Bob's hole

Now is the time of year when, back in Decatur, I would be preaching at my cousin Cheryl's church in Jackson, GA, while she attended the Wise family reunion. Alas. Instead I'm unlikely to travel back there this long journey. We spoke about this back in March. She may or not travel herself to Alabama to hob nob with the relatives. I am content, though to be here in Durham, even though without church of my own and far from my family (as is Jami also). I am content that Cheryl and I, even though far apart, share a corpuscle in our blood that is Wise. It is enough that this deep of a connection spans the miles for us, as I am sure that she is heartened also, that though her cousin is distantly residing, still there beats a shared molecule, a lone survivor, an emblem of all that being Wise stands for, that like the yellow flowers that dot our lawns in spring, that dandy miracle, declares its joy even when overwhelmingly rarefied.
I have not preached in a while and I'm getting itchy. I am distraught that I did not get to preach any of my Easter sermons, and each week I make a stab with exegeting some text. Today's texts provided some wonderful fodder: Noah getting the animals on the boat with a 2 by 2 or a 2 by 7, along with all "creepy" things (as the text says); the house built on the sand and its dramatic declension in that ancient housing bubble; and a faithful passage from Romans, where Paul says that he'd rather not boast. I drew a magnificent bit of baroque cross, a cross between celtic and anastazi. I liked the comparison and contrast between the flood passage in Genesis and the flood passage in the parable concluding the Mount's Sermon. As good as the house made of rock on the rock was, I ponder how remarkable an engineering feat it would be to sustain the sandy house through such a deluge. Concrete is indeed (and Rome is built not of marble but concrete) sand, in Roman times a volcanic sand, made rock, and made rock peculiarly in water. At Georgia Tech, one of that engineering school's campus competitions revolves around the problem of making a concrete boat. Can you imagine, making an ark of sand that when the rains came down concretized and then floated improbably away. And the house made of rock? What was its equity? Indeed it's made of rock, but what of its location? What of the market? Can you imagine mishandling the financing of the rock house, that perhaps on a rainy day you watch it being demolished to put an even larger house on the lot, only to witness a concrete house filled with animals sail right by you. Creepy things would be afoot.
Vincent Price made a creepy movie about a dismembered hand seeking out victims; a sequel where a cut off foot went around kicking people didn't engender an equivalent effect. The one with the dismembered ear, listening in on conversations, thankfully ended the series.
I see a vision of dismembered hands, feet, ears and eyes, joining viscera and lifting up voice on a hill top - much as in the Tom Waits song "Eyeball Kid". The eyeball kid didn't have a mouth and couldn't even blink but he came here to teach us how to really see. And that's the message I took away from this Sunday's sermon: that we all have a part but we're not apart.

