I'm sorry, but I have to say something: it is not within J.K. Rowling's rights as an author to declare four months after the last Harry Potter book is published that Dumbledore is gay. I'm not talking about whether or not Dumbledore should be gay or has a right to be gay or even might possibly be gay, but the fact is that once a book leaves an author's hands, it is no longer her book! A writer gives birth to a book like a mother gives birth to a baby, and any writer is therefore intensely possessive of their book. But just as a mother cannot declare that her child is gay unless the child declares homosexuality first, an author cannot declare a character to be gay unless the book itself makes that same declaration.
I have no problem with Dumbledore being gay, except that it makes me wonder about Gandalf.... I heard in a history class once that some historians believe most priests and monks in the Middle Ages were actually gay. I've heard that homosexuality may have been something Paul struggled with. I've even heard it said that Jesus was gay. All of these are interesting to think about and worth pondering while you read church history or the New Testament or Lord of the Rings but in the end, it's all speculation, because it doesn't say that anywhere in there.
There is a reason that literature classes still read and dissect Shakespeare and Joyce and Cervantes, and it is that the text takes a life of its own outside of the writer. Maybe Shakespeare gave an interview in which he completely explained Hamlet, but if he did, we've long since lost it, and we've lost it because we don't care very much about what Shakespeare thought; we would prefer to wrestle with Hamlet ourselves because we know that - for ourselves - we can explain Hamlet's behavior better than anyone. We can explain it better because we are reading it, and the story is really half the writer's creation and half the reader's creation. I read it so it's my story as much as Shakespeare's (in a sense) so I can tell it how I want to. That's the beauty of literature and why we keep reading it.
Were Rowling to say at some point that she had always thought of Dumbledore as gay (but for whatever reason never chose to show directly that in the book) then I would be very interested in reading through Harry Potter and trying to get inside Dumbledore's head and figure out if I think he is gay. That's half the fun of reading, trying to figure out what is going on beneath what is happening on the surface. Of course, Harry Potter is not really that kind of book and its characters aren't really all that complex, so I do not think I would find any indications one way or the other as to Dumbledore's sexual tendencies.
Honestly, in my reading, Dumbledore has no sexuality, because Dumbledore is not a "real" character in that way. He is a hero, a distant idol, and even at the end - when Harry begins to doubt Dumbledore's sincerity - the wizard is still out there, away, not part of the action. He is therefore as sexless as McGonnagal or Gandalf or any other great austere saints. Sexuality is a significant and vital part of life, and I don't want to suggest that the really big important ones don't have it, but as long as they are portrayed as the really big important ones (off there somewhere, only stepping in to lend a hand to the little guy) then there is something good in recognizing that you can be somebody apart from your sex. That you can be Dumbledore and no one ever knows - or cares - whether you like men or women or don't even think about it at all.
J.K. Rowling was at a book signing when some kid asked her whether she thought "Dumbledore would ever find true love." This is a funny question to me since Dumbledore dies, and I would have replied "No, he died too soon," but Rowling replied "Dumbledore is gay," which is also funny because (a) Dumbledore is still dead and (b) it doesn't answer the question unless you assume homosexuals cannot find true love and (c) it seems like something a frustrated author would say to a stupid question.
I blame a media determined to be non-judgmental for picking up on this and declaring in headline after headline: Dumbledore is Gay.
So it is with a heavy heart that I have to break the news: I don't care what his mamma says, Dumbledore is not gay. I read the books. I never heard him say it. Sorry.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The Vastness of Open Plains and Grey Winters
I have changed my mind. I now believe that I thoroughly enjoy conversation. It has been two very long weeks since I wrote last, and if I were to summarize the best parts of the past two weeks, I could do it in a single word: conversation. A series of personal, face-to-face, one-on-one conversations has been all that kept me out of the pit of despair in the past several weeks.
In fact, the last two weeks might best be described as polarized: one moment of overwhelming chaos followed by one moment of intimacy followed by one moment of stress. More than once, my emotions shifted so suddenly and so extremely to leave me wondering if I might be bipolar. I guess it was last Monday that I was on the phone talking to a friend and almost literally felt a sense of despair hit me in the face. A sense of isolation. (The phone, by the way, is no longer my friend.) I jokingly said, "Well, I'm going to go shoot myself in the face. Have a great night," and my friend thought I was talking about homework I had to do, and I did nothing to correct the mistake. Somehow, the nameless and faceless despair stuck to me throughout the week.
In stark contrast with these dark moods stood the brief shining moments of real closeness with another person, and there were a surprising number of these. I went to the Renaissance Festival the weekend before last and was pretty unhappy to have to go, mostly because I was tired of always being out of town and felt overwhelmed by other stuff going on, but I ended up staying up late into Friday night having one conversation and spent Saturday lazing around the campsite talking with several other people! From my brief experience, the Renaissance Festival is okay, but the campground outside is pretty cool.
Sunday night, I was up until after 4 arguing the war in Iraq with my roommate. That was not exactly a good conversation, mostly because it felt so pointless. If you have ever seen Richard Linklater's films Slacker or Waking Life then you know what I'm talking about: conversations that sound profound and feel important, but really amount to random words thrown around like spaghetti in a food fight.
"The worst mistake that you can make is to think you're alive when really you're asleep in life's waiting room."
"I mean, I'm not saying that you don't know what you're talking about, but I don't know what you're talking about."
~Waking Life
However, despite the seeming pointlessness of these conversations, they mean something to me. It has been a long-standing practice for me not to talk openly about politics or religion, and I find myself more and more talking about both. My same highly-political roommate also asks a lot of questions about theology and what I believe, which - I'm embarrassed to say - are not questions I think about usually.
I do not like the idea of regularly staying up most of the night arguing about politics, but I am glad to have a roommate who disagrees almost across the board with everything I believe, with whom I can politely debate and against whom I can test my ideas and beliefs.
The alleged reason that Michael and I stayed up until 4 talking was to be awake when the cold front came through, which we thought would be at about midnight. So at about midnight we stepped outside and talked. Neither of us had a watch or a cellphone with us, and our conversation was so animated that we were surprised when the storm finally came through to find that four hours had passed.
The storm did finally come, however, and somewhere in the pounding rain and howling wind, winter fell on Austin. I like what Don Miller said in Blue Like Jazz about Texas winters:
"In Houston, where I grew up, the only change in the weather came in late October when cold is sent down from Canada. Weathermen in Dallas would call weathermen in Houston so people knew to bring their plants in and watch after their dogs. The cold came down the interstate, tall and blue, and made reflections in the mirrored windows of large buildings, moving over the Gulf of Mexico as if to prove that sky holds magnitude over water. In Houston, in October, everyone walks around with a certain energy as if they are going to be elected president the next day, as if they are going to get married.
"In the winter, it was easier for me to believe in God, and suppose it had to do with new weather, with the color of leaves clinging to trees, with the smoke in the fireplaces of big houses in opulent neighborhoods where I would ride my bike."
If you have not yet, go right now and read everything Don Miller has ever written.
I'll wait.
Okay, now that we're on the same page, I also love winter. I love the terrible, cold, rainy, grey days because the world seems so very immense and so very holy. I love the beautiful, bright, biting, cold days because the world seems so very small and people so alive. Either way, in Texas, you look up when it gets cold. You look at the sky and at the trees and at the faces of everyone around you. When its hot, you look down, shuffling, trying not to let the weight of the universe push you into the steaming ground. In the heat and humidity, the air is impossibly thick, too thick to reach through to another human.
