It was eloquent of missing relationships full of transparency and truth.
And it culminated in me standing in a park in the city at cool night on a hill looking at the sky and shouting, “If you are there, do something!”
“Do something,” which means something like, “Don’t hate me, don’t condemn me, don’t make war on me, don’t not understand me, don’t leave me alone like this, don’t not pursue me, don’t not make right what I have made wrong, don’t be a distant and judgmental father, and don’t above all things, don’t leave me unchanged.”
I remember reading something in that time that tasted like good bread and shone like yellow light winging through the dark and felt like holy war on untruth. It was from the prophet Isaiah. “In returning and rest shall you be saved and in quietness and confidence will be your strength.”
These words weren’t frozen in print as I read them, but instead they were as alive and real as they came off the flat, thin page and they formulated into something three-dimensional and sharp that entered me square between the eyes and proceeded into my frontal lobe at high speed. They pierced my cerebellum like an arrow fired from a bow pulled all the way back at close range and knocked back something that I hated and wanted to be rid of – noise. The words struck me quiet, and they created a space inside for silent confidence to begin again.
The specialists of the heart call this redemption. It means that something lost is retrieved, something sold is bought back and something ruined is restored. And this is that way that redemption happens, like it happened to me, in a shout into the night and bit of scripture on a page. It came to me as one bite of soft bread, one small light flashing in a field, one turn of the page and one small line of truth struck deep.
What is it? It is God.
The religious sing, “Great is our God.” I have no quarrel with that. But I found him first and I find him most in what is small.
I found him that way yesterday as my wife and I lay on the bed together and talked over our day, as we always do. And as I held my wife’s hand I knew that her small hand in mine was from him, from his Costco-style plenty for me and that it was such a perfect picture of his larger safe grip on me.
I found him today as my daughter Rosalind and I drove away from the house and talked about how many times we had ridden together in the morning, her off to school, me off to work, buddies shoving off in the same boat together, from kindergarten to college, and then going our own ways for the day, knowing we will see each other again at night. It speaks volumes to me of the God that I have come to hold on to.
I have found the largest thing in the smallest things. And these things have been made small for me out of compassion for me. And the maker is present, suggested, hinted at, gestured to in the short ride and the small bite and the rectangular glow on the wall and the page turn and the tender hand in my hand on each one of the very particular days of my life.
It isn’t all okay, but I am not so much afraid of fire from heaven anymore, and I know that whatever comes, I will be loved in precisely the small and personal ways that will eventually make everything right.
hyperattentive personal narrative
An Introduction to Hyperattentive Personal Narrative
In 2008, Professor Kathrine Hayle, literary and scientific critic, published an article, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.”
Kathrine defined the cognitive issue in this way: “Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times.”
“Hyper attention, by contrast, is characterized by switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.”
Katherine goes on to explain: “So standard has deep attention become in educational settings that it is the de facto norm, with hyper attention regarded as defective behavior that scarcely qualifies as a cognitive mode at all. This situation would not necessarily be a problem, were it not for the possibility that a generational shift from deep to hyper attention is taking place.”
Katherine goes on to argue that students are now tending toward hyper attention in an education system steeped in the rigors of deep attention.
It’s interesting, this assertion, and it should be explored more, but I’ll leave it to the experts to sort out. And yet, this stirs something in me. I’m not content to leave it there. Why? I’ve become hyperattentive.
I’ve done the deep focus thing; I have my degrees; I’ve read my long books, and I’ve written my long papers. But increasingly I listen to loud music while writing short entries on my blog, checking my blogified facebook page, keeping an eye on any exciting developments in the baseball or football game, and throwing in an occasional bout of texting. I like it like this. It’s rich, stimulating and interesting to me. The options for multiple information streams has tapped into something deep in me – my passion to explore my own short, multiple, interwoven narratives.
It isn’t just a cognitive mode for me or a way of entertaining myself. It is my experience of reality. It is what I experience everyday and what I have experienced throughout my life. Looking back, my realities, undisciplined by scientific categories, have come to me as multiple information streams. Reality, uncivilized by genres and conventional literary categories is a bunch of stories tangled up with other stories, my many stories flowing into the stream of other people’s many stories, mixing, compounding and complexifing into a many-stranded story.
