Last Sunday's Sermon

Sermon January 27^th, 2008 Benson, NC

1 Corinthians 1:10-18 ¹⁸ Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose. ¹¹ For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. ¹² What I mean is that each of you says, "I belong to Paul," or "I belong to Apollos," or "I belong to Cephas," or "I belong to Christ." ¹³ Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? ¹⁴ I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, ¹⁵ so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. ¹⁶ (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) ¹⁷ For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. ¹⁸ For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

1 Corinthians 1:25 ²⁵ For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

Power is a theme Paul returns to again and again in his letters to the Corinthians. Each time he connects power to the Cross, or to the message he's preaching. He is not talking about power as we perceive it in our society, where people get their way because they have friends, or money, or persuasive skills, or status. Paul is talking about the Cross as if it has a specific power: the message of the Cross is our salvation. No other power can save.

Early in this letter to the Corinthians Paul expresses concern about the behavior of the Church. He is witnessing a Church of Christians at odds with each other. The church has become like a political convention with signs and slogans. We learn later in the letter that church members are suing each other. We learn that they are acting immorally. At some point in the letter a reader might despair that there is any hope for this church at all.

Paul though writes tenderly to them. The Corinthians are a church that can go over the brink or be pulled back from the abyss. Paul pulls them back by reminding them of the power of the Cross. He doesn't remind them of the Cross's power by using conventional methods of persuasion. Such methods, a power in themselves, would divert the power of the Cross into something else, something not the Cross – but something humanly acceptable.

It seems odd that the Cross should become humanly acceptable. Even dressed up in swelling words, it couldn't be disguised that the Cross was the number one means of torture and execution. The Roman Empire had a message of the Cross. It was a word of warning. Today such a message for us might be symbolized by an electric chair. Or perhaps when we think of the state's projection of power, we might think of prison bars, shackles, orange jumpsuits, and goggles. The Cross is how the state makes its power known.

That the Lord was executed on the Cross is a sign of weakness and shame. The Roman state made quick work of Jesus. He was publicly exposed, tortured as a criminal, mocked, and left to die in the elements. There was no way to hush it up; no way to spin it as something else. The Cross was a message of bitter defeat in the mouths of the early disciples.

So it is interesting here, when Paul encounters a Church given over to squabbling and power plays, that he would say that their whole salvation stems from the power of the Cross – and he doesn't apologize for that Cross. He doesn't use pretty language to make an ugly thing acceptable. He means the Cross in all its ugliness, the brutal instrument of Jesus' death, is the power of God for their salvation.

That is, it is only through the Cross that God shows them God's love. It is only through the Cross that the Holy Spirit moves among them, giving them gifts of expression, giving them faith, giving them love. And this is part of how God expresses God's power: in paradox. God expresses power in weakness; wisdom in foolishness; exaltation in in humility. And this is why Paul is writing the Corinthians. They don't get it. They're living as if the Cross weren't there at all. They're living in the Church as if it were any other organization. They are living as if they don't need God's power that saves.

How easy it is, once hearing the message of God, the call of God, to think that we're back in control – like we can carry on as we did before. Yet when we do we negate the power of the Cross.

The power of the Cross has changed our lives. The power of the Cross has brought the Church together. The power of this instrument of torture and death was transformed by the presence of Jesus. Jesus transformed this instrument of torture by his faithfulness. He was faithful to God in his life and teaching – restoring the poor and marginalized to a place in God's kingdom and a place among their fellow Israelites. Jesus transformed this method of state execution into the expression of God's love. God loves creation and humanity. As much as the state might try to get its way with violence, Jesus presence on the Cross demonstrates this violence for what it is: the failure to love others when they are different. On the Cross, Jesus shows the world how far God will go to love creation and to love humanity. God never resorts to violence or force.

The power of the Cross is a new life. The worst that humanity can do to silence dissent, to assert that might makes right, to keep people in line, afraid to act as if things could be otherwise, was attempted in crucifying Jesus. Violent humanity took its greatest power, the fear of death, of being exposed and being in pain and shamed, and Jesus turned that power on its head. The power of the Cross is finally that the power of the world is on its head. God's weakness triumphed over the world's strength; God's foolishness outwitted the craftiness and pragmatism of force – that worldly wisdom that says there's one way to play the game and don't rock the boat.