I got locked out of my car yesterday for the first time since I bought this car. I bought new glasses and had an hour to kill while the glasses were made, so I went to a nearby theater hoping to sneak into the last 45 minutes of a movie. (I feel okay not paying if I'm only staying for part of the movie.) However, there was already someone checking tickets, so I turned around to find that I had left my keys in my car. Luckily, the rain had stopped, but it was still cold and windy, and I stood by my car, my hood pulled tight around my face like Kenny from South Park, and it was beautiful.
It was fiercely lonely, but a good lonely. Not a summer lonely, driven indoors into our artificial cool by the oppressive heat, nostalgically wishing for the days when summer was carefree and heat's cure was a packed swimming pool. Not the loneliness of a crowd, sitting alone in a crowded lecture hall, unknown and never to be known. Not a bedroom lonely or a television lonely, sitting or lying bored in a dark, silent room, praying to God that someone will call who wants to talk or (even better) wants to be with you, but knowing that call will never come. These are tragic, hopeless lonelinesses.
Leaning against the back of my car, bracing against this cold wind, this strange and unusual cold wind, staring at a vast gray sky, so gray that it turned the whole world gray... That loneliness is not a bad feeling, though it can hurt almost as much as the bad loneliness does. The loneliness of a grey winter day in Austin, Texas, is like the arctic wind sweeping down from Canada, across the vast white plains. See the Coen Brothers film, Fargo, for an example of this moment. The vast loneliness is like stopping for water while hiking into the Grand Canyon with my closest friends and catching my breath at the complete silence in the middle of that huge place. Vastness. It's like going to the Davis Mountains in West Texas, the darkest place in the Western Hemisphere, and staring at the sky and trying to wrap your mind around the immensity of an accelerating universe. Vastness.
Sometimes, even the good loneliness hurts like cold fire. In the bad loneliness, you feel like you should matter but for some reason, you don't seem to matter, and no one seems to care. In the good loneliness, you realize that you should not matter, and all evidence suggests that there is no way that you even begin to matter. ("By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." Genesis 319) Somehow, however, you feel - in the face of the odds - that you do matter. Maybe it is because you realize that nobody matters exactly and therefore we are all in this together. When the earth is so large compared to a human and yet the earth is so very small compared to the universe, you want to clump up with other dust mites. Maybe it is a sense of connectedness: the world is bigger than me, but - however small - I am a part of it, and on that scale, what makes Bob Dylan's accomplishments any more significant than my own?
Whatever the reason, the experience works something like this: Bam! Vast world. Right in my face. So much bigger than I am. So much older than I am. So much cooler than I am. And then an afterthought: but that's okay. That's holy.
So all of this to say that as I leaned against my car in the cold gray afternoon, waiting on a spare key, I was intensely alone and it way wonderful. I thought about what I want my life to be about. What meaning I do have. That was when I realized how much conversation has meant to me lately. I decided that I want to talk to people. And I want to convince them to talk back. I want to meet people at cafes for lunch and coffee shops at midnight and invite them to my house for dinner. And I want to spend all the time between conversations being completely lonely (in the good sense), wandering the streets and staring up at the stars and trying to wrap my mind around an immensity I do not understand and letting it change me. I short, I want to be the best kind of career slacker. So please let me know if anyone is hiring.
It is sunny now - the other kind of winter - and by afternoon it will warm up to autumn again, but that's okay. Honestly, how much vast lonely weather can a person take in one sitting? Especially right after a long summer.
In fact, the last two weeks might best be described as polarized: one moment of overwhelming chaos followed by one moment of intimacy followed by one moment of stress. More than once, my emotions shifted so suddenly and so extremely to leave me wondering if I might be bipolar. I guess it was last Monday that I was on the phone talking to a friend and almost literally felt a sense of despair hit me in the face. A sense of isolation. (The phone, by the way, is no longer my friend.) I jokingly said, "Well, I'm going to go shoot myself in the face. Have a great night," and my friend thought I was talking about homework I had to do, and I did nothing to correct the mistake. Somehow, the nameless and faceless despair stuck to me throughout the week.
In stark contrast with these dark moods stood the brief shining moments of real closeness with another person, and there were a surprising number of these. I went to the Renaissance Festival the weekend before last and was pretty unhappy to have to go, mostly because I was tired of always being out of town and felt overwhelmed by other stuff going on, but I ended up staying up late into Friday night having one conversation and spent Saturday lazing around the campsite talking with several other people! From my brief experience, the Renaissance Festival is okay, but the campground outside is pretty cool.
Sunday night, I was up until after 4 arguing the war in Iraq with my roommate. That was not exactly a good conversation, mostly because it felt so pointless. If you have ever seen Richard Linklater's films Slacker or Waking Life then you know what I'm talking about: conversations that sound profound and feel important, but really amount to random words thrown around like spaghetti in a food fight.
"I mean, I'm not saying that you don't know what you're talking about, but I don't know what you're talking about."
~Waking Life
However, despite the seeming pointlessness of these conversations, they mean something to me. It has been a long-standing practice for me not to talk openly about politics or religion, and I find myself more and more talking about both. My same highly-political roommate also asks a lot of questions about theology and what I believe, which - I'm embarrassed to say - are not questions I think about usually.
I do not like the idea of regularly staying up most of the night arguing about politics, but I am glad to have a roommate who disagrees almost across the board with everything I believe, with whom I can politely debate and against whom I can test my ideas and beliefs.
The alleged reason that Michael and I stayed up until 4 talking was to be awake when the cold front came through, which we thought would be at about midnight. So at about midnight we stepped outside and talked. Neither of us had a watch or a cellphone with us, and our conversation was so animated that we were surprised when the storm finally came through to find that four hours had passed.
The storm did finally come, however, and somewhere in the pounding rain and howling wind, winter fell on Austin. I like what Don Miller said in Blue Like Jazz about Texas winters:
"In Houston, where I grew up, the only change in the weather came in late October when cold is sent down from Canada. Weathermen in Dallas would call weathermen in Houston so people knew to bring their plants in and watch after their dogs. The cold came down the interstate, tall and blue, and made reflections in the mirrored windows of large buildings, moving over the Gulf of Mexico as if to prove that sky holds magnitude over water. In Houston, in October, everyone walks around with a certain energy as if they are going to be elected president the next day, as if they are going to get married.
"In the winter, it was easier for me to believe in God, and suppose it had to do with new weather, with the color of leaves clinging to trees, with the smoke in the fireplaces of big houses in opulent neighborhoods where I would ride my bike."
If you have not yet, go right now and read everything Don Miller has ever written.
I'll wait.
Okay, now that we're on the same page, I also love winter. I love the terrible, cold, rainy, grey days because the world seems so very immense and so very holy. I love the beautiful, bright, biting, cold days because the world seems so very small and people so alive. Either way, in Texas, you look up when it gets cold. You look at the sky and at the trees and at the faces of everyone around you. When its hot, you look down, shuffling, trying not to let the weight of the universe push you into the steaming ground. In the heat and humidity, the air is impossibly thick, too thick to reach through to another human.