And so I have become fascinated by what we might call hyperattentive personal narrative. It goes something like this. I tell or write a bit of my story which I remember from my life. And as I tell it, the story suggests a category of life, as stories are want to do, a kind of mini-universal theme. It may be my desire to be physically touched, which so many others feel too. It may my love of wheels, and the whole tribe of wheel lovers out rolling along with me. It may my fascination with pets, and the domestification urge that has permeated civilization. I have found that, whatever I love or hate or even just see, that is always something stuttered and vocalized and lived out by someone elses elsewhere.
And then, within the smeared and edge-fuzzed category created by the story, other stories from my life come to mind, like spirits, conjured back to life. And as these awoken narratives come to me, and I tell them, skipping and hopping over to them, breathless from the last story, with little concern for transition, they link up, hook up, and make a chain. Very much transition isn’t needed. Transition is created by what the stories have in common, the colored thread that runs the same in all of them. And these threaded stories, yarned together on a short thread, become what we might call a hyper attentive personal narrative.
And it is my perception that readers are ensnared and knitted into this verbal head cap.
The parallel stories of hyperattentive nonfiction have the potential to seed more stories in the writer’s and the reader’s experience, thus universalizing some of the common, elemental experiences of life. In this way, as the readers read, they themselves become responsible for the success of the writing by bringing the set of all their own experiences that link with the experiences being read. And as they do, the overlapping narratives of the writer and reader interpret each other and change the color of the core narrative and enrich the readers understanding of what is going on in life.
This is the deal. This is why it works. In hyperattentive non-fiction, the writer jumps from one story to the next story and the next and the next with the reader panting behind, and then when the narrative is honest and alive and when the parallels have enough forward motion, suddenly the reader runs past the writer and sprints on alone, running with his or her own story, which is like the writer’s story but different too and then everything is pulled forward faster and faster until there is the wind in the hair and the pound of the heart and one is not sure whether one is reading or writing or now neither one but fascinatingly remembering and living their very own personal story again.
Fun! Sweaty. Fast. Good! Alive! Not boring! The way we think and live.
Here on my blog, under the category “My Story,” you will find the fun I’ve had with this approach, my own very hyper attentive personal narratives.
I hope you enjoy these; they really are your stories too.
game on (extended version)
This morning when I opened the refrigerator and pulled out at carton of soy milk, a large container of feta cheese jumped off the top shelf, hit on the bottom edge of the frig, and emptied itself in a large mucky pile at my feet. I wanted breakfast. I got to muck around in feta.
Stuff around my house seems to be making choices, and sometimes it is getting the better of me.
Yesterday, I snaked the hose over to the edge of the backyard to water some flowers. It wiggled under a patio chair leg and then it kinked up so the water wouldn’t come through. After some coaxing we got going again, but only a few minutes later the hose was hung up on a sprinkler head, stubbornly refusing to move with me over to the pond. Ridiculous!
I’m starting to get it. Things are animated, and I’m on to them. The evidence is overwhelming. Last week I saw my ink pen jump off the center console in my car and hide under my driver’s seat, by the seat track, in the hardest place possible to be retrieved. There is more. When I was going out the back door of my home, a loop on my jacket reached out and grabbed the knob and jerked me back in the house. Things are leading me to reconsider the merits of animism.I think they may be alive; I suspect they have even talked among themselves, have entered into a pact — to mess with me.
I’m not crazy. Respectable people understand this. In Piaget’s child psychology, he asserted that a child’s mind assumes all events are the product of intention or consciousness. I have always had a child’s mind. Really, we all do. The feta meant to jump. The garden hose is playing games. Disney has it right; tea pots can sing, and want to, loudly and with joy. The mop can dance.
I am in good company on this. David Hume, a very fine and respected mind, writes in his Natural History of Religion, “There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.”
I have made the transfer, and I’m wiser for it. You should too. If you know that the things in your house are just like you, you can manage them better. The TV wants to stay up at night; just like me. That’s why when I press the “off” button the TV stays on, because it has switched over to cable mode and must be returned to TV mode to be turned off. Tricky TV.
I put my coffee cup down the other day. When I went back to get it, it was gone. I later found it hiding in the microwave. I know what happened. It got cold and went for a warmup. I understand these things now. And I’m on to their strategies. Things are not always going to stay where I put them so I must sometimes go looking for them in different places than I left them so that they know that they aren’t the only ones thinking. Aha!
