while Moses

The name, Jethro, has different connotations for us, who might feel that Moses had left Pharaoh's court for Appalachia, the holy mountain being Grandfather mountain (though there is a mount Pisgah nearby with attendant Devil's Courthouse). It is Jethro's sheep (often sojourning biblical heroes wind up taking care of their father-in-law's sheep - the prodigal son is the eventual declinsion of this biblical trope) Moses is shepherding when he spies a bush burning without being consumed. People see things like this in the desert. Never in a city or on a pleasant hillside in the lake country. But in a desert, a place without boundaries or habitations.
And so Moses, curiosity ignited, comes toward the bush, to see why it's not being burned up. A man of science out to discover causes. And God addresses him, when he gets close enough - or it is God's angel who speaks. Greek Orthodox iconography pictures this moment, this bush, as containing the Virgin Mary in the flame. I have to admit this puzzles me. But often the Virgin is depicted with the Trinity in her womb. So I suppose the Virgin is a shorthand for the Trinity.
Anyway. Moses approaches and God introduces Godself. God introduces Godself and gives Moses a quest: no longer a shepherd of sheep but a shepherd of people. And Moses asks, "Who am I." And God tries to console him, to persuade him. And Moses asks, "who are you?" And God says, "I am that I am - or in the Septuagint - I am existence - or in some commentaries I will be what I will be." All God's answers have enticing aspects to them. Brevard Childs puts forth the interpretation in his Exodus commentary that God is saying, "I'm here." God at least knows who God is.
Who am I? Who are you?
Moses cannot answer this question for himself. He neither knows who he is or who God is. In a land without boundaries, he perhaps doesn't even know where he is. Looking at this sight of the burning bush, he perhaps considers that the order of nature is standing on its head. So that he is less certain of who he is than when he began to lead Jethro's sheep. Less certain than when he fled Egypt. Less certain than when he killed an Egyptian, thinking it would herald his revolutionary identification with his kinsmen. Up to this point Moses has made misguided decisions, and perhaps he's wondering if God's taken a real look at his resume.
Who am I? Not much, a shepherd, a fugitive, a person with a hidden past I'd rather not talk about.
Who am I? I don't know. I don't want to know.
But God continues. Funny God. "Listen I want you to do this for me."
And Moses asks, "Who are you?"
I am existence. I'm the very thread and fabric of the world - though I'm not the world. I'm in and out, essence and form.
I am what I will be - I'm not the past, but the ever arriving future. I hold the past but am not limited by it. I am the eternal present.
I am here. I am not far away. I am right now the word in your mouth, the faith in your heart.
In short, God knows who God is and who Moses is.
God interprets Moses to Moses. The ultimate situates the penultimate.
This is Bonhoffer's idea in Christ the Center: "It is only from God that man [sic] knows who he is." Bonoffer says that the Chalcedonian definition (which explains how God became human) distracts us from the real Christological question: Who? Who are you? Who is Christ? Christ meets on the border of our existence, as with Moses. We do not know who we are or where we're going. And God sets us a task. A task that takes us out of conformity with this world, that requires a renewal of our minds. Jesus will confound us with his talk of setting our minds on human thoughts and not God's; his talk of losing our lives to save them - or distressingly, that in saving our lives we will lose them.
How unconcerned Christ is with whether we'll corner the market or have a corner office. Christ asks, "What will you give in return for your life?"
Most people sacrifice their authenticity, desiring to fit in, doing what's expected of them. If they see a burning bush, they are sure the authorities will know what to do about it.
Some sacrifice their authenticity acquiring possessions and honors. Stuffing the void in their lives with diversions.
But God asks the question "who are you" in good faith. God knows who you are and can interpret your life's curious course to you. God sets you a task among the world. To relate to people in love. To seek healing. To overcome evil with good. To mourn with those who mourn and laugh with those who laugh.
How far Christ is from a recruiter, who promises an education or travel.
How far is Christ from the TV hawker, who promises a giant home and luxury.
How far is Yahweh from the desert genii, who promises wealth and prosperity. Three wishes.
God promises that you will know who you are and who God is.
God promises that the losing of a life the world finds acceptable is the finding of a life with real authenticity.

abraham, isaac, angel, donkey, ram (details)