There's no Cy Twombly at the NC Museum

But there's lots of other things, marvelous paintings by Diebenkorn, Stella, Morris Louis (advertised on the website but not out in the gallery), Robert Motherwell, a gigantic Kiefer (that outdoes the one in Atlanta for ostentation, encrusted paint, dangling objects embedded the surface, and obtuseness of meaning); as well as a Kirchner, a Nolde, a Jawlensky (or a Schmidt Rutloff); along with some Wyeths; plus a wealth of European, Egyptian, and Ancient works. It was greatly pleasing, a fine culmination to a Sunday trip back from Smithfield. In our little corner of the South a fine artistic experience can be cobbled from the Ackland in Chapel Hill, the Nasher at Duke, and the North Carolina Museum at Raleigh. Still All of these places are trumped by the Chicago Art Institute, any museum in Manhattan (Imagine if you wanted to visit three collections there - the Frick, MoMa and the Met or the Guggenheim, plus any gallery hopping you might want to do), the MFA in Boston (plus the Gardener). A person could spend years gleaning the ultimate artistic experience: visiting Russia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, England, NY, Boston, DC, LA, Santa Fe - not to mention seeing such monumental things as the pyramids, Angor Wat, the Forbidden City, various cathedrals, the Dome of the Rock, the mosques of Cordova and Granada. Human culture is rich in aesthetic expression and we scratch the surface of it in our ordinary lives, where we seem oddly contented.
We were walking around the museum in Raleigh and what did we find 10 minutes before closing? Peter Aertsen's The Meat Stall of 1551. I was taken aback because my copy of Janson's Art History (the piece of ballast every art student taking a survey course carries in a backpack to place on tiny coffee shop tables for perusal with cappuccino in hand) says that the painting is in Uppsala, Sweden. It is the very same painting down to the twirling sausage casing and the ascendant pig's head. A magnificent calf's head dominates the painting. In the background: the holy family flies into Egypt on layover from Beirut. This painting is a wonderful celebration of all things carnivorous: all things bright and beautiful - our Lord God broiled them all. Here is the answer to the question What would Jesus grill? Would he today turn hot dogs into Brats? Would Moses hit the rock and a Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA or a Duvel pour out? An updated Leviticus should have a verse reading "he that pisseth water and call it beer, shall be acursed; for weak watery beer that has no umph (which only virtue is that it's cheap) is an abomination."
I spoke with my friend Joe this afternoon and he told me that Twain's has a Rye beer that is like drinking a ham. I almost rent my garments: how appropriate for the town of Smithfield, where the streets are decked with tenderloin, that it should have a hamish beer.
Smithfield does have a wonderful German restaurant called Edelweiss where an ex-serviceman and his German wife cook up authentic German food. It's meat heaven. I had a Roulade, which is a beef rolled with sausage, served with fat and sauerkraut. I had a dark wheat beer with that: not Meisel but the other one.
I can't wait to return to the NC Museum of Art. I love looking at paintings. I especially love looking at crazy paintings (not the typical gallery line up of "please buy me; you'll never know I'm there" offerings). If only the Woodruff in Atlanta were as accessible by car.

Along the Eno

The Eno is a river a few miles north of us; part of its course is a state park where you can walk along riverside trails. I and the most beautiful woman in the world took a walk along the Eno's banks Monday, a fine way to spend the last day of the Memorial Day Weekend.
We saw turtles, old brick structures [an old pump house, not pictured), snakes and wonderful rock formations.
The day was mild and I would have had no exertion except for my need to carry binoculars, camera, and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology, a Bible, Basil Buntings Poems, and a sketchbook in my blue "Tampa Maid" bag. Plus I was over dressed: the better to ward off unwelcome insect pests and their pesky bites. Jami traveled light and expressed some concern that I might be better off without the blue bag; that I might be cooler wearing shorts and a t-shirt. But no, veteran of riverside excursions me, I sauntered on.
The Eno is a beautiful river to walk along. Its waters are easy going, with great placid stretches. Today we walked to Bob's Hole. Previously we'd visited Bobbit's Hole, a wide place in the river, with gurgling rapids downstream. When we saw it, Bobbit's Hole seemed a magical place. We sat for a while on a bench the park provided along the bank. Bob's hole, perhaps would offer some of the same wonder.
We walked along the river. We crossed under the bridge to the road. We picked our way through rocks along the bank while traffic rumbled speedily overhead. Some stretches of river are full of algae, and green sprigs of grass and trees sprout from sandbars. At one point we saw a fish, alone, swimming upstream beside the bank. Mostly we saw turtles, holding their place against the current. Straddling a fallen tree in our path, Jami saw a small frog, invisible almost as it nearly matched the ground cover in texture and color.
The light bounced off the river and shimmered on the underside of overhanging branches, and its dull opaque surface was broken by amber shadows that revealed the bottom's rocks and sand. Whenever I looked back I saw that the trail was different in its aspects and mystery - so much so that I wondered if I'd noticed anything at all.
We crossed Pea Creek, a small tributary strewn with rocks. Jami nimbly crossed from rock to rock, while I took a more circular route where rocks seemed closely spaced. As I crossed the Pea I thought about a time 28 years ago when I hiked deep into the Rockies at the continental divide. Tenderfoot that I was, I made quick work of rocks across streams and at one point jumped across a small gap in a beaver dam. At the time I only had 150 pounds on my 5'10" frame. Now with 238 lbs. and 48 years old, I considered how much limberness I'd lost to time. At one point I handed Jami the Tampa Maid bag and hunched from one rock over another braced like a sumo wrestler, pivoting my leg over the gap. My leaping days are behind me.
If we're ever attacked by zombies or velociraptors I'm toast.
Not far from where we forded the Pea, we clambered up a rock, and as we stopped, I looked down at the river and saw a snake, brightly colored and lazing in the shadowy current. I have no idea what it is, but I'm sure it's poisonous, a copperhead or water moccasin, perhaps [ Jami informs me today, 5/29/2008, after checking the NC extension site and Wikipedia, that it's an Eastern Milk snake, and that it eats mice and other snakes - not poisonous]. It was beautiful. We took photos, messmerized. Later Jami would describe it as a foot long and I would aver that it was 5 feet, at least. I'm sure that it's in the middle.
As we continued up and down this exposed rock, I thought about how snakes like to sun themselves on rocks such as this.
Eventually we made it to Bob's Hole. It was a wide place on the river, but it lacked the charm of the Bobbit Hole. It did have a wonderful rock at one end, white and root tangled, standing 20 feet out of the river on the bank. The park provided no bench; no campsite was nearby. A small bed of rocks gurgled at the entrance to the hole.