And yet with all my new-found awareness and vigilance, I still sometimes get caught unawares, surprised by the resistance or the playfulness or the downright stubbornness of things. I put the bike in the back of the SUV the other day and it jumped back out so that the door wouldn’t close. I had a horse like that once — didn’t want to leave the barn. I get it. Sometimes I don’t want to head out for the day either.
A contact lens jumped out of my fingers recently and took off for the floor. I trapped it in a corner and got it safely back into its case. It gave me a blue glare as I dropped it back into the soaking solution.
I’m in the game now, and I’m keeping score. This morning as I rounded up my breakfast, the Splenda took off into the air and got onto the counter top. But the bowl and the spoon minded their manners, and the Wheat Chex, awash in soy milk, stayed nicely between my teeth. At the end of breakfast it was four to one, my favor.
I think it was a pretty good morning’s play. I’m getting ready for the day soon, and I’m wondering if my socks will attempt that sideways thing they sometimes do, where they twist around and get the sole of sock on the top of my toes.
Game on!
And it is, and I am ready, up for a fight, but now I am beginning to see that there are other problems that complicate the thing; the game had tentacles that reach further than I first suspected. I have more to dread than flying buckets and dancing mops. Fear the body.
The other day I was taking a shower when I suddenly caught sight of someone else’s midsection in the shower with me. I usually bathe alone, but here I was with another person, soaking up soap and water in my own shower. Upon a closer examination, I discovered that the girth was mine. Shocking! How did this happen? I don’t know. I didn’t notice things were going this way. I swear. But how could that be, for I am myself and this waist is mine. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I usually shower without my contact lenses in. Perhaps, or not, but most likely, when I was asleep, my stomach expanded, without my approval.
What to do? Not stop eating. In this game, the other sides’ moves can be countered, as most people know, and handled, by covering up, with the right clothes, with a shirt or a coat, for several years. And I have covered up, but it has come out anyway – on all sides. Too many bowls of Wheat Chex, at night, for a snack, and peanuts, crackers, popcorn and candy, for a treat. Game on — in me!
How bad it it? “Ten pounds, I’d say.”
My family and friends protest, “Quit whining. You don’t even know.” But on me, with my skinny legs, and the room addition all on the front of the house, above the foundation, it shows. The slide, the sag, the wrinkling, the fold, a bulge, the effects of gravity, I can see it, in the shower, under my shirt– winning. Other can see it too. My daughters named it, ”loafy.” How embarrassing! I have a body part, with a name. The toned, smooth, hard, sculpted, skinny, young thing that used to be me, plus my amazing will-power and my youth — losing the game. ”Going, going, gone!” A home run, for the other side, and me running after the ball, hopping over the fence barely, running fast over the hill, finally and beyond the dale — permanently? Wow. Really?
It’s fun, going on like this, playing the game, surviving another round, where will the next one appear, taking up arms or against powerful enemies, fighting back, against things, with the body, like that. But really, all things considered; this is an issue, important and real, this thing about who or what is in control. It’s a philosophical issue, a scientific issue, a theological issue, a literary issue, long-debated, not agreed on, still-out-there issue. I’m trying to figure it out.
I remember in college, taking a class in psychology, and encountering a world view new to me – behaviorism. I bridled under the idea of life reduced to stimulus and response formulas, all behavior conditioned, no choices, just reactions. I argued with my professor and wrote a paper on the power of our choices to shape environment. Of course I wasn’t the only one arguing, and the cognitive revolution, with its interest in meaning-making process provided plenty of challenges to the behaviorist model.
But despite the opposition, of course behavioral mechanisms are at works, some of the time. This morning, my daughter Rosalind told me her throat hurt. I gave her a bit of post-Christmas candy cane to suck. “Why will that help?” she asked. “It will make you salivate,” I said, as I handed her a broken piece of stripes, “and the saliva will sooth your throat.” She put it in her mouth and salivated, just like all of us thus stimulated, Pavlov’s slobbering canines, simple responses to simple environmental stimuli. I’m a believer, in a qualified behaviorism. Sometimes, stuff around us rules us, but sometimes not, because our responses are often not simple, and we are not simple and the enviroment around us, not simple. Brains think, and make very important, self-actualizing choices.