I got locked out of my car yesterday for the first time since I bought this car. I bought new glasses and had an hour to kill while the glasses were made, so I went to a nearby theater hoping to sneak into the last 45 minutes of a movie. (I feel okay not paying if I'm only staying for part of the movie.) However, there was already someone checking tickets, so I turned around to find that I had left my keys in my car. Luckily, the rain had stopped, but it was still cold and windy, and I stood by my car, my hood pulled tight around my face like Kenny from South Park, and it was beautiful.
It was fiercely lonely, but a good lonely. Not a summer lonely, driven indoors into our artificial cool by the oppressive heat, nostalgically wishing for the days when summer was carefree and heat's cure was a packed swimming pool. Not the loneliness of a crowd, sitting alone in a crowded lecture hall, unknown and never to be known. Not a bedroom lonely or a television lonely, sitting or lying bored in a dark, silent room, praying to God that someone will call who wants to talk or (even better) wants to be with you, but knowing that call will never come. These are tragic, hopeless lonelinesses.
Leaning against the back of my car, bracing against this cold wind, this strange and unusual cold wind, staring at a vast gray sky, so gray that it turned the whole world gray... That loneliness is not a bad feeling, though it can hurt almost as much as the bad loneliness does. The loneliness of a grey winter day in Austin, Texas, is like the arctic wind sweeping down from Canada, across the vast white plains. See the Coen Brothers film, Fargo, for an example of this moment. The vast loneliness is like stopping for water while hiking into the Grand Canyon with my closest friends and catching my breath at the complete silence in the middle of that huge place. Vastness. It's like going to the Davis Mountains in West Texas, the darkest place in the Western Hemisphere, and staring at the sky and trying to wrap your mind around the immensity of an accelerating universe. Vastness.
Sometimes, even the good loneliness hurts like cold fire. In the bad loneliness, you feel like you should matter but for some reason, you don't seem to matter, and no one seems to care. In the good loneliness, you realize that you should not matter, and all evidence suggests that there is no way that you even begin to matter. ("By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." Genesis 319) Somehow, however, you feel - in the face of the odds - that you do matter. Maybe it is because you realize that nobody matters exactly and therefore we are all in this together. When the earth is so large compared to a human and yet the earth is so very small compared to the universe, you want to clump up with other dust mites. Maybe it is a sense of connectedness: the world is bigger than me, but - however small - I am a part of it, and on that scale, what makes Bob Dylan's accomplishments any more significant than my own?
Whatever the reason, the experience works something like this: Bam! Vast world. Right in my face. So much bigger than I am. So much older than I am. So much cooler than I am. And then an afterthought: but that's okay. That's holy.
So all of this to say that as I leaned against my car in the cold gray afternoon, waiting on a spare key, I was intensely alone and it way wonderful. I thought about what I want my life to be about. What meaning I do have. That was when I realized how much conversation has meant to me lately. I decided that I want to talk to people. And I want to convince them to talk back. I want to meet people at cafes for lunch and coffee shops at midnight and invite them to my house for dinner. And I want to spend all the time between conversations being completely lonely (in the good sense), wandering the streets and staring up at the stars and trying to wrap my mind around an immensity I do not understand and letting it change me. I short, I want to be the best kind of career slacker. So please let me know if anyone is hiring.
It is sunny now - the other kind of winter - and by afternoon it will warm up to autumn again, but that's okay. Honestly, how much vast lonely weather can a person take in one sitting? Especially right after a long summer.
Monday, October 8, 2007
An Oceanic Feeling
I went to the soccer fields at Zilker Park today with my dog, Riker. After a brief and meandering walk, we settled down on top of the Rock Island, my back against a scraggly tree, the dog reclining to my right like a lion.
I read the chapter in The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, called "Why God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist".
I read two chapters in my cosmology textbook about the formation of stars and the formation of galaxies.
I read a chapter in Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, by Rob Bell, called "True" about sensing holiness in great moments, ordinary moments, and tragic moments. Rob Bell tells the story of being speechless when he held his newborn son in his hands. He also tells the story of sensing holiness while holding the dead body of a friend's one-day-old child.
Two weeks ago, I went to Zilker to read and the grass was all dead, burnt by thousands of hot bodies during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, and the fields were covered with rows of trash bags, filled with plastic bottles, cups, and debris. Today, however, the grass was beautifully green and lush.
When the wind stilled, a little sweat would trickle down my nose, but the wind was rarely still; a gentle cool breeze slipped across the surface of the rock and between the trees, rustling branches and sending leaves to the ground around me.
Thousands of birds and locusts screamed from everywhere around me. Dogs barked sometimes, and if they got too near, Riker would bark back. I decided to leave my iPod off so that I would not miss the music.
Rightness. Holiness. A sense of something bigger than me, greater than me, flowing around me, part of me but... apart from me. Holiness. I cried a little while reading Rob Bell just at identifying so immediately with the immensity in his stories.
Once the sun started to sink below the horizon, I packed up my books, and Riker and I strolled back across the fields to my car. My air conditioner is broken, so I never go anywhere without all my windows rolled down.
The radio is broken in my car, so I usually put on my iPod, but I decided today to keep listening to the other music around me. My car makes an almost imperceptible, rhythmic squeaking noise when I'm not braking that makes me a little nervous, whi-whi-whi-whi!
Austin is growing these days, so the sounds of construction are almost all-pervading. I sat at a stoplight and listened to the sound of metal-pounding-metal. Riker sat in the passenger seat with his head out the window and his tongue hanging from his mouth, smiling.
At some point, I put my headphones on and listened to Joanna Newsome tentatively singing, "Joy! / Landlocked / In bodies that don't keep / Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being / Until we don't be," over the majesty of a full orchestra.
The windows were still open, and when I pulled into a neighborhood, I passed a sprinkler in someone's front lawn. It made a sound, one of a trillion sounds that cannot be reproduced in words, but that every author wants to capture, because the sound is just. so. right. Ra-ta-ta-ta-tat! Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat!
I have read the arguments Richard Dawkins calls his most convincing. I have read Freud arguing against God. And yet, as I crawled out of my car, and whistled to Riker, who jumped out and ran a little circle around me, I thought, "Do some people just not have this feeling? This oceanic feeling of rightness?"
It has been a good day.
I read the chapter in The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, called "Why God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist".
I read two chapters in my cosmology textbook about the formation of stars and the formation of galaxies.
I read a chapter in Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, by Rob Bell, called "True" about sensing holiness in great moments, ordinary moments, and tragic moments. Rob Bell tells the story of being speechless when he held his newborn son in his hands. He also tells the story of sensing holiness while holding the dead body of a friend's one-day-old child.
Two weeks ago, I went to Zilker to read and the grass was all dead, burnt by thousands of hot bodies during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, and the fields were covered with rows of trash bags, filled with plastic bottles, cups, and debris. Today, however, the grass was beautifully green and lush.
When the wind stilled, a little sweat would trickle down my nose, but the wind was rarely still; a gentle cool breeze slipped across the surface of the rock and between the trees, rustling branches and sending leaves to the ground around me.
Thousands of birds and locusts screamed from everywhere around me. Dogs barked sometimes, and if they got too near, Riker would bark back. I decided to leave my iPod off so that I would not miss the music.