O for a muse of fire

Here we are at Memorial Day: three days, Saturday, Sunday and Monday of liberty from the soul crushing atmosphere of work and social expectation. I exaggerate with a far flung hyperbolic turn of phrase when I say "soul crushing." Or do I? These three days are a tonic to the week spent, for me, scanning test responses and, for the last two days, assembling typed responses and irregular responses in the proper packets for distribution to scorers.
O the menial jobs I've done while maintaining my art: loading hay, making aircraft parts, telephoning for PBS, and scoring basic skills essays. The last activity has the virtue of being done with well educated people who are in a similar boat, and there's at least a smidgen of an acknowledgment that you know something. Where else have I worked with the possibility of discussing jazz, abstract expressionism and Hegel? But squeezing my brain into state required slots takes a toll. After a week of doing this my head actually feels numb. Right now there's a tingling feeling on the left top of my skull. It began yesterday around 2 pm and it continued on through dinner at Vespa, an Italian eatery in Chapel Hill, where I had spaghetti with tiny calamari in it. I tried reading Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception again and again, only to reread several passages I'd reread before (the hazard of not having a book mark), before giving up and going to bed. My head tingled numbly on through the night.
My only relief is drawing. Lately I've taken to drawing ribbons, lots of ribbony sheathes and mobius strips, winding and (in)(con)voluting. I think they symbolize for me a kind of structure that is both exo and endo skeleton. I feel keenly the need to paint. When I go into these Italianate warehouse buildings where I score tests, to the big lofts with hardwood floors and large windows, I relish the space, and I wish that I had a large canvas stretched out before me, rather than a desk with packets of tests. Lately I've begun to appreciate the work of Cy Twombly and his large caligraphic marks and swirls. There are a couple of really great Twomblys at the Chicago Art Institute. These are difficult paintings to appreciate for the noncognoscenti, but I see them as an enlarged passion for the page: the musings of thought we allow ourselves when we're in the process of working toward something. Twombly's paintings say that the process itself has merit and operates aesthetically without having a product, a Telos. Of course there must be some Telos, but it could be unknowable, or unnamable: as Jung said, a symbol tending toward an unknown goal. This is the same language Freud uses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to describe the mechanism of drives (actually Zilboorg uses this phrase in his introduction to BTPP): that they operate at the behest of some unknown mechanism, something repressed that is trying to make its way back into the ego's consciousness.
My goal is to paint and draw, to create, with as few constraints as possible.
We both look forward to the day we can live on the beach and write and paint. Nothing unnumbs the mind more than the crash of the surf and the light of the sun off the water.
Now I'm off to shave and shower and we're going to see our friend Joey down in Smithfield where the streets are paved with ham and lined with streak-0-lean, bacon baking in the sun on lakes of pork and beans. We'll likely take in the Ava Gardener museum - my way of touching base with the chairman of the board. Ring a ding ding. And then we'll enjoy even more time off - the luxury of going into Sunday night without the feeling of work in the morning to oppress us. With that in mind I propose a Sinatra liturgy that begins with Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week and ends with 'Scuse me, while I disappear, as the benediction.