So if the Corinthians know this, what has lured them away from it? What has caused them to play the world's game? Well the whole thing is difficult to believe. God's foolishness and God's weakness are well and good for God, but they're uncomfortable when lived out among friends and family and business associates. And it's easy to think that encountering Christ is a one time experience. You do it once and that's all you need. Like getting a fix or a certificate – and then you go back to how things were. You said a prayer, you cried, you confessed and now it's back to what needs to be done. Paul makes this assessment of the Corinthians throughout the two letters. Paul makes this assessment, but he doesn't give up on them. Paul is tender with them. He calls them back.

Paul knows that the power of the Cross must be lived out every day. That God's love and faithfulness must be acted on each day. That the new creation needs to be re-imagined and walked into each day. Some days are better than others but each day the effort to love our neighbors, to exhibit our gratitude for God's faithfulness towards us, undertaken anew.

Over time, as we practice the wisdom of God's foolishness and the weakness of God's power, we'll discover what Paul knew and the Corinthians learned, that the power of the Cross is our passion.

The power of the Cross is there for us every day. When we lose our jobs; when we face the limits of life, we can be confident that God's love is with us. God's weakness, suffering the Cross instead of lashing out, establishing God's kingdom by force, shows us just how strong that weakness is: the weakness of the Cross goes all the way. There is nothing God will not do to love creation and the people he has called into being. And God's foolishness shows us how far God will go to confound our expectations – that God will not be predictable. God is so foolish that God welcomes all. God calls all kinds of people to the banquet table. The power of the Cross is God's generosity – the expenditure of God's abundance for us, for the world.

And it is all for us, individually and in the Church, if we will practice each day living in the power of the Cross. When we live according to the rules of the world, as Paul told the Corinthians, we empty the Cross of its power. But when we live in the power of the Cross, we really do live into the new creation that God has promised.

Clouds

The passage of time is certain. I once drew a cartoon where I alluded that the passage of time was stalled in committee. But a committee only seems like eternity. I once read in some Dutch theology of good Calvinist bent [Bavinck, I think it was], that we can't experience eternity like God, but we can participate in eternity. That is, we participate in eternity when we do what God does: pursue justice for the marginalized, give generously, be merciful, and love all creation and all people -- especially those of the household of faith. And this notion of participation joined to eternity seems present in the medieval doctrine of the wheel of Fortune: that the closer we are to the hub (the unmoved mover - who moves as he is beloved), the less we participate in Fate and the more we participate in Destiny: it is out on the rim, removed from the presence of God and the love that turns the planets and illumines the stars, that we feel lost to Fate, the recipients of unlucky accidents.

Presto Change-O

I am now almost fully back to Durham. I have spent over a week here and interviewed three times, with a phone interview Tuesday evening. Five months away from Jami has been difficult, even when visits are two weeks apart. This last week has been heavenly. I am now flying back to Decatur where I'll finish packing the house and studio. One last shuffle board at Twain's; one last visit to Birmingham - to deliver the Shirley Gutherie painting to Cary Speaker. Cary will hang the painting, a fine expressionist image of a great reformed theologian, in his church at Mountain Brook. I'll see Shannon Webster there and hopefully we'll share a pint somewhere. Then I'm back to our house (which we'll rent if it doesn't sell in the next week).
Here are pictures I like. Jami drinking tea at a cafe in Jackson, WY and a view of the Grand Tetons from Gros Ventes (pronounced "growVaunts"). Tetons means breasts and Gros Ventes means belly - breasts and bellies: what were those French fur trappers thinking?
I hope to see friends and family in Decatur.