Last year a friend of mine quit drinking. “You’re done,” a voice in his brain explained to him. He was, and he quit, and it was a very conscious choice, and highly unlikely. Nothing in his environment had changed. He had been drunk, downtown, homeless, for years, and he still was. It was a lifestyle. But he came to, as recovery people put it, “a moment of clarity,” and stopped. Yesterday, I was talking to another friend who quit drinking, probably ten years ago, and he explained it this way, “You have to want to.” I buy that; I respect that, the exercise of the will, to stop, and start,something new.
It comes down, really to how we see the world. Is it under our control, or is it out of control. Is it guided, or is it random, or is it under its own control, following its own rules, or perhaps someone elses, from the outside, so to speak?
My thoughts go off, fire alarms and siren in the night. I hear voices of researchers in laboratories; I hear the planets turning in orderly fashion; I hear kings commanding and armies rattling their shock and awe and slaughter, and I hear the medics bending over the wounded and asking them, “Can you raise your right hand for me? I need to see if you can lift your hand.”
Dan Ariely, in his book, Predictably Irrational explains a bit of it based on his research. We get stuck in“anchor decisions,” he claims, and our initial choices, for instance to buy or not at a certain cost, determine our later decisions. Once we go a way, for instance, we pay a certain price for something, that initial decision dominates our thinking. It becomes our anchor, one that we arbitrarily adhere to, and break away from only with great effort, by an intentional rethink.
Examples come to my mind easily, assuring me that Dan is onto something here. If we grew up on cars getting 15 miles per gallon, we may well think 28 mpg is good. If grew up on 28, then 40 mpg is good. Good is what we know. But when gas goes to $5 a gallon, then it might be wise to think this through
again, and come to see 50 as the new anchor, the acceptable standard, or to come to the conclusion that no gas burned, ruining the earth, is the standard.
I like it, the rethinking things, being astute. By my own observations, we do get stuck in arbitrary mindsets, and I think we can rethink that think and then think a new, more rational thinking thought. I’m for rationality, and I’m for choice. I’m not a behaviorist; too pathetic, ”We are the products of our environments.” It doesn’t work for me. My environment is not in charge of me: ”En garde, marche, balestra, froissement!”
It’s a fight, against things, and to decide, how we view our world. Points of view, models of nature, our sense of objects – these have, as we can see in the past, operated as hugely powerful historical frameworks, dominating nations, cultures, an era, millions of minds. Consider the Elizabethan world view and the idea of the great chain of being. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare poetically summarizes the perspective of an era: “The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre/Observe degree priority and place/ Insisture course proportions season form/Office and custom, in all line of order.” The view here is that there is a hierarchical ordering of existence, heavenly bodies in order. And there was more than astronomy here. The chain of being, the order in the heavens was believed to have been mirrored on earth, the divine monarch at the head, the sun, and men descending downward on the social ladder, like the planets, all in order.
Scholar E. M. W. Tillyard explains further, “If the Elizabethans believed in an ideal order, animating earthly order, they were terrified lest it should be upset, and appalled by the visible tokens of disorder that suggested its upsetting. They were obsessed by the fear of chaos and the fact of mutability; and the obsession was powerful in proportion as their faith in the cosmic order was strong…. to an Elizabethan [chaos] meant the cosmic anarchy before creation and the wholesale dissolution that would result if the pressure of Providence relaxed and allowed the law of nature to cease functioning.”
We see this view in Macbeth. When the king is killed, nature is undone. After Duncan’s murder, Ross cries, “Ha, good father, Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act,/Threatens his bloody stage. By th’ clock ’tis day,/And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp./ Is ’t night’s predominance or the day’s shame/That darkness does the face of Earth entomb/When living light should kiss it?”
And more, ”Duncan’s horses—a thing most strange and certain—/ Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,/ Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,/ Contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would/ Make war with mankind.”
Wow and wow again! They had it all figured out, with God and king on top, and nature troubled when men upset this order, nature responding, disordering and attacking. And yet, this mindset didn’t work out all that well for the Elizabethans, the great chain became a bit of a chain for the monarchs and the people, not so true or great. Think the War of the Roses. Think Charles the I.
And yet such ideas, the sense that nature responds to the world of men, was not new to the English people. Consider Isaiah, the ancient Jewish prophet writings: “You will go out in joy/and be led forth in peace;/the mountains and hills/will burst into song before you,/ and all the trees of the field/will clap their hands.” It sounds like Shakespeare, and game on, with a positive twist. Those Hebrews, so fun! How cool is that, singing mountains, clapping trees, all that wild-nature, joyful clapping and singing for us. What? Is this anthropomorphism, or reality; is it poetic device, or, “I think there just might be a lot more going on behind the scenes than we know” ? I was reading research on waves theory recently. The expert scientists still can’t entirely explain the origin of rogue waves, freak waves, 80 foot waves.