Rightness. Holiness. A sense of something bigger than me, greater than me, flowing around me, part of me but... apart from me. Holiness. I cried a little while reading Rob Bell just at identifying so immediately with the immensity in his stories.
Once the sun started to sink below the horizon, I packed up my books, and Riker and I strolled back across the fields to my car. My air conditioner is broken, so I never go anywhere without all my windows rolled down.
The radio is broken in my car, so I usually put on my iPod, but I decided today to keep listening to the other music around me. My car makes an almost imperceptible, rhythmic squeaking noise when I'm not braking that makes me a little nervous, whi-whi-whi-whi!
Austin is growing these days, so the sounds of construction are almost all-pervading. I sat at a stoplight and listened to the sound of metal-pounding-metal. Riker sat in the passenger seat with his head out the window and his tongue hanging from his mouth, smiling.
At some point, I put my headphones on and listened to Joanna Newsome tentatively singing, "Joy! / Landlocked / In bodies that don't keep / Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being / Until we don't be," over the majesty of a full orchestra.
The windows were still open, and when I pulled into a neighborhood, I passed a sprinkler in someone's front lawn. It made a sound, one of a trillion sounds that cannot be reproduced in words, but that every author wants to capture, because the sound is just. so. right. Ra-ta-ta-ta-tat! Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat!
I have read the arguments Richard Dawkins calls his most convincing. I have read Freud arguing against God. And yet, as I crawled out of my car, and whistled to Riker, who jumped out and ran a little circle around me, I thought, "Do some people just not have this feeling? This oceanic feeling of rightness?"
It has been a good day.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
A Warrior for Peace
I heard a talk this weekend about Christian men as warriors, which created a lot of thought and discussion between Joe Ricks, Bryon Hance, my dad, and myself. The three of them shied away from the metaphor and were a little disappointed with its use. Their reasons are pretty good: the militant metaphor is hard to use practically. Either you take it literally, which is a terrifying thought and suggests fundamentalism, or you take it as a metaphor, which risks leaving the image meaninglessly impractical for our daily lives. Sure, you can get hyped up at the thought that "I am a warrior for God!" or something like that, but if it doesn't really tell you how to live on Monday morning, it is useless. Dad says that an intense connection to the practicality of an ideal is a big part of 'emergent' Christianity. (Shudder. I hate that word almost as much as 'postmodern'.)
While I agree that focusing on the Monday-morning practicality is a great idea, because it takes spirituality out of the theological realm and into real life, I have to say that I believe a warrior image - or even better, a defender image is desperately needed these days.
The quote below is from the website for The Defenders:
“We are joined together to take a stand, declaring that the sexual exploitation of children, using pornography, and buying sex is not something real men will tolerate. Real men guard themselves and protect children with dignity."
I’ve heard a lot recently about how there are more people enslaved in the world right now than ever before in history, and that the vast majority of these slaves are women and children. This includes a huge number of sex slaves, child soldiers who are kidnapped and forced to kill, and “simple” economic slaves, who run restaurants, salons, etc., around the world. I don’t know if you remember, but there was actually a bust just out of Austin only a few months ago where hundreds of women and children were being kidnapped in Mexico and brought here where they were forced to work without pay in American restaurants.
I agree with Joe that we do NOT live in a time of universal moral decay or debauchery like a lot of Christians think. In some ways, our culture is morally better than ever; in some ways, the situation is the same as always; and in some ways, the situation is worse. I also understand the great care that has to be taken about not creating a militaristic image to outsiders, but I do think that a warrior image is still a useful thing to stress. And we can leave “Christian” out of the title to avoid misinterpretations. When a culture wants to (rightly) stress equality of men and women in the home, workplace, and society, it is awkward and difficult to admit that it is men who are a big part of the problem (even if one's role is as small as buying pornography that might feature underage or slave actresses.) and therefore it has to be men who take a role in fixing the problem.
“Real men” have to be proactive and passionate about defending the women and children around them. If we take the religious overtones out of the equation (but keep the spiritual leaning), then we are not warriors against the forces of Satan, but defenders against the forces of evil that really truly do exist. From that perspective, ancient customs like a knighting ceremony (very macho) mean something as a practical metaphor. Imagine the scene from The Gladiator when the evil emperor Claudius forces the hitherto anonymous gladiator to reveal himself by asking, "Who are you?" The gladiator replies, "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next." Maximus is driven by an all-encompassing purpose in his life (be it vengeance) that tells him who he is and defines what he wants to do with his life. The emotion I get out of that is intentionality and aggressive proactiveness against the less savory elements of life.
We are not philosophers in an ivory tower talking about how to achieve inner peace and tranquility. If we achieve inner peace and tranquility, it is because those are skills we need in our fight.
Many of older Christians have probably heard the military metaphors so much that they are burned out on it all or else simply can no longer hear the metaphor at all. However, young people like myself who have grown up in churches that stressed peace and personal happiness probably do need to hear, I think, that they actually have a purpose in this life and it is not just to become happy. Our purpose is to be a defender of the helpless. And I wonder if the older men and women might not benefit from a reminder that only those who sacrifice their own happiness for someone else get to be happy.
And so, with this whole discussion in mind, I watched 300 this evening, and thought about it as a metaphor in which it is not about fighting the Persians or the 'infidels' or Satan. It is about fighting brokenness and wrongness. I thought about the grueling process by which boys are transformed into soldiers in the movie. About how the first and possibly greatest battle that a defender of wholeness must fight is the battle to make oneself whole and how it's a process that you never finish but you cannot begin to fight brokenness in the outside world until you have begun to fight it in yourself. Apparently that whole inner peace and happiness thing really is an important tool to becoming warriors of wholeness.
This is a metaphor that I imagine being especially powerful - at least in our culture - to men, but I suppose it is not meaningless to women also, who are commissioned as much as men are to fight brokenness and hurtness in the world around them.
And so what's the practical implication? (Since - in the long run - practicality trumps poetry.) Well, that's a little harder to say, and I'm still thinking about that. But I think that it is worth keeping the emotional sensibility of the warrior image for as long as it takes to figure out what that means on Monday morning.
While I agree that focusing on the Monday-morning practicality is a great idea, because it takes spirituality out of the theological realm and into real life, I have to say that I believe a warrior image - or even better, a defender image is desperately needed these days.
The quote below is from the website for The Defenders:
“We are joined together to take a stand, declaring that the sexual exploitation of children, using pornography, and buying sex is not something real men will tolerate. Real men guard themselves and protect children with dignity."
I’ve heard a lot recently about how there are more people enslaved in the world right now than ever before in history, and that the vast majority of these slaves are women and children. This includes a huge number of sex slaves, child soldiers who are kidnapped and forced to kill, and “simple” economic slaves, who run restaurants, salons, etc., around the world. I don’t know if you remember, but there was actually a bust just out of Austin only a few months ago where hundreds of women and children were being kidnapped in Mexico and brought here where they were forced to work without pay in American restaurants.
I agree with Joe that we do NOT live in a time of universal moral decay or debauchery like a lot of Christians think. In some ways, our culture is morally better than ever; in some ways, the situation is the same as always; and in some ways, the situation is worse. I also understand the great care that has to be taken about not creating a militaristic image to outsiders, but I do think that a warrior image is still a useful thing to stress. And we can leave “Christian” out of the title to avoid misinterpretations. When a culture wants to (rightly) stress equality of men and women in the home, workplace, and society, it is awkward and difficult to admit that it is men who are a big part of the problem (even if one's role is as small as buying pornography that might feature underage or slave actresses.) and therefore it has to be men who take a role in fixing the problem.