It's not in the lectionary this week, but the Abraham/Isaac saga has the feel of those "deathly encounters with God" that are scattered in the Pentetuch. My painting has a folk quality about it: all the story's particulars are present - the donkey they came in on, the father, the son, the restraining angel, and the ram to be substituted. The fire's already blazing.
How must it have gone?
Abe: I want you to hold still while I tie you up. Thanks for helping me with the fire.
Izzy: What? You were going to do this all along! No way.
Abe: Come on. It'll make God happy.
Izzy: You're looped. I'm outta here.
The reality of two human beings tells me it must have been closer to this. That Isaac, no matter how pious, no matter how much a daddy's boy, must have been put out by this. Perhaps it's our need for clean pieties that makes us imagine it more like this.
Abe: Hold still while I tie you up on these sticks.
Isaac: Sure dad. Say hello to mom.
After all we are trained to think of faith as going along with authority. Following orders. Don't talk back. Go over the trenches and charge.
The Bible has a more contentious working out of faith though. David faces off with Goliath against orders. Elijah and the prophets strike back against the authorities as expressions of their faith. Jonah argues with God, as does Job. All in faith.
Even Abraham, already accounted as righteous for his faith, doesn't really need this further test. Paul writes it as an act of faith. That Abraham considered that God, the creator, could raise the dead and call into existence what didn't exist - and so Abraham was cool with sacrificing his son.
Kierkegaard finds this sacrifice, its very absurdity, the crux of faith. This story brings him into his assertion that faith has an absurdist side. That the absurdity of existence provides the augur where we prove our faith. Something like that.
The person who's really being asked to have faith here though is Isaac. He's the only one whose life is on the line. Or maybe the Faith's God's - whose plan for human salvation is on the line. Certainly what Abraham was doing was common practice among middle eastern peoples of that time. Abraham might of been thinking, "why's God asking me to do what all the other god's would ask?" Perhaps Abraham needed a sign of how this God, with whom he'd covenanted in Genesis 15:6, was different from the gods of the nations.
The angel's intervention says, "no more of this. We're not doing things this way anymore." The story read this way becomes an anti-authoritarian parable. We are breaking with the authority of tradition here, the way things have always been done, and the authority of culture, the power of doing what everyone else does. Abraham is so faithful that he would worship YHWH like everyone else worships their gods - and perhaps this is the test here, and Abraham shows himself to be just like anyone else. He's at least willing to go as far as the nations would go. But God says, "no." We're not going to do things like that anymore. No more of this top down stuff. No more will you assume that I yahweh want what the other gods want, or that I yahweh can be approached like any other god. The faith that you have with me and that I show to you is face to face, not top down.
And so Jesus calls us as a servant. He is lord, but he is servant of all. And he calls us to sacrifice our pretensions to lordship. To break away from authoritarian structures.
The world loves authority. Counter cultures are demonized. The gods of patriotism and market forces demand that we comply: put a pin on our lapel and let investment banks graze on the earth's people without restraint. But the righteousness of God, which judges a nation on how its weakest members (psalm 41, and other places) are treated, is different. In scripture we read that God's wrath is reserved for the most authoritarian of regimes. Regimes that quell dissent, that demand blind allegiance, that use violence to have their way. Authoritarianism would sacrifice the youth, the future, and the promise of God.
Here, in this story, we see God leading Abraham to a different kind of faith. Not an absurdist faith, or a "following orders" kind of faith, but a faith that approaches God as a partner.