mis-en-place for the studio and the well appointed gadfly

I forgot to mention that my wife, Jami, made the most incredible pecan pie - as well as bruschetta (wasn't there a 70s cop show of that title?) , a wonderful spread constituted with olives and love. As the picture above indicates (actual footage), she rounded up all my favorite meets and vegetables. And the pie - I can't say enough: it's richer than the treasury, better than (or just as good as) my grandmother's.
Now I meant to talk about studio mis-en-place, that for the artist such a mis-en-place is even more important than for a chef. I daresay it but when I was in New Mexico, scientists from Sandia labs, who worked in the infamous safe rooms reverse engineering alien technology so we can have safe microwavable popcorn, would come by and visit my studio and study my methodology, hours later shaking their heads in wonder as they returned to their black helicopters and left. So I think I know something about organization.
First off I let chaos have its way. Entropy is the natural state of nature and nature teaches us, as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes might say, so that we may pursue things in their proper course. When we learn from nature, we copy God's creative process. And what we see in nature is that God delights in blurring edges, moving things around, losing things, and having stuff pop up in surprising places.
Second - and we may have to come back to this later, as the topic may shock, scare, or nonplus some of the more delicately constituted readers of this blog.
Third off (out down up) it's important that the studio space not be too nice. Or maybe it could be all right if it's nice - I've just never had a nice space. There should be plenty of light, and it helps if a train track is nearby and it's convenient to restaurants, coffee houses, and bars. For a number of years I would water color in bars and coffee houses. If your studio is your room, that might seem to be a downer, but one benefit of painting in your room is that you don't have to get dressed: I've enjoyed painting in my underwear. Certainly I can't paint in my underwear in a "nice" place.
Fourth it's important to have flat surfaces, tables and wall to prop canvases on - easels are a fabrication of the art supply industry and you don't necessarily need them. If you do get an easel get a good solid french easel, season it by throwing a bucket of aged turpentine and linseed oil on it, hack at it with a knife, and partially burn one of the legs. It is important that the easel not look better than any painting. It is important that the easel look like you found it in the woods and brought it home. One of my favorite easels was used to trap rabbits. Sometimes a piece of fur would come out of a crack and become embedded in the paint. Moments like this are what makes a studio's mis en place. Chance should always be in play.

Hello Durham

None of these photographs was taken in Durham, but that doesn't stop me from using them to evoke, albeit only obliquely and not exactly, not sufficiently, the change that has occurred in just these last days: where I have left the hospital in Atlanta and moved to Durham to be with my wife, Jami, after 5 arduous months of geographic separation. If you were to relate the photos to Bartok's 1st, 3rd, and 6th string quartets, then something would be added to the feeling, the sensibility. Think of the transition from Antonioni's E'Clisse, the ending, where nothing is said for 10 minutes, and then break out Sinatra's You Make me Feel So Good.
Jami welcomed me Friday night with all my favorites, cheese, nuts, marinating steaks, and with her exuberant love. I'd had a rough day and I'd been sick. Even as I write this I'm still prone to fits of coughing. Hopefully I'll see a doctor on Monday, as I'm extending my stay here for a week. I'll be back in Atlanta for a few days the week next, packing up the house, readying things for the final move. Then we'll rent the house: a wonderful 3 bdrm, 1 bath 1947 ranch, with deck and spacious back yard, located in exciting Oakhurst, within walking distance to the Eastlake MARTA station and a 15 minute drive to downtown Atlanta. Perfect for a family just starting out.
Come the 1st of February this is where I'll be, with my wife, in our apartment with our cats, painting and working out my call as a minister of Word and Sacrament. In the meanwhile, I do look forward to seeing people in Atlanta and Birmingham soon, after the 21st.

Home

Here we are, a year later, and still a dapper young couple. Nothing has been more difficult than living apart for 5 months. I'm going to Durham this weekend and have an interview. I have an interview after next weekend as well. Pray that all goes well and that I can be in Durham with Jami soon. This week has been an arduous week - I've been ill, feverish, and work has been difficult. Emotionally I'm a bit at loose ends. Today in our men's prayer group I learned that I'm not the only one going through some form of that emotional and physical stress. We all have things going on in our lives that wear on us.
Tomorrow is a tough day for me: going to work at 7 am, having a conference with my supervisor and her supervisor -and I discovered this tonight: another supervisor- at CCCG, and then getting on a plane and flying to Durham to be with Jami - which is the highlight of the day.
This may all be too personal to write in a blog. I do typically venture into the realm of arcania or some imaginative flight. But so be it.
Today as I lay sleeping, slipping in and out of hearing NPR on my computer (which is the only way to listen to NPR in Atlanta - Jami and I often wonder why Atlanta has such a poor NPR station, while Chapel Hill has such a good one), I was grateful for being loved. I knew that no matter how difficult things might seem, that love is always victorious. I don't mean victorious in a militaristic way, but in a more enveloping way.
I told my friends in the prayer group tonight that I'd had a mystic experience yesterday. I stood on the quad at Columbia and I looked up in the sky, on one side of me a long gray cloud and on the other a long white cloud, and all the sounds, the thrumming of the air compressors, the chirping of the birds, the whoosh of the wind, were part of a musical piece - the sounds of people playing, the traffic - for a lover of Ives and Boulez this is no stretch: this is what music is. I stood there aware that I was surrounded by love, by Jami's, by my counselor's, by my friends', and by God's, and it seemed to be the most weighty fact of the universe, more weighty than a black hole or neutron star. I felt the mass of love as a pressure passing through all the world, embracing, enveloping, holding all the lost, alone, too busy, over focused souls in the world. I felt it and was aware of it, though I hadn't been seeking it. I had been praying to be lifted out of my sadness at being separated, at feeling alone at work. And there I was and there it was. I told this to my friends, and one of them, who had been playing frisbee golf on the quad said, "that's what you were doing." I asked him if I had seemed strange standing there, and he said no, just that I had looked deep in thought.