“Real men” have to be proactive and passionate about defending the women and children around them. If we take the religious overtones out of the equation (but keep the spiritual leaning), then we are not warriors against the forces of Satan, but defenders against the forces of evil that really truly do exist. From that perspective, ancient customs like a knighting ceremony (very macho) mean something as a practical metaphor. Imagine the scene from The Gladiator when the evil emperor Claudius forces the hitherto anonymous gladiator to reveal himself by asking, "Who are you?" The gladiator replies, "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next." Maximus is driven by an all-encompassing purpose in his life (be it vengeance) that tells him who he is and defines what he wants to do with his life. The emotion I get out of that is intentionality and aggressive proactiveness against the less savory elements of life.
We are not philosophers in an ivory tower talking about how to achieve inner peace and tranquility. If we achieve inner peace and tranquility, it is because those are skills we need in our fight.
Many of older Christians have probably heard the military metaphors so much that they are burned out on it all or else simply can no longer hear the metaphor at all. However, young people like myself who have grown up in churches that stressed peace and personal happiness probably do need to hear, I think, that they actually have a purpose in this life and it is not just to become happy. Our purpose is to be a defender of the helpless. And I wonder if the older men and women might not benefit from a reminder that only those who sacrifice their own happiness for someone else get to be happy.
And so, with this whole discussion in mind, I watched 300 this evening, and thought about it as a metaphor in which it is not about fighting the Persians or the 'infidels' or Satan. It is about fighting brokenness and wrongness. I thought about the grueling process by which boys are transformed into soldiers in the movie. About how the first and possibly greatest battle that a defender of wholeness must fight is the battle to make oneself whole and how it's a process that you never finish but you cannot begin to fight brokenness in the outside world until you have begun to fight it in yourself. Apparently that whole inner peace and happiness thing really is an important tool to becoming warriors of wholeness.
This is a metaphor that I imagine being especially powerful - at least in our culture - to men, but I suppose it is not meaningless to women also, who are commissioned as much as men are to fight brokenness and hurtness in the world around them.
And so what's the practical implication? (Since - in the long run - practicality trumps poetry.) Well, that's a little harder to say, and I'm still thinking about that. But I think that it is worth keeping the emotional sensibility of the warrior image for as long as it takes to figure out what that means on Monday morning.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
And Then It Was Today
I spent the evening doing nothing that I intended to do and it was everything that I could have wanted it to be.
I have to say that for the first time in my life, after 5 roommates, I am really enjoying having a roommate.
I specifically got this apartment because I wanted to live alone. I had a whole list of reasons why I wanted to live alone, and all my previous experience with living with other people suggested to me that I could not get what I wanted unless I lived alone. So, for 3 months I lived alone. (That number is not really true, because I spent 6 weeks in there living in PPD.) I have to say that living alone was AWESOME. I guess I got to see myself in a different way than I ever had before. I saw myself as a bachelor adult and I yearned for the odd quirks and habits that come from being accountable to no one. The funny thing is that I started to see them in myself. I started to create a morning routine and I set the alarm for the same time every day. I had something of an evening routine too. I bought a pair of pajamas for the first time in my life because I found that a shower was no longer always the thing I did right before bed, but the thing I did before fixing a cup of coffee and watching Simpsons and Seinfeld. And the best part was that my "routines" were completely flexible enough to be tossed out on a whim, and I could - and did - spend the evening out without having to inform someone about how my plans had changed, and then justify it.
The point is that for the first time in my life, living alone created a sense in me that this is ALL my life - every minute of it, from the moment I wake up until I wake up again. How I manage my time and my resources is both my privilege and my responsibility. But significantly, it is mine. Living the bachelor's life is amazing, and when (and if) Mike moves out in January, I might well decide not to get another roommate.
However, I have been surprised at how cool it can be to have a roommate. It has been surprising to find that it does not necessarily mean that I can't still have some of that independent life. I still have friends over; my Doxology small group met at my house Wednesday. What I have gained, however, is daily conversation, and I did not even suspect how good that would be. Mike smokes occasionally (a couple of cigarettes every couple of days, I think) and I have gone outside with him a couple of times and sat on the balcony talking politics and religion and life, and even though we come from very different perspectives on a lot of issues, the conversation is friendly and really good. Incidentally, I'm not sure how we might have breached the conversation wall had it not been for cigarettes. "Hey, I'm going to go stand outside. You want to join me?" does not allow the same easy excuse as "Hey, I'm going to go smoke a cigarette. You want to join me?"
So tonight, Mike and I cooked spaghetti, (Cooked meals is another thing I enjoy which is so much easier when cooking for 2.) watched Simpsons and Seinfeld, and then stood out on the balcony talking for several hours, until just a few minutes ago, actually. After the conversation, we both went into our own separate rooms, agreeing to do it again sometime. Those of you who have easily come by successful adult relationships with your roommates might not understand how shocking it is for me to realize that living with someone can actually be more than an economic relationship.
I was telling my mom and dad a few days ago about how cool it is that Mike cooks regularly, (The second day he lived here, I came home to find a plate of pasta for me in the fridge.) and I jokingly said that I now understand the advantages of a wife. Besides the (joke) advantage of someone to cook for me, the actual feeling I'm getting at is that there is definitely something nice about the practical side of things, which I hadn't considered before. A relationship like that isn't just in your head or your heart, "soulmates", or something like that. There is that, but then there is also something nice about cooking dinner with someone. Cleaning dishes with someone. Just the nitty-gritty living of life with someone. It's not like, "I love this person, so clearly I would want to have her around as much as possible, so that's worth the sacrifice of my own independence. And besides, that's more practical too." It's more like, "I love this person, and it is pleasant to think of having the same life, with the same dog that needs walked and morning and evening habits that complement each other." Mike, of course, is not my wife; we are friendly at best and merely sociable under most circumstances. Even if we were best friends, he would not fit this description, because he's a guy, and because there still is something, I think, to that whole lovey-dovey side of the coin. But having a really positive roommate situation really is a new perspective for me. Of course, I do not think I could possibly have seen this perspective if I hadn't had a few weeks to understand my own independence.
So, thanks to unplanned conversation, I have a lot to do tomorrow before I leave for Tres Dias, and I have stayed up WAY too late. So it's off to bed for me now and then the weekend begins with a rush! Don't let life slow down on you, because that means the spring is winding down...
I have to say that for the first time in my life, after 5 roommates, I am really enjoying having a roommate.
I specifically got this apartment because I wanted to live alone. I had a whole list of reasons why I wanted to live alone, and all my previous experience with living with other people suggested to me that I could not get what I wanted unless I lived alone. So, for 3 months I lived alone. (That number is not really true, because I spent 6 weeks in there living in PPD.) I have to say that living alone was AWESOME. I guess I got to see myself in a different way than I ever had before. I saw myself as a bachelor adult and I yearned for the odd quirks and habits that come from being accountable to no one. The funny thing is that I started to see them in myself. I started to create a morning routine and I set the alarm for the same time every day. I had something of an evening routine too. I bought a pair of pajamas for the first time in my life because I found that a shower was no longer always the thing I did right before bed, but the thing I did before fixing a cup of coffee and watching Simpsons and Seinfeld. And the best part was that my "routines" were completely flexible enough to be tossed out on a whim, and I could - and did - spend the evening out without having to inform someone about how my plans had changed, and then justify it.