Imperfect images of new paintings

It's possible to look so hard that substance coalesces into pure being

I've slackened in my blog responses not so much because I have too little to say, as as I have too much to say: so many things are going through my mind - art shows, paintings, drawings, Merleau-Ponty, the lectionary texts for this Sunday and last Sunday, Eberhard Jungel on justification by faith, Barth talking about Christ the servant as lord, Keck's Roman's commentary, our cats health, house buying, being a good husband, being a good friend, and many more articles recondite and mundane: all these things run through my mind, inviting me to grasp hold of them, each in turn, only to elude my real grasp. As I said before, the past eludes us and the future has no shape in space, such that we only grasp the present.
Merleau Ponty says that we are so caught in time, embodying time, that we "secrete time" we "create time" and live in a present against a future, empty, hollow; our past, conditioned by interpretation and habits, never is a present. We ask, "what am I looking at" never fully in possession of ourselves - hence our existence is penultimate. We are embodied, though and our embodied existence is a "work of art." We are thrown into things between the horizons of our past and future limits.We live by looking, by focusing - not allowing our focus to slip off into unconsciousness- we must describe what we see. At least that's as far as I've read now, and I can't say that I've absorbed everything. But I continue in hope: I am immersed in Ponty's book. I find that I've been immersed like this in only a few books: the New Testament, Barth's Church dogmatics, Calvin's Institutes, Becker's Denial of Death, Bakhtin's Rabelais and his world, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There are many similarities between Whitman and Ponty - this keen emphasis on observation and the sense of embodiment, open to multifarious points.

2 new paintings

I have gone before you

I find myself reading a lot these days and pondering: what is the Real? One of the great books of art theory is Hans Hoffman's Search for the Real - and he devoted his career to this search, teaching and painting, exerting influence upon the group of artists who created Abstract Expressionism - the painterly idiom that shifted the balance of power in the artworld from Paris to New York: an idiom whose basic tenet is that the subject of painting is paint, and how paint shows the process of the artist. He determined that what is real in a painting (or sculpture) is not an ostensible subject (puppies or trees or battles) but the manipulation of the plastic qualities of the artist's materials. It's possible to represent a subject with great clarity and at the same time have a terrible painting, because the truth of the materials has been denied. This result is typically called kitsch. On the other hand, a primitive work, even clumsy work, may exhibit an emotional or personal investment in the materials, thus exhibiting the Real. This is the attraction of folk art. What Hoffmann's work does is articulate artistic freedom from mimesis. This is probably not new, per se, but Hoffmann stated it in terms that allowed artists to invest themselves more fully in the process, their process. Hence the Real does not depend on resemblance.
I think that this is perhaps one of the most difficult things for people looking at art to get. I often hear "I liked that picture because it looked like the real thing." This observation is I think related to the sentiment we feel about certain photographs: what looks real, is what we project our desires onto. Even photographs call into question what is real: photographs are subject to the same "faults" that modern paintings suffer from in the eyes of observers regarding the Real: photos are blurry, ugly, and increasingly subject to manipulation. Hence mimesis, what is casually called Real, has the characteristic of being false - a false Real.
This search for the Real is compelling. I feel that I am on to it in my art - but only because I've been on it for many years, learning to recognize the signs of what is true and what is false Real. I know that when psychiatrists like Lacan talk about the Real, they're describing not just the artistic Real, but what we might call "all that there is and how all that there is fits together." This Real is something beyond description. We fall into describing our "real" situations in terms of imaginary or symbolically.
This Real eludes description. I discover this as I've tried to come to terms with my own history and what is happening in the world today. There are many descriptions, typically labeled left and right, conservative and liberal; and these descriptions of the Real reduce human history to either/or dialectics. Is the Real the working out of a materialistic scenario? Today we hear free market capitalism enjoined as the mechanism that will usher in a world utopia - and do we not hear in this promise the Marxist promise, equally mechanistic, equally materialistic, of another kind of revolution: that human history resolves in simple ways. When the tide rises though, we see that not all boats float. The reality is more complex than either system pretends and unintended consequences (and who takes responsibility for those?) are the more lasting result. Whatever the Real is, it is more complex than the politicians of either party are likely to speak out on. Instead we get spin and marketing - slight of hand. Perhaps we most often recognize the Real in its shadow: that feeling of inauthenticity we find ourselves in when the buying spree is over, the degree obtained, the election won.
Even though the Real is more complex than something that can be described in a slogan or boiled down to a party platform, our faith compels us to investigate it and try to live lives that display an understanding of that complexity: lives that don't give into consumerism or ideology. Lives that don't settle for the imaginary or the symbolic - although Lacan would say that that is impossible. I think we can try.
One place to begin is in this story of Joseph. Joseph has been given up for dead by his family. The brothers certainly don't expect to see him here, in Egypt, in charge of who gets to eat in the kingdom. Joseph makes himself known to them and twice he says, "God sent me before you to preserve - life - a remnant." He tells them not to be angry with themselves or afraid. He reassures them. He has gone before them.
In this story the Real the brothers thought they knew has been turned upside down. They thought their lives hung by a thread. They thought their brother Joseph was dead. Think of the guilt they'd harbored over the years: the shame they felt for their lie and how that secret overshadowed the life of the father they loved. Now they have been thrust into a different and truer reality. The reality is that God has sent someone before them, into their predicament, and that their fears and anxieties are founded on nothing.
That sense of someone being sent sent before us is very present in other parts of scripture. In Psalm 77 God's footprints go before the people. And in the New Testament we meet God incarnate going before us. In Hebrews where Jesus passes through the veil of death and is called the pioneer of our faith - and in John's Gospel where Jesus tells his disciples that he is going before them.
Jesus too comes to his disciples, the first Christians, and to us. He has gone before us.
But we don't see it, Perhaps. What we see is like what Joseph's brothers saw: lies and secrets shadowing us; death of hopes, death of us and those we love. Even Christ might seem as dead to us, or as absent, as to his disciples during that first Easter weekend.
And so have we lived too much of our lives in a world imagined by marketing agents and politicians, dogmatic revolutionaries and moralistic hedonists - all with some material mechanism or materialism couched in spirituality as the paragon of the Real. An answer that explains everything and promises our desires. Like painting that isn't true to paint, the images look pretty, just like we've been trained to imagine them. Yet we live among images that are unreal. Kitsch. How can we recognize the Real?
God has gone before us to preserve us. In Jesus' resurrection we encounter nature in a new way and we encounter ourselves in a new way. We are freed from false likenesses of the Real. This false likeness springs from death. The fear of death trains us to find gratifications for our anxieties in the approval or others or in possessing what others have - either through conquest, theft or projection. And so these images are bound to disappoint. Each promise of this false Real ends in a death, a harbinger of the ultimate death.
God goes before us. Don't forget. God has claimed death, removed its teeth. And God calls us to follow Christ. Follow Christ on the path that loves. Follow Christ in the path of life, a path that restores creation.
When we are true to the material of our faith, that it is a faith in a generous, loving, tolerant, healing God (who sent Christ not to condemn but to save the world), whose wrath is for a moment and whose favor is for a life time [psalm 30], we produce a life that is a work of art.