10, 12, 97 strikes and you're out

After months of drought, Durham has enjoyed rain every day or so lately, and no day has been more suitable for rain, than days when we go to the ball park. Last week we were treated to an endless supply of fried chicken and beer under that patio awning in right field (a Beowulfian approach to the game, or a Henry the eighth approach - depending on the gluttonous revelry that you might fantasize about). It rained the whole time, though not so heavily that they delayed the game. This last Sunday thunderstorms were looming and the powers that be (the umpires, the team officials, the league?) delayed the game two hours - that's the time lag between the first and last photograph above. Our friend Paul came along with us this time, and we were fortunate enough to secure seats under the canopy. By the time the game began, we were all squeezed under the canopy behind third base, along with all the remaining souls in the park. Unfortunately most of the vendors had begun closing down. In spite of this hardship we managed to have some good beer, hot dogs, brautwurst, bar-b-que, and funnel cake. The new Bulls park is much better than the "historic" park that we went to 18 or more years ago; this one has the feel of Turner Field but scaled down, cozier. My only regret is that I'm not watching the Braves prospects but Rays prospects. This had been the Braves' double A or single A affiliate. Now it's triple A, and a much improved quality of play. Richmond should play a series here. I'll check the schedule.
One interesting thing about minor league games is the presence of managers and coaches who recently were players. Players I hadn't seen in a while were on the roster. I thought, "so this is where Tomo Okha wound up." Five years ago, when the Braves dominated the National League, Okha was one of those rookie pitchers who had the best game of their season against the Braves. I think he might have played for the Expos. Such is the fugitive life of the aging fringe prospect. A while ago I spoke with my friend Bob about lifetime minor leaguers. They must love this game to endure such obscurity. You might figure that by the time a player is over thirty, they're not likely to be called up. But they soldier on, minor league free agents, with the heart of a child and the marketable skills they've managed to acquire while possibly attending a college in the off season.
Walking behind the stands the former major league affiliations of the Bulls are listed. The Tigers, Mets, Red Sox, Braves and Philies at one time or another have had players who've played in Durham.
Minor league history is the history of most of America. Atlanta, which feels like a major league city, was once as minor league as any. That was in a slower time when Atlanta still had trolley service through most of the city. Today Ponce de Leon (ponce-a-lean) park is underneath the parking lot of Borders and Home Depot. No more Crackers or Black Crackers for Atlanta. I suppose the sense of a major league city is that the team affiliation doesn't change on a whim or the vagaries of market forces (although major league teams have switched cities and Kansas City, Seattle and Milwaukee have had two different major league franchises) ; their ball parks don't sit empty for a decade (as Durham's park did according to wikipedia for most of the 70s), and they don't combine with teams from other cities. Minor league ball has more a sense of how transitory life is. Sitting in Turner Field I can think that all this is permanent and will continue into the future. For most of its history Durham has gone to games not knowing if the team will be playing there the next year. The team hangs on like an afterthought.
The minor leagues are a consolation. The players still live among ordinary citizens. They don't have no-trade clauses or guaranteed contracts. Only a few have more than enough money to last till next year or to cushion the blows of fate. Although as I suspect that even the minor league minimum now is more than a professor at Duke or UNC makes, the players have little control over their careers and they mostly hope that they may play in the majors one day. That they will walk onto the big stage, produce some hits, score some runs, eat up some innings and win a few games. The hope of the majors is that there is nothing more to be desired (playing on a championship team, perhaps); the shift from minor to major isn't a subtle shift: a person moves from being a peon to an aristocrat.
Yet even the majors weren't always like that. At one time, in the 60s the major league minimum was around 30K - a still princely sum in its day, but not extraordinary. I remember in the 1970s that players still had off season jobs. The minor leagues must have been miserable back then.
Now minor leagues are an asset. The city built a new stadium and a triple A franchise now plays here: a double upgrade. Restaurants and cultural events are proliferating in town. And neighborhoods are gentrifying.
The major minor shift remains. I notice the shift from major to minor whenever we return to Atlanta. I really notice it when we go to New York or Boston or London. Each place has its own quality: energy vibrates up from the street and among the people. Creativity springs up everywhere.