The point is that for the first time in my life, living alone created a sense in me that this is ALL my life - every minute of it, from the moment I wake up until I wake up again. How I manage my time and my resources is both my privilege and my responsibility. But significantly, it is mine. Living the bachelor's life is amazing, and when (and if) Mike moves out in January, I might well decide not to get another roommate.
However, I have been surprised at how cool it can be to have a roommate. It has been surprising to find that it does not necessarily mean that I can't still have some of that independent life. I still have friends over; my Doxology small group met at my house Wednesday. What I have gained, however, is daily conversation, and I did not even suspect how good that would be. Mike smokes occasionally (a couple of cigarettes every couple of days, I think) and I have gone outside with him a couple of times and sat on the balcony talking politics and religion and life, and even though we come from very different perspectives on a lot of issues, the conversation is friendly and really good. Incidentally, I'm not sure how we might have breached the conversation wall had it not been for cigarettes. "Hey, I'm going to go stand outside. You want to join me?" does not allow the same easy excuse as "Hey, I'm going to go smoke a cigarette. You want to join me?"
So tonight, Mike and I cooked spaghetti, (Cooked meals is another thing I enjoy which is so much easier when cooking for 2.) watched Simpsons and Seinfeld, and then stood out on the balcony talking for several hours, until just a few minutes ago, actually. After the conversation, we both went into our own separate rooms, agreeing to do it again sometime. Those of you who have easily come by successful adult relationships with your roommates might not understand how shocking it is for me to realize that living with someone can actually be more than an economic relationship.
I was telling my mom and dad a few days ago about how cool it is that Mike cooks regularly, (The second day he lived here, I came home to find a plate of pasta for me in the fridge.) and I jokingly said that I now understand the advantages of a wife. Besides the (joke) advantage of someone to cook for me, the actual feeling I'm getting at is that there is definitely something nice about the practical side of things, which I hadn't considered before. A relationship like that isn't just in your head or your heart, "soulmates", or something like that. There is that, but then there is also something nice about cooking dinner with someone. Cleaning dishes with someone. Just the nitty-gritty living of life with someone. It's not like, "I love this person, so clearly I would want to have her around as much as possible, so that's worth the sacrifice of my own independence. And besides, that's more practical too." It's more like, "I love this person, and it is pleasant to think of having the same life, with the same dog that needs walked and morning and evening habits that complement each other." Mike, of course, is not my wife; we are friendly at best and merely sociable under most circumstances. Even if we were best friends, he would not fit this description, because he's a guy, and because there still is something, I think, to that whole lovey-dovey side of the coin. But having a really positive roommate situation really is a new perspective for me. Of course, I do not think I could possibly have seen this perspective if I hadn't had a few weeks to understand my own independence.
So, thanks to unplanned conversation, I have a lot to do tomorrow before I leave for Tres Dias, and I have stayed up WAY too late. So it's off to bed for me now and then the weekend begins with a rush! Don't let life slow down on you, because that means the spring is winding down...
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Connecting the dots
Since I posted last...
- I am responsible for a dog who lives with me. (Though I will not say, "my dog".)
- I have a roommate who treats me like the landlord.
- I am again a teacher.
- I have begun working toward becoming a "steward" at Doxology.
I spent the evening watching football and talking about beer with my dad, who doesn't watch football or drink beer. For that matter, while I drink some beer, I don't really watch football either.
Yesterday, I drove to Crockett alone, which is one of the longer drives I've made alone, and probably the longest drive I've made alone at night. I hung out with a bunch of old guys I didn't know who know my dad and took care of some stuff and had kind of a weird experience where I didn't feel like I needed my dad to be there or needed to be carefully unassociated with him.
Sometimes I look at what's happening around me and wonder "Is this my life?" and then something extraordinarily stupid happens and I think, "Yeap, yeah, this is the one." The past two weeks have been like this.
The tagline for the New York Times is something like "All the news that's fit to print." Well, it's amazing to me that in the past two and a half weeks, there has been - it seems - no news that's fit to print. The key phrase here is "fit to print." Instead, 17 days fill up with an enormous amount of dots or data. One of these days, something is going to happen that will be the key, and the past 2 weeks will somehow make sense. But for now, I won't bother with all the news that isn't fit to print.
And it's really a great way to describe how I feel these days: waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
And so for now, I will read a book and listen to music and type away on my typewriter and keep my eyes open for that last dot to make the picture make sense.
And this posting doesn't make any sense.
- I am responsible for a dog who lives with me. (Though I will not say, "my dog".)
- I have a roommate who treats me like the landlord.
- I am again a teacher.
- I have begun working toward becoming a "steward" at Doxology.
I spent the evening watching football and talking about beer with my dad, who doesn't watch football or drink beer. For that matter, while I drink some beer, I don't really watch football either.
Yesterday, I drove to Crockett alone, which is one of the longer drives I've made alone, and probably the longest drive I've made alone at night. I hung out with a bunch of old guys I didn't know who know my dad and took care of some stuff and had kind of a weird experience where I didn't feel like I needed my dad to be there or needed to be carefully unassociated with him.
Sometimes I look at what's happening around me and wonder "Is this my life?" and then something extraordinarily stupid happens and I think, "Yeap, yeah, this is the one." The past two weeks have been like this.
The tagline for the New York Times is something like "All the news that's fit to print." Well, it's amazing to me that in the past two and a half weeks, there has been - it seems - no news that's fit to print. The key phrase here is "fit to print." Instead, 17 days fill up with an enormous amount of dots or data. One of these days, something is going to happen that will be the key, and the past 2 weeks will somehow make sense. But for now, I won't bother with all the news that isn't fit to print.
And it's really a great way to describe how I feel these days: waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
And so for now, I will read a book and listen to music and type away on my typewriter and keep my eyes open for that last dot to make the picture make sense.
And this posting doesn't make any sense.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
IN FAVOR OF IDIOCY, BROKENNESS, AND IMMATURITY
Imagine, if you will, a person who has it all together. Call her Jane, because, you know, why not? Jane's finances are perfect - free of any real debt to speak of because she exercises admirable restraint and foresight when she spends her money. Her time is always her own to spend, and it too is budgeted carefully and spent with restraint and foresight. Her emotions are always positive, or else smooth as glass, and nothing seems to affect her inner tranquility or budge her emotional stability. Her faith and beliefs - whatever they might be - are rock-solid and immutable, neither swaying nor breaking, even in the most extreme conditions. Overall, Jane is a real rock in the storm, a true beacon of maturity.
Of course, Jane is entirely imaginary: I have never met such a flawless soul and don't anticipate it ever happening; usually those who seem at first to fit Jane's description turn out - as you get to know them - to be as flawed as everyone else. For another obvious statement, Jane is, I think, very definitely an admirable person, a hero.