details, ephemera, remnants

Art, as times I forget, is response, at once to outer projections and inner needs: a language of symbols and colors, tendencies toward an unknown goal - as Jung pointed out in the Mysterium (alchemic image of dreams). I forget and forget to respond, feeling an ideological urge, which only when it's suppressed, exhibits the conjunction of inner response to outer need. If the gist of postmodernism is in fragments and ruins found, then language is best borrowed and burrowed into, and there lighted a cozy fire, a good chair, and a glass of Bulleit. Our images are myteries, babel on: might be said. Suffice. Sufficient.
Who can read that: the uncertain sound St. Paul indicates in I Cor 13? A French horn, probably.
So I find that over the years I've sought to build my artistic vocabulary: quoting Cezanne, Goya, Lynch, Chardin, Perlstein, advertising.
I cannot write this out. I've just got to paint.
I paint, and then I look at along with the viewer.
As Jami reminded me the other day, when I said that a painting is not wall paper with a frame: one of my favorite paintings, a Daphne (depicting the moment where Zeus turns her into a tree to save her from the advances of Apollo) was bought because the purchaser liked how it went with her sofa - she could care less for the mythology or any other detail I told her about it. It went with her sofa.
And so music is chosen for its background sense, whether Mozart or Sinatra; and so many things function as background. What is foreground?
Are we human beings foreground? Are we background to other people's drama? What would it be to be foregrounded? At any one time what do we see and what, right before our eyes, do we not see? What are we missing now?
Berkeley said that "to be is to be perceived": the implication being that God, who sees all things, causes all things to be. Ponty addresses this problem of perception: that we exist not in opposition of subject to object, but that our bodies make a totality of perception, and that we are at once limited and expanded - or so I seem to be gathering. An impression.

recent paintings

The top two paintings are ones I'd "finished" last autumn - but I went in this last week and changed the figures: in the top one, I changed the figure into a reclining pregnant nude; in the second one, I got rid of the "James Bond girl" silhouette and made a good substantial figure looking away. The bottom three paintings are recent, in the last week or so. A woman hands a man a skull - nothing much going on there. Next, a series of quotes of Cezanne's bather's pictures. And finally I revisit the cellist - this time in an empty circus tent. I haven't painted a cello player since 1986. I drawn some since and done a few water colors.