Another week goes past

Squint real hard - now you can see it a bit better. I have this idea, gleaned from other sources, that Church, in the future will not be site specific but event oriented. That is, people will arrive at any old place and perform Church. They will gather the materials of personal symbology and create environments symbolic of their spiritual journey. Like my somewhat celtic pavement design above, it's not quite in focus now. What if the church got out of its buildings and into the places where people lived? What if people approached Church more like a fair or carnival? Chuck and Stan at Columbia pushed something like this idea, and we even attempted it on the quad, but I am not sure that we ever attempted it as an example of an ordinary church service. The key is the unscripted nature of it. For me, such a move is important because of the freedom it invites: people can work individually or in groups, in something great or small. The only specification is that it will take place at a certain time and location. The Word will be preached and hymns hawed. Prayers will be prayed.

Mother's Day

(m)Other's Da(y): family component and conundrum: the mother is the original other, the One broken away from or merged into, that gives birth and devours. Herakles wrestles Antaios one of the sons of Gaia, the earth, defeating him by lifting him off the ground, the mother, from where his strength originated. Hence we are enjoined by our mothers to be grounded, as if that would ward off our Herculean defeats. We are eventually defeated by time and death subsumes us back into our earth mother. Heidegger points out (which I'm getting from reading Placher's book, Narratives of a Vulnerable God - a wonderful exposition of where things now stand theologically, with a wonderful chapter on Heidegger) that To Be authentic we have to come to terms with the limits on our time, that we always have less, and live in such a way that we claim our decisions as our own.
And here I quote from Placher, p 34.
"To exist authentically (with respect to the future) means facing the fact that you are going to die, not in the sense of worrying about the pain of dying, but acknowledging the finitude of life. Every moment means that much less time left; temporal finitude is a basic fact of human existence. With respect to the past it means acknowledging however much I may have been "thrown" into it, the past that lies behind me is my past, and taking responsibility for it. Therefore with respect to the present authentic existence means among other things knowing that decisions really matter, because they are irreversible and always involve further limits on a finite future, and accepting one's responsibility for those decisions. To go to law school is [for example] for many an undergraduate to decide not[sic] to go to graduate school straight out of college--returning to graduate school at the age of thirty being a very different option -- and thereby to end up having become a very different person. So it is with all our decisions and their consequences.
"To exist inauthentically is to hide from all this. The inevitable human reality of death recedes from the mind. One accepts the roles proposed by others. "My parents said to go to law school. My adviser said I'd do well there. I even won a scholarship. Lots of my friends are going to law school." Somehow the decision never gets claimed as one's own, one never faces the momentous consequences of such a choice in a finite existence, and one's existence results in a kind of blending in with one's social surroundings. One gets dragged along, one loses oneself, one flees in the face of oneself. "

I'm finding all this very stimulating and very helpful as I begin therapy with a new counselor here in Durham. I am trying to read and understand Heidegger, and I appreciate Placher's chapter helping me gain insight into him.
The problem with reality is just this. It is not so simple to "live" it, taking action. Action must be informed, and the success of actions are not always a good marker to the authenticity of those actions. The person in the above paragraph who went to law school - dragged along half conscious, might turn out quite successful - still having lived inauthentically.
The question is. What have we done with our lives? How conscious were we that we lived our lives? And we can never get time back. I look back on my 20s and 30s only too aware where I wasted time and suffered damage to my soul. Or where I moved along almost asleep.
Now I can only attempt to be more conscious of my life as I am 2 years away from 50 this July. What is it to be authentic with my wife, my friends, my church, my family? What is it to be authentic in my art? I've struggled with this my whole life.
And I understand "authentic" not as something tied to my emotional state, but as I think Heidegger employs it, to describe the process of acting and being in my decisions as I make them in time, making them while realizing that those decisions have limits.
50 is a big year for me, as it is the limit of my mom's life. Standing where I am now, at 47 and 10 months, I can't believe that that was all she had. Make the argument about Mozart and Keats having 35 and 20, but they would have preferred to have more. In the billions of years of our universe's existence, what are we? And yet we spend our time wasting time on war, on vengeance, on acquisition, on burying ourselves in work, on hoarding, on worry and anxiety. In the blink of an eye, humanity could exist no more, and the silence of the universe would swallow up our remaining sound, the artifacts of our presence. All we have in our power to be is to be ourselves as authentically as possible. We cannot please others or live as others would suppose us to live - or as we might suppose they would be pleased with us living. What has value for the remaining years of life? Insurance companies and brokerages all want to sell us something, some simulacrum of security, but such things are rendered doubtful in the state of the current market. Even if the false god of "market forces" could provide some secured income, the question of authenticity is still out there.
In 1 Peter 3:14, the writer says in the NRSV "do not fear what they [the nations] fear." This resonates with Paul's admonition to the Thessalonnians that we do not mourn as those who have no hope. What kind of church would model this? What would such a model look like?
The message of the Church is that we move toward a goal, following a messiah who has conquered death and paved a way through it, so that we may be authentic people; and that we don't reach this in our individual strength or apart from our fellow believers, but that we are connected in love.