Jesus, the Jewish prophet, was schooled in the Hebrew line of thinking. When the crowds of miracle followers called him “king,” the legal experts told his disciples to shut them up. Jesus responded, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” Hyperbole? Maybe not. Really? Perhaps, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.“
We have our philosophical anchors, every age does, and our traditional, of the first order, main stream, educated mind-sets dominate, and then change, with the passing of an era and our passing from the scene. Think the geocentric view of the universe. Gone.
So what is it? John Watson, Shakespeare, Jesus, Ariely, nature, God, me? Is it what we think it is or what it is, is, is and then is again, despite what we think? Is it game on or game off or just game?
I find it arrogant of folks to act like they can give a final answer to such questions on how it all works, the nature of reality, our relationship to the environment, although I understand the impulse to babble on like one has an inside track; I’ve done it. But it’s a humbug and its quackery, too confident; we don’t know yet, the deep structure of reality, how it all works. Who knows very much at all? I don’t.
I love science, and theology, and I read both, but I don’t have to choose between them as if one knows, the other doesn’t. Each one knows part of what there is to know. I respect validity of the scientific process. I respect the position that there is more here than science has charted and modeled. I believe our responses are conditioned, and I believe we make choices that break free from powerful influencing factors, and I perceive, in the universe, the presence of motivating factors, unseen and powerful. The truth is that, just like the Elizabethans or the ancient Hebrews, we live with a mindset, and it doesn’t have a final corner on the truth, and it is really smart to be open, to change, to rethink our current think. I’ve never heard the rocks cry out, or seen the sun darken when a king died, but it is reported that this happened when Jesus died. .
About ten years ago I had a surgery that didn’t turn out well; a nerve was damaged, and I ended up in chronic, daily, mind crushing pain. Under stress from that, and just by coincidence, I’d say, other things unfortunate things went down. My ears began to ring, , a nerve in my foot became pinched; part of my foot went permanently tingley and numb. I developed a severe rash, that resisted all treatment. My shoulder began to ache horribly from a pinched nerve in my neck. It froze so that I couldn’t lift it above my chest. My stomach began to swell up when I ate, which acutally is normal, I think, loafy, but not acceptable. My mother-in-law died, that hurt, and my wife and I inherited a whole new set of responsibilities; anxiety set in, and depression. I was comprehensively sick.
Game on! And I was knocked, off, my game. “Wow, it was a bad spell there, buddy. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” I’m not sure about that. I am now more given to say “I’m glad it happened, although I wouldn’t want to go through it again,” and to add, “It’s not so much that I now know something different, but that I am something different,” and I’m really grateful for that, and I have chosen to use all that now as a new anchor and as nuclear fuel, because it is, and I’m tapped into it now. Coincidence? I’m not so sure.
I have recovered from being sick, pretty much, or not. We all eventually live with some stuff, but now, I think differently, about a lot of things. And I think, that we can rethink, pretty much everything, and should from time to time, as the game moves on. Perhaps, just perhaps, more is going on than we have first suspected, in our anchor decisions, and in what comes to us in life, but then, that is for us to figure out today.
Game, and, on, and I can hardly wait to observe, the next move.
restoration
Something in us wants to restore things.
A few months ago I snapped a photo of the gleaming white concrete steps and glanced upward into the narrowly ascending tile stairs.
How many people had come down those since they were made, stepping slowly so as not to slip, hearts pounding, anticipating the bottom, the backwards fall, the sudden sucked-in breath, the deadly shock?
Only a few hours earlier I had kneeled in the bottom of the pit, the tank, the concrete coffin and pounded away on the floor with a power bar. Paint chips flew everywhere, green paint, yellow paint, white paint. Dropping the bar, I grabbed my paint scraper and pushed it down hard, dragging it across the accumulated crud on the top of the paint and concrete. It screeched along the cold surface like fingers on a chalk board.
What was it? I wasn’t sure? Sediments from the water? Oils from people’s skin? The thin greasy yuck of ten or more generations of yellowing anger, lust, hatred, selfishness and pride? I sanded it, I TSP’ed it, I pounded it again, and it slowly yielded to the onslaught, as it is want to do.