Waves upon waves fold into the shore and tether out

I did a watercolor of a wave for a friend before leaving for the beach two weeks ago. Can it have been two weeks? I painted it before leaving for the beach. While at the beach I did no watercolors. I was too busy looking at the waves, studying the waves, how they broke and foamed around my ankles; how they swelled and lifted me, carrying me away; how they broke near the horizon and reformed behind me; how the water piled up higher and higher, then tumbled down, as if downhill toward the shore.
How long has this been going on? The waves lap a billion years around the dinosaurs over the mountains and under them, roiling into the fissures left by the continental plates. The waves keep time, ticking against the sand.
As I bounced around on the swells off the shore one afternoon, amazed by how gentle the ocean was that day, I pondered my own ephemerality and the emphemerality of human civilization. We've barely made a scratch; even should global warming or holocaust doom the planet for habitation - the planet will go on. Our blip: one minute killing a mastadon with a stick, the next second programming a computer chip: vanished without a trace. What an odd event we are in the universe. What an odd event I am in the the universe: I or anyone of us: that that in a billion years of existence, across vast reaches of space, in all probability we're a conscious blip - our secrets, our antipathies and sympathies, our struggles with change and emotional maturity- occur in too brief an allotment.
I was bobbing out there, watching the waves pile up and a shrimp boat maneuver, and I considered how short a time I have: that 48 years have already passed through my hands and, for all my grasping, I'm holding only the present.
If I live as old as uncle Frank, 99, in a nursing home but with his mind entire, that is only 51 years more. It seems like a long time but my experience is that it is not enough - or maybe just enough.
I paint and create with more intensity now a days. I see a therapist so that I don't waste time in emotional cul de sacs and build my cognitive and emotional skills so that I'm not waylaid by unproductive mental obstacles. I try to eat better and get more exercise. I love Jami with all my heart has. I think of how I can be the best friend to my friends.
The curious thing to me is time. I used to think that everything I'd ever experienced was stored perfectly in my head, like my brain was a high performance video recorder. Now I realize that I've forgotten many things, misinterpreted a host of things, and concluded that my mind more likely functions as a compost pile. A dusty attic that an unknown person cleans out from time to time. What is left behind resembles a Kurt Schwitters collage: a bit of fabric, a photo, a stub. Perhaps that's why I like artists who deal is fragments: Joseph Cornell, Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Salle. My mind takes a dadist approach to the past.
To the question: What happened back there? Whether "back there" was 14th century bce Crete, 6th century bce Jerusalem, or 2nd century ce Rome - or even 1900 Butts County Georgia; can be added the question: What's happening right now? What is this? What is important right now and how do I discern where to go. As to questions about the future - they are not helpful: What will I do? How will this turn out? It's impossible to know, and these questions get in the way of understanding and living in the present.
Living in the present is pretty much the content of Israel's wisdom literature. When the writer of the pastoral epistles admonishes contentment as great gain, (s)he's echoing that literature as well as Stoic thought: that we should be content with what we need and what we have - not in what we don't need or don't have. That the measure of Godliness in us, is that rest in what God has provided. Goodbye consumerism. Don't keep us with the Joneses, instead say goodbye to them and wish them luck. Focus on where you are and what matters.
Genealogy is a distraction too. I've bent over the microfilm reader, scanning newspapers and census rolls, burning out my eyes, trying to make sense out of my family in the 19th century and early 20th. Mostly I've come away surprised at how lynching is treated as a spectacle, attended with picnics and civic pride - and the belief that at least one of my ancestors emerged out of think air. I know that if I went back in time, I would not be at home there. Life is not back there. It is important to understand the past, but with this: that we hold it up to interpretation; we cannot see them as they saw themselves and we cannot read our desires and beliefs back into their lives.
As I paddled out among the swells, always making sure my feet could touch the bottom, I was content.