Now, imagine another person, Jack, who seems to have always had it all together. Jack has never been so deep in debt that he can't see a way out, and doesn't know what it is like to look at a bank balance with a clenching guilty feeling in the pit of his stomach and wonder, Where did it all go, and have no answer except a long series of movies and dinners out, or one, big, stupid, and impulsive purchase. Jack has never failed miserably, publicly, embarrassingly, or put his head in his hands and said to no one: "What was I thinking?" He doesn't understand so thinks suspiciously of those whose faith slips through their fingers sometimes, who doubt and question. Jack has never had to fight for a place in life or claw his way back to okay.
Jack, needless to say, is even more imaginary than Jane; if few are really mature then none could have been born with this maturity. As my grandfather would put it: "You can't put an old man's head on a young man's shoulders." However, it feels to me like - whether we say it or not - many people hold Jack up as an ideal to be sought after personally and in those we love. To put it another way, if maturity is a good thing, then the earlier a person comes by it, the better it will be for them.
I have recently decided that I wholeheartedly disagree. While that is true on the simple, immediate level, (More maturity equals less pain.) I think that, in the long run, this idea is absolutely false. Not only is it impossible to put an old man's head on a young man's shoulders, such a feat is highly undesirable and potentially dangerous. If forced to choose between an easy maturity and a difficult journey with no end before death, I hope I might choose what I see from the outside to be the best option: a hopeless journey.
Why? This is a tricky question to answer. Before we attempt to, I should mention that I am not interested in "early maturity" in children. A seven-year old who acts like an adult (a sight more frequently seen in the movies than in real life) does not really, I think, mean very much at all. I remember one time when I was about thirteen or so, sitting in a Randall's café, talking to my mom about someone we knew who was thinking about dropping everything to move to California to marry a girl he had only ever met online - clearly, a bad idea. I remember Mom saying something to the effect that at thirteen, I knew it was a bad idea, and at thirty-something, she knew it was a bad idea, but that sometimes, when you're in the thick of something, you can't see how bad an idea that thing really is, or else you hope in spite of reality, betting against the odds. The impression I got from Mom was to be very careful about putting yourself into that kind of situation, and that a wise person knows not to get so far in that you can't still tell what the wise thing to do is. I also felt, at thirteen, like a cloud of stupidity must descend on you at about fifteen and not evaporate until about twenty-five.
This, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), is true. It is not, however, a cloud of stupidity as much as a narrow canyon that suddenly opens up onto a vast plain of new possibilities and freedoms to fail or succeed at, and the only way to understand this plain upon arrival is to take a series of breathtakingly-stupid risks.
I can think of two kinds of people who begin their journey across the ever-changing plain of life without somehow "destroying their lives" at some point or another: those who keep their eyes to the ground, refusing to acknowledge the vastness of possibility, and taking each step slowly and carefully for fear of tripping, and those who are extremely lucky and whose every risky decision works out in their favor. The first situation can only create timid naivety and the second can only create cocky naivety. Neither creates real wisdom. No matter how "together" such a person seems, I do not think that their wisdom lasts. Whether you are careful or lucky, eventually, life trips you up and breaks you down, and those who never learned to fall are the worst for it.
I first fell - really fell - for writing. Specifically, I fell for my idea of what it means to be a writer. I have to admit, by the way, that this is still an idiotic idea that I haven't quite let go of, but I have come to realize that I am not the only one with this idea. I wept to hear Garrison Keillor tell the story of one place this pursuit took him, but then I've become a big sap recently. Basically, I am not of the personality to naturally take risks, but since I was young, I have longed to find a really cool story to tell or an amazing experience or emotion to capture. It seemed to me when I was younger that no real writer could ever come out of a happy, middle-class, suburban, idyllic upbringing, so I spent a long time making myself miserable to I could talk about it down the line somewhere. Yeah, I know. The moment I walked into my first job and saw the strange, addictive community of servers, I thought these people were so much more interesting than anyone else I knew, and immediately wanted to become a part of that group and figure out their story. It wasn't until I started at UT and left home that I found myself in that community, but that search for another experience to write about led me to stupid risks and I finally found my long-lacked immaturity.
After three semesters at UT, I found myself out on my butt, suffering the consequences of my foolishness. I didn't need to do that, and would not recommend it to future college students, but it is a very important part of who I am today. As a side note, I have found that I can tell a lot about a person by the look on their face when I talk about flunking out of school. The people I have the most difficulty relating to are those who look at me confused and a little disgusted and say, "But why?" and the coolest "grown-ups" are the ones who say "No, I didn't go through that, but man, it sure coulda happened."
In the end, I think I prefer the company of fools over the company of our artificially wise friend, Jack. I prefer those who are broken and fallen and hurting over the cocky fool. I am deep awe of those who are healed enough to be truly wise, who tread carefully because they know what it is to fall and be hurt, but also know what can be gained by leaping, so sometimes they still look like fools and sometimes are broken down. These people truly amaze me.
It's not a new idea to praise the value of suffering - the depth and complexity of character created - but I don't think many seem to be lauding the self-inflicted suffering of fools and idiots, the immature and the risk-takers, and this makes no sense to me, because I'd rather learn to fall by leaping than by being pushed. In fact, I hope that I never have it all together until the day I die, that I'm always taking risks everyone tells me are stupid, hoping against hope that the unlikely will happen.
The funny thing is that all the stupid things I know are stupid are things I want to - and have to - fix! To choose not to grow up and mature when you know how to is irresponsible and dangerous. I have a cigarette-burn, cross-shaped scar on my forearm, self-inflicted, from a time when I wanted a visual symbol of a pain and had not yet discovered poetry. (Incidentally, I wrote my first poem around that same time.) My sister and my parents and basically everyone told me that it was a stupid idea. Looking back, I know that it was a colossally-stupid idea. One of those moments mentioned before when you put your head in your hands and think, "What was I thinking? Why on earth would I want to be so dramatic?" And I can tell you. I was being romantic, playing a role, filling someone else's shoes. More significantly, it had recently (finally) gotten through my skull, actually gotten into my head, that I had been very depressed for a very long time, and I wanted to do something - anything - to break through my ice cocoon and remind me that it is okay to hurt. Once I got the image of ice in my head, fire seemed the perfect solution. And wonderfully romantic. Now, a couple of years later, I can tell you that I did not have to do that; I can tell you it was idiotic. But do you know what? It worked. Do I regret it? Well, given the choice, I couldn't do it again, so it's probably good I have no choice, because, really, I wouldn't want it any other way. Now I might have decided to keep burning myself with cigarettes so I don't have to admit it had been a silly mistake. A fool, a real fool, beyond the kind of fool I've been praising, would recognize the idiocy of his actions but keep doing them for whatever reason.
So we do stupid things, immature things, things we know won't turn out like we want them to (but we have to try anyway). We do them until we see them fail, then we stop, and try something new. We fail, pay the consequences, grow from the experience, deciding not to step on that mousetrap again, then we move on to the next trap hoping (in spite of all the odds) fora day when we've figured it all out.
Now isn't that idiotic?
"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid."
~John Keates
"[The young poet] should stay the hell out of writing classes and find out what's happening around the corner. And bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything very well."
~ Charles Bukowski
Of course, Jane is entirely imaginary: I have never met such a flawless soul and don't anticipate it ever happening; usually those who seem at first to fit Jane's description turn out - as you get to know them - to be as flawed as everyone else. For another obvious statement, Jane is, I think, very definitely an admirable person, a hero.