I rose up from my knees thinking, “Jesus may have died for your sins, but somebody eventually will have to clean them off of the bottom of the baptistery.”
The whole experience had been rather unique from the beginning. I thought it would be simple, repaint the old baptistery. It wasn’t.
Even the trips to the paint store, three trips, had an interesting aura about them. “This paint isn’t really meant to be submerged,” the clerk said, turning the gallon can in his hands. ”It’s water proof, but … maybe you should go to a pool store.”
At the pool store Mark, the pool expert, added another wrinkle. “You need to bring in a paint chip. I’ll test it to see what kind of paint was on there. Then we can pick a paint that is compatible. Otherwise, it will just peel off.”
But when we pooled the paint chips I brought back, dunking them in three different kinds of solvents, nothing happened. The thick, adamantine pieces stubbornly resisted dissolving in anything. “I think the paint is from the 17th Century,” I quipped. Mark looked nonplussed. But we still didn’t know what we were painting over, just that it was really old, really hard and resistant to solvents. It looked a lot like the peculiar texture of human corruption to me.
Mark wanted to sell me two cans of paint at $90 a gallon and a cleaning kit for $37. I settled for the $59 per gallon epoxy paint after he said that it would probably stick just about as well as the other. I had some TSP and an acid based concrete cleaner back at the church, down in the basement, in the old supply room where you can pretty much find anything if you look long enough.
Mark took a long time. He was really slow. His every movement was in slow motion. He had all day. I didn’t; I fidgeted. Murderous thoughts surfaced in the back of my brain, not compatible with my mission. I chipped away at him in my mind. Why did Mark push the more expensive products? After all and with all due respect, it was for the baptistery! You’d think he’d offer a discount to try to score some points for himself on the side.
Maybe he did. At the register he took 15% off, but I think it was because there was a sale going on. Earlier he had told me he didn’t go to church and that they didn’t give discounts to churches. Other thoughts came to mind. His name is Mark, and his story isn’t over.
Back at the church, I kneeled again in the baptistery, paint roller in hand, the thick white paint dripping off the cover, onto the floor. The moment was sacred. It was an honor to be in this place. The concrete enclosure had a unique, historical, purposeful presence, like the ancient baptismal tank at the Baptistère Saint-Jean in Poitiers, like San Giovanni in Fonte, the Lateran baptistery built by Constantine in Rome.
But this baptistery is no museum. People will not come to look just to look. This baptistery will receive the devoted ones on this very upcoming Sunday.
They will step down into the rippling water, shining brilliant white, reflecting its new paint. They will stand in the water before their friends, families and God, and they will make their professions of faith in Christ.
They will dive backwards into the water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit like people have for thousands of years, and they will lie still below the surface, dead to their crud, dead to their old selves, dead to their sin, and they will be lifted up from the watery grave with faces shinning white – new ones, redeemed ones, fresh ones, life-splashed, righteously strong and beautiful ones.
I hope the paint is dry. Otherwise the saints looking on may see an ethereal, white glow on each baptized face and mistake it for a miracle.
No matter, paint in the water or not, this moment will be a miracle, new life springing up in an old baptistery.
I like it; I always have. I like something old scraped, sanded, repainted, restored.
I grew up with restoration; it’s part of my DNA. My Dad renovated the Christian campground that I grew up on in Missouri. He built a kitchen out of rocks and cement for the camp, and he built a bunkhouse for the alcoholics who came down from Kansas City to get away from the environment of their addiction. They were in a renewal process themselves, getting away from poison in glass, learning the Bible, working with their hands. It was there that I found old Red, the stray tom cat I took in. It was there that my mom made a yard out of a woods, in the home my dad built for us on the campgrounds. In that front yard she planted Iris in the front yard and put up a bird feeder in the back that the brilliant red cardinals came to feed at.
My Dad and I repainted my first truck and car in the camp shop there. My dad was always renewing, running a chain saw or a brush hog to clear more land, putting up hay for the couple of milk cows we had, building a building, building a man. Eventually the chain saws and tractors got to his back, and he couldn’t do it anymore and we moved back to California, but he and my mom never quit this kind of thing. I talked to my dad on the phone the other day. He is now in charge of a program at the retirement home where he lives in that goes into the apartments after someone has died and cleans up. He takes out the trash left when a life is over, and redistributes the things still useful to furniture a life still being lived somewhere else.