The passing of my uincle Frank

Tonight my dad called to tell me that my uncle Frank had died yesterday night. He was 98. A remarkable age to attain. And he was the twin brother of my grandfather, Fred, who died from injuries suffered in a cotton mill accident in 1956. Fred's arm was wrenched out of his socket as he threw loops of twine over his shoulder in the room with the looms, and he died several days later, never regaining consciousness, at Crawford Long in Atlanta. That's how I remember uncle Frank telling me the story several years ago. In January when I last visited him, and hospice care had just begun, he'd forgotten how his brother had died.
Every time I'd visited Frank in the last 7 years he'd greet me with my dad's name, Jerry. It would take awhile before he'd realize that I was Jerry's son and that I was named for his brother. He would frequently remark that "life's a teacher." I suppose he meant that change is unavoidable and also not too bad. The last day I saw him, again he called me Jerry. He was sitting on his room mate's bed in the nursing home, looking out the window. We talked about the squirrels and birds for an hour. He was childlike.
When he and my grandfather were born in Arkansas, in 1909, the midwife had put him in the warming part of a wood stove to keep him alive. He loved to recount that. He told me about getting lost in the woods while opossum hunting and following the north star home. He told me about his father's running off with another woman: how his mother, Victoria, had gathered the children together and taken the train from Arkansas back to Georgia. Months later my great grandfather returned as well and she took him back.
Of those children, only his little sister, Essie, my aunt Mae, now 90 something herself, remains. The Funeral is Sunday, tomorrow, at 3 pm in Covington. I wonder if she'll be there.
I would love to be there but I'm 367 miles away.

The two water colors here are kitchen scenes. I had intended to write about cooking and just as I started, dad called with the news of Frank's passing.

posting

I was working on the post for April 30 something for so long, never publishing it, that I finally gave up. Suffice it that there are many things worth talking about, writing about, and that being selective, which is the same as having the energy for, can be difficult to come by. Lately I've undertaken reading Heidegger's Being and Time. Placher, in his Narrative of a Vulnerable God, mentions this as useful in discussion with Barth on time, which is scattered throughout the Dogmatics. Also I'm still working through Zizek's Ticklish Subject and Kristeva's New Maladies of the Soul. I'm beginning to understand Lacan and how the differences between Freud and Jung show up in describing the human condition. Don't think I've given up on reading Fretheim's Suffering of God. I see that book as very important, along with Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology, for understanding and crafting theologies that touch our lives today. The problem is knowing God, and knowing God through Jesus: all the while being aware of my own projections and transferences. Again and again I confront the impossibility of knowing, which spurs me into understanding the process of knowing and knowability. I ask: how can I know God and not just be knowing some projection of myself? A scan of church history suffices to show how all too often the church projects society's goals and fears onto its program of salvation and its depiction of Jesus.
I've discovered a key in Lacan's and Freud's concept of Jouissance: that is our drives are structured to what gives us joy or pleasure.
I'm still reading and studying how laughter is used in the Old and New Testaments. The word for delighting before the Lord, used by Wisdom, in Proverbs 8:30 is the same as for David dancing before the Lord in 2 Samuel 6:5. The word is translated "play" but more purely means "laughing."