Now, imagine another person, Jack, who seems to have always had it all together. Jack has never been so deep in debt that he can't see a way out, and doesn't know what it is like to look at a bank balance with a clenching guilty feeling in the pit of his stomach and wonder, Where did it all go, and have no answer except a long series of movies and dinners out, or one, big, stupid, and impulsive purchase. Jack has never failed miserably, publicly, embarrassingly, or put his head in his hands and said to no one: "What was I thinking?" He doesn't understand so thinks suspiciously of those whose faith slips through their fingers sometimes, who doubt and question. Jack has never had to fight for a place in life or claw his way back to okay.
Jack, needless to say, is even more imaginary than Jane; if few are really mature then none could have been born with this maturity. As my grandfather would put it: "You can't put an old man's head on a young man's shoulders." However, it feels to me like - whether we say it or not - many people hold Jack up as an ideal to be sought after personally and in those we love. To put it another way, if maturity is a good thing, then the earlier a person comes by it, the better it will be for them.
I have recently decided that I wholeheartedly disagree. While that is true on the simple, immediate level, (More maturity equals less pain.) I think that, in the long run, this idea is absolutely false. Not only is it impossible to put an old man's head on a young man's shoulders, such a feat is highly undesirable and potentially dangerous. If forced to choose between an easy maturity and a difficult journey with no end before death, I hope I might choose what I see from the outside to be the best option: a hopeless journey.
Why? This is a tricky question to answer. Before we attempt to, I should mention that I am not interested in "early maturity" in children. A seven-year old who acts like an adult (a sight more frequently seen in the movies than in real life) does not really, I think, mean very much at all. I remember one time when I was about thirteen or so, sitting in a Randall's café, talking to my mom about someone we knew who was thinking about dropping everything to move to California to marry a girl he had only ever met online - clearly, a bad idea. I remember Mom saying something to the effect that at thirteen, I knew it was a bad idea, and at thirty-something, she knew it was a bad idea, but that sometimes, when you're in the thick of something, you can't see how bad an idea that thing really is, or else you hope in spite of reality, betting against the odds. The impression I got from Mom was to be very careful about putting yourself into that kind of situation, and that a wise person knows not to get so far in that you can't still tell what the wise thing to do is. I also felt, at thirteen, like a cloud of stupidity must descend on you at about fifteen and not evaporate until about twenty-five.
This, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), is true. It is not, however, a cloud of stupidity as much as a narrow canyon that suddenly opens up onto a vast plain of new possibilities and freedoms to fail or succeed at, and the only way to understand this plain upon arrival is to take a series of breathtakingly-stupid risks.
I can think of two kinds of people who begin their journey across the ever-changing plain of life without somehow "destroying their lives" at some point or another: those who keep their eyes to the ground, refusing to acknowledge the vastness of possibility, and taking each step slowly and carefully for fear of tripping, and those who are extremely lucky and whose every risky decision works out in their favor. The first situation can only create timid naivety and the second can only create cocky naivety. Neither creates real wisdom. No matter how "together" such a person seems, I do not think that their wisdom lasts. Whether you are careful or lucky, eventually, life trips you up and breaks you down, and those who never learned to fall are the worst for it.
I first fell - really fell - for writing. Specifically, I fell for my idea of what it means to be a writer. I have to admit, by the way, that this is still an idiotic idea that I haven't quite let go of, but I have come to realize that I am not the only one with this idea. I wept to hear Garrison Keillor tell the story of one place this pursuit took him, but then I've become a big sap recently. Basically, I am not of the personality to naturally take risks, but since I was young, I have longed to find a really cool story to tell or an amazing experience or emotion to capture. It seemed to me when I was younger that no real writer could ever come out of a happy, middle-class, suburban, idyllic upbringing, so I spent a long time making myself miserable to I could talk about it down the line somewhere. Yeah, I know. The moment I walked into my first job and saw the strange, addictive community of servers, I thought these people were so much more interesting than anyone else I knew, and immediately wanted to become a part of that group and figure out their story. It wasn't until I started at UT and left home that I found myself in that community, but that search for another experience to write about led me to stupid risks and I finally found my long-lacked immaturity.
After three semesters at UT, I found myself out on my butt, suffering the consequences of my foolishness. I didn't need to do that, and would not recommend it to future college students, but it is a very important part of who I am today. As a side note, I have found that I can tell a lot about a person by the look on their face when I talk about flunking out of school. The people I have the most difficulty relating to are those who look at me confused and a little disgusted and say, "But why?" and the coolest "grown-ups" are the ones who say "No, I didn't go through that, but man, it sure coulda happened."
In the end, I think I prefer the company of fools over the company of our artificially wise friend, Jack. I prefer those who are broken and fallen and hurting over the cocky fool. I am deep awe of those who are healed enough to be truly wise, who tread carefully because they know what it is to fall and be hurt, but also know what can be gained by leaping, so sometimes they still look like fools and sometimes are broken down. These people truly amaze me.
It's not a new idea to praise the value of suffering - the depth and complexity of character created - but I don't think many seem to be lauding the self-inflicted suffering of fools and idiots, the immature and the risk-takers, and this makes no sense to me, because I'd rather learn to fall by leaping than by being pushed. In fact, I hope that I never have it all together until the day I die, that I'm always taking risks everyone tells me are stupid, hoping against hope that the unlikely will happen.
The funny thing is that all the stupid things I know are stupid are things I want to - and have to - fix! To choose not to grow up and mature when you know how to is irresponsible and dangerous. I have a cigarette-burn, cross-shaped scar on my forearm, self-inflicted, from a time when I wanted a visual symbol of a pain and had not yet discovered poetry. (Incidentally, I wrote my first poem around that same time.) My sister and my parents and basically everyone told me that it was a stupid idea. Looking back, I know that it was a colossally-stupid idea. One of those moments mentioned before when you put your head in your hands and think, "What was I thinking? Why on earth would I want to be so dramatic?" And I can tell you. I was being romantic, playing a role, filling someone else's shoes. More significantly, it had recently (finally) gotten through my skull, actually gotten into my head, that I had been very depressed for a very long time, and I wanted to do something - anything - to break through my ice cocoon and remind me that it is okay to hurt. Once I got the image of ice in my head, fire seemed the perfect solution. And wonderfully romantic. Now, a couple of years later, I can tell you that I did not have to do that; I can tell you it was idiotic. But do you know what? It worked. Do I regret it? Well, given the choice, I couldn't do it again, so it's probably good I have no choice, because, really, I wouldn't want it any other way. Now I might have decided to keep burning myself with cigarettes so I don't have to admit it had been a silly mistake. A fool, a real fool, beyond the kind of fool I've been praising, would recognize the idiocy of his actions but keep doing them for whatever reason.
So we do stupid things, immature things, things we know won't turn out like we want them to (but we have to try anyway). We do them until we see them fail, then we stop, and try something new. We fail, pay the consequences, grow from the experience, deciding not to step on that mousetrap again, then we move on to the next trap hoping (in spite of all the odds) fora day when we've figured it all out.
Now isn't that idiotic?
"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid."
~John Keates
"[The young poet] should stay the hell out of writing classes and find out what's happening around the corner. And bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything very well."
~ Charles Bukowski
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