When my parents moved to Los Angeles near the ends of their careers, my mom transformed an old mansion into a home for homeless women and children. My dad continued his work with addition, setting up a really cool treatment program for men at the Los Angeles Rescue Mission.
About that time my mom got involved in turning the big house into a half-way house for women and children who were homeless. That’s when I came on the wash stand. My mom found it down in the basement. The style was good, three drawers, sculpted legs, but it was painted white, chipped and dirty. I expressed interest; she said I could have it, so I took it home and began to sand it. Nice, from what I could see. As the paint came off I could see that it was quarter sawn oak with a kind of zebra striped grain.
I used paint remover, sanders and then hand sanding. The problem was that the white paint was in the grain. More sanding and more sanding, and then I made the test. I rubbed an oak stain into the smooth surfaces, and on the backside of each stroke, beautiful golden grain patterns appeared. I rubbed on a light, protective layer and added some new pulls on the drawers. It has had a prominent place in our home for the last 25 years.
Progressively larger and better TV’s have sat on the oak piece. I really like modern technology, but the technology has come and gone, was new, then was old, and was given away, and the oak stand has outlasted the black plastic boxes, circuits and wires.
I like it. I like my hands on a surface, adding an new gleaming finish. And like my mom, I like my hands down in the earth bringing something blue and purple and yellow out of the ground. I find it more meaningful to find, restore and preserve something old than to get something new. I love old homes, old baptisteries, old cars and old wash stands fixed up – they rock.
The other day I was at Sophie’s Gallery in Liberty Station. Liberty station was formerly the Naval Training Center (NTC). It is now a beautiful Point Loma shopping mall. On the walls of Sophie’s were wooden boxes and box tops, with the bottoms painted in scenes and the sides acting as frames. I asked about the art; the owner called it “repurposed art.” I like that. The Naval Training Center was repurposed. The boxes were repurposed. I like repurposed. I am repurposed.
I know now that I am the greatest restoration project I will ever work on or experience is me. I too am a piece of work, under restoration. I have been scraped and sanded, and I too have been repurposed.
Early in life I got old. We all do. It is the kind of old where our social and psycho-personal surfaces oxidize, rust, dull and fade from early psychic dings and wacks. Then we flake and rot, inside. For me, this premature aging was hurried along by my own bad choices and from the stupid mean choices of others. I was this kind of old by the time I was in third grade.
It was the old that couldn’t tell Teresa, my fourth grade crush that I loved her. It was the kind of old that chased Roy Coons into a shameful corner on the play ground. It was the kind of old that had to hit a homerun over third base to feel good, the kind of old that held my brother down and screamed at him during a basketball game, the kind of old that threw over the monopoly game board when I saw all to clearly that I had lost, and then all the fake money and green houses and red hotels went flying through the air and bouncing over the braded rug in the living room and the game was very clearly a mess and over and ridiculously done.
Enough of the stupid and embarrassing examples; it’s the kind of universal old that comes straight out of outhouse of our interior corruption, from the nasty chamber pot of selfishness and competition and judgment and ranking and exclusion. I hate it. It’s so stupid ugly. It is so deeply pressed into the grain of our psychic wood. It is so ground into the psycho-social floor of our very existence. And it is so mean-hard to scrape off. “Help! Call that guy that advertizes about doing remodels. Help! Call the police. Help! Help! Call 911 and get an ambulance here, now! We have to go to the hospital!”
When I was eight years old I told my mom I wanted to pray. Just before that I remember walking down a road and kicking a rock and thinking I’m destroyed — eight years old and done. I remember thinking, “There is something horribly wrong with me! And I am going to be punished; I am going to rot in some kind of ugly, insane and horror-house place forever if something isn’t done about this. “ It may have been imperfect contrition, but I don’t really think that was all of it. I wanted to be young again and I knew that the only one who could do that was the youngest one in the universe. It wasn’t simply fear; it was fear compounded with hope.
And so I did something that was more like letting someone else do something than doing something myself. I told my mom I wanted to pray. Pray what? Pray a prayer that said that I was old when I was still young and that I wanted to be young again. So I did. I prayed that I would be forgiven for the choice that I had made that made me old. I prayed that I would be made over, fixed back up, as restored as an old baptistery fixed up or an old wash stand refinished.