I noticed that last Sunday's lectionary text was that bit where Jacob wrestles a stranger

Jacob wrestles a stranger and it turns out to be God. We might say, that it'd better turn out to be God. "What did you do last night?'" "I wrestled God." "Wow, no wonder you didn't call for help."
As opposed to:
"What did you do last night?" "I wrestled some stranger." "Good grief, why didn't you yell? We were right across the stream."
The text doesn't say that it was God, just that Jacob wrestled a man, who wouldn't tell him his name in that enigmatic 'can't you tell I must be God' kind of way. When Jacob asks, "So what's your name." The guy's response is, "do you really have to ask?" And in the next section, when we're told that Jacob is no longer Jacob but is now Israel, the saga-singer says that God had renamed Jacob Israel. I suppose that the text repeats this assertion, just in case we, the reader, the hearer, is as dense as Jacob was that night.
This story always reminds me of Joseph Conrad's story The Secret Sharer. A sea captain takes in a stranger during the night and keeps him in his cabin, unknown to the crew, finally letting the stranger go, helping him reach land, by sailing too close to the shore and its reefs, endangering his ship for the sake of a stranger.
The story's sense is that until that moment, the captain was not himself - that the stranger prompted an existential crisis where the captain was taken out of himself and could see himself in light of ignoring mortality for a human purpose.
And here Jacob is alone. The text reads in hebrew: "left Jacob alone" - there he is, between left and alone. His family is close, but on the other side of a stream. Jacob is separated in the night, by the night. He has put himself in this position on purpose.
Did he hope for another vision, like the one he had on leaving home, where a ladder reached up to heaven and God spoke to him. Perhaps he'd begun to settle down, to prepare himself, to center himself. He waited for the heavenly vision.
He is accosted. It's not a dream. It's not a vision; it's real. Real hands grasp Jacob about the waist and lift him off the ground. His hands claw back around the shoulders of an unknown nocturnal assailant. It's world championship wrestling until dawn. He breathes heavy with exertion and desperation. Who is this indefatigable guy? Why won't he quit? Jacob knows that he can't quit. He can't relax. He can't call it off. He'd die. He doesn't know who this is.
Finally his assailant says, "enough of this," and puts Jacob's hip out of joint. "Damn, why didn't I think of that," Jacob thought, and then, "I'm screwed." But he held on for dear life. Perhaps he threw the rules of fair play aside and dug his teeth in.
"Let me go!" wrested his assailant.
"Bless me, M****F*****r," Jacob held.
And then Jacob is told that he's successfully striven with men (that would be his brother in law Laban, as well as his father, Isaac [Oedipus anyone], as well as his brother, Esau [until tomorrow that is]) and successfully striven with God. Now he'll be called Israel, or God Strives. Jacob, the supplanter, is now the God striver. It's like a defense attorney becoming a judge: the first name connotes playing the angles with a view toward winning and the second name connotes actively seeking out justice with a view toward equality.
What a conversion story.
We don't often think that we're converted to strive with God. We easily get the turning away from being the supplanter.
But to strive with God - in American Protestant circles it seems blasphemous, indelicate at best. I remember Dr. Brueggemann describing how the Church doesn't get this quality of the Old Testament: believing that we're called to behave, keep quiet, and endure calamity as "God's will." That to complain or argue back would be a sin.
What a relief though to read the Old Testament (and if you will, the Newer one) with the gloves off. Jesus won't break, and neither will Yahweh. Witness Psalm 88 for the epitome of pissed off Israel: no "sorry Lord, didn't mean to be angry or complain." Instead "where the hell are you? My friends are in darkness, I'm surrounded by waters, I suffer your terrors," and earlier, "Why are you absent from me? Is your love declared in the grave?" This lament doesn't conclude with the "I will yet praise you for you are faithful," section most laments have.
This is hard stuff, grim, echoing Jacob's response to Pharaoh that his life had been short and bitter - not like his ancestor's lives.
So it is that Jacob has contended with humans and with God and prevailed. Jacob has gotten what he wanted, but at a cost. He's always looking over his shoulder, wondering who's catching up with him, and now he's pulled up lame. He's injured, but he's invited to a new kind of relationship. God says, "contend with me."
Contend with God, but realize that this requires being contended back at. God takes the theodicy problem and says, "in the beginning you wanted to be like me - well, then be like me." And then God asks, "where's justice? Where's feeding the hungry? Where's hospitality for the stranger? Love for the neighbor?" He says, "What kind of God would create a world like this? [in a sarcastic sneer, a Truman Capote whine] What kind of human being lets another lie cold on the streets, hungry? What kind of human being steals from another? What kind of human being amasses a pile of money for himself?"
Contend with me- God says. Show me what you've got. If you've got anything. God doesn't leave us room for passivity. We have to defend ourselves. Love our neighbor as ourselves, even if we must limp to do so - or die trying.