After I prayed, I remember feeling shiny. I remember feeling like I had just been scraped, sanded and repainted. I remember walking out into the backyard and feeling ridiculously light. I remember feeling young again. It was unexplainably crazy good, just what the doctor ordered, what had to happen to avoid being ruined and discarded.
I wasn’t finished by that prayer; but I was begun. The restoration had begun. It is still in progress, like road work in Boston, never really finished but apparently further along, frustratingly slow, but headed in the right direction.
The thing is that more scraping is required than it looks will be necessary in the beginning. The sediments on the floor are harder and deeper than you think. Later, in mid-life I began to realize that I had put on a mask in the first act of the play and that in the second act it was still on and it was keeping me from playing the role that I was now being asked to play.
We had a marriage. We had a Rosalind, our daughter. We acquired a mortgage. We snagged careers. We had friends. We discovered that in having Rosalind, we had a disabled daughter. And it was needful that I understand that there was pain to be faced in working at a minority isolated high school and pain in my wife being overwhelmed and pain in being overwhelmed myself. And yet I couldn’t I couldn’t be overswhelmed because I had to win the game and hit the best hit and fix up the house and fix Rosalind and it just wasn’t okay to be weak or vulnerable or to grieve or to admit that I couldn’t actually repair brain damage.
I went to the doctor. I went to an interior specialist, a therapist, a MFT. It was hard. Men didn’t do this, not so much then, at least not the men I knew. I didn’t want to go. I kicked a rock down a road first and seethed. In the end I went because I couldn’t not. It was too painful. I went in the same way that I had prayed when I was eight years old. I went because I needed someone else to fix what I couldn’t .
Bill, my soul doc, gave me a test. I figured I did well. I had a history of testing well. I did, and I didn’t. I figured I answered in a way that made me look good. I did, but that made it come out that I was trying to look better than I was. I remember Bill sitting down with me and going over my test. He said, “You have a tendency to present a carefully constructed self. You aren’t being congruent.” I was shocked, offended. He didn’t back off.
He gave me a copy of a book. It helped. I could take it easier in book form — read the concepts, apply them to myself, nobody else in the room pointing a finger at my heart, just me and the cool ideas. I have always loved ideas, particularly the ones that operate like a paint scrapers or the shiny ones that work a lot like new paint.
Congruency is where what goes on inside is like what goes on outside. If I feel weak, I express weakness. If I feel overwhelmed I say so and take cover in others love. If I feel angry I find appropriate ways to express that. In the past I had hidden these emotions. I wanted to be respected, so I presented a respect-worthy self. I presented a fortified, intellectualized, managed, attractively storied image. And it worked, kind of. I was respected, and I was perhaps even feared in the way people fear someone that they feel is superior to them.
But it didn’t work in one very important way — I wasn’t loved. People admire a strong man, but they don’t necessarily love him. To be loved and to give love I needed to be real, authentic, congruent. I needed to take off the mask and let people see a whole person, strong and weak, intellectual and confused, right and sometimes wrong. I needed to be remodeled into a more complete person. I needed not simply to be spiritualized, to not just say a prayer, but I needed to be humanized, to live openly with my own flesh. I needed to be comfortable being human in all its rotted and rusted and dented essence.
I began, the first tentative steps of disclosure, of honesty, of humanness. It worked, almost magically. Disclosure begets disclosure. Be open, people are open back. Rip off the mask and others do too. Quit pretending to be a saint and you actually begin to have friends. And then there was the best. I came to a startling conclusion. If I could learn to accept weakness in myself, then I could accept it in my wife and children and friends. If I could quit criticizing myself, I just might begin to quit criticizing others. This was transformative for me then, and it still is now.
This scraped and sanded the crud out of me. This put a new coat of paint on my inner baptistery. This made my face shine, and it made the faces of those I dunked in my waters of acceptance shine too. This began to put to death an old life. This began to repurpose me. I began to live more connected to other people. My face began to shine more, to shine with tears more and to shine with a smile more.
It isn’t done, not by far — scrape, scrape, sand, sand, paint, paint, paint. This week I rolled a new coat of white paint on the old baptistery floor. The last baptism loosened some of the new paint. Weird, the improvement of the old is never done. I’m thinking of tiling the floor now. Paint isn’t going to cut it.
More restoration.
Good.