eating as entertainment

Steak, Martinis, Jami's mom, Gaby, and sister, Jennifer, and our niece Grace: all make for a wonderful evening of eating. Note Grace's special panache with pasta.
I attempted recreating a martini I'd had here in Durham: 1/3 Hendrix gin, 2/3 Chopin vodka. Jami reminded me at the last minute that the special thing about that martini was the cucumber soaked in brine; to me, the big olives don't lose any of the excitement of this martini.
The steak: a veal porterhouse - raised on a farm in western SC. I think that I would eat it again.
Meals bring us together - that is why the central sacrament of the Church is a meal, a bringing together and lifting up; and why all through scripture, the eschatological kingdom is a feast.
Something more than consuming food goes on in a meal.
Just like a painting is more than a representation or an expression.
Just like our bodies, which can be analyzed physically, have souls, the essence of which escapes observation.
Human life cannot be reduced to its mechanics - or when it's attempted a comic effect is produced.
Eating is more than the consumption of proteins for breakdown into amino acids.
And so it is.

Life on the high seas

First off, we had a wonderful week. We spent time together and with Jami's mother, Gaby, her sister, Jennifer, and our niece, Grace. We ate a lot of food, possibly going over our weight watchers total allowance of points - for the week, but still within our allowance for the month. Just one day in the sun and my belly was horribly burned. I mostly wore a shirt the whole rest of the week. But the beach is a wonderful place, perhaps the only place, in America where you can wear just shorts and be socially acceptable. I felt like a kid again, barefoot, coursing over the dunes and into the waves, whistling the Sailor's Hornpipe (the Popeye theme) with variations in minor and modal keys and in odd syncopations of rhythm, keeping my eye eye out for the Kraken. Especially the notorious Kraken Jack, who'd entered in a kraken time, and might be mistaken for a kraken the pavement. A few tumbles in the surf, the mild surf of Kiawah, and I was Kraken up. Breakers, rollers, tumblers, crashing, sliding, sucking, swelling, slapping, lapping, pulling, pushing, left me in waters wracked, laced with foam, green and sparkling, jagged and eddying, but cool under the hot sun.
Of the ten beers I brought, I consumed all but two. The best beer was a kolsch. But I enjoyed an assortment of IPAs and ales.
Among the books I brought I really enjoyed reading Rabelais. I read him standing in the surf and sitting under an umbrella. The five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel are satirical classics without parallel. I wrote earlier in the year about reading Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World, about Bakhtin's take on carnival and laughter and the grotesque: how these practices heal and subvert. Out in the surf, I read Rabelais in pure enjoyment: his lists, the fantastic adventures, the humor (scatological and sexual), all amid the roar and race of the foaming breakers.
I wound up bringing 42 books to the beach and managed to touch on 20 of them in some fashion.
I drew some but was unable to do any water colors. I spent some time trying to get my remaining .35 mm faber-castell TG1-S technical pen to work: the nib and the central needle and weight were misaligned and ink wasn't flowing through the nib. Months before I'd dropped the pen on my studio floor. I finally broke the pen, the needle becoming dislocated from the weight. I have to order these pens from Germany now, and two should be on their way to me. One day, I will have to change pen brands or go over to a different kind of pen. I don't know what that day will be like. Sad and expectant at once.
Again I read Barth, this time CD IV.2. After being burned the first day, I determined to expose only one square inch of my body to sunlight at a time (as witnessed above).
The best part was being at the beach with the most beautiful woman in the world, smiling and laughing.