On the street where we live

While our house hasn't sold, the house on the corner has been torn down. This house had been boarded up for over a year and this Fall someone began taking it a part. I haven't taken photographs of this progress in a month. During the last month the rebar and concrete have been smashed up, and this morning a small bull dozer began digging out a deep hole. The top photo may not show the front door well enough, but the previous owner had taken up a perfectly good patio and made a front decoration for his house with the upturned stone work. Jami felt that this was not the best choice that could be made. Certainly that's part of a neighborhood's charm: the choices people make - sometimes creative and good, sometimes creative and puzzling. With the demolition of this house, we've witnessed the passing of one man's dream [cue the Chuck Mangione song "children of Sanchez"] . What will arise in this house's place? I speculated earlier that a roller coaster would be built. Most likely a large, two story porched, three - four level house with garage, like the one up the street, will arise. It's unlikely that any kind of folk art will flow forth from the new yuppie owners. I can't be critical though. We hope that yuppies will come and take our house. Still this house on the corner is a reminder that our 1947 ranch's days may be numbered. What will arise over our heads? A 20 story family dwelling with a zeppelin docking station. One day the current 5400 sq ft houses that are springing up will face the fate of the house across the street. Will one of those people have decorated their facade with decorative stonework?

Footprints in the Snow

Robert Burn's poem "To a Mouse" is one of Jami's favorites. It contains the phrase "the best laid planes of mice and men." Burns uses the disruption of a mouse's home under the turf by a plowman to meditate on the common fate of mice and humanity, as well as on the travails of nature - the poor mouse has gathered its winter provisions at a great cost of time, only to experience devastation at an inopportune moment. Burns concludes that the mouse and he share a common fate, albeit as a human his knowledge of this fate doesn't allow him to live comfortably in the moment (both past and future loom over him with their dangers and uncertainties) while the mouse is blessed --"the present only toucheth thee." The mouse can enjoy the moment, even in disaster. The mouse must have read Ecclesiastes, and in its natural state proclaims the truth that unnecessary toil and extreme regret are vanity, and that God requires that we make the most of each moment. In Reformed theology we might say that in each moment we are to glorify God and enjoy God forever.
Last year, at this time, we were honeymooning in London, and we visited a bookstore at Charing Cross, where on one shelf, Jami found a tiny 19th century copy of Burns poem. It was so tiny that it might have belonged to the "Wee Sleeket Cowran Timirous Besatie" of the poem. In fact the bookstore owner, who reminded me of Richard Blake, our librarian at Columbia, did his best to persuade Jami to purchase the book, saying, "don't you care for the wee sleeket beastie?"
I recalled the poem as we went snow shoeing yesterday. Our guide, Taylor, pointed out where a bird, perhaps a hawk, had landed. In the photo above you can see the impression it made on diving, crashing into the snow's crisp crust, as well as the impressions made by its pinion feathers as it took off. On close inspection, and it's barely visible in the photos, tiny tracks lead to the depression. But these tracks also lead away. The wee sleeket cowran timirous beastie lives to forage another day.
I'm filled with joy that the beastie has made it. Its tiny prints delicate laid out in line across the snow. What a chance it took across this open ground, this exposure between sagebrush and tree root. Disaster has left its impression, but the wee sleeket has carried on.

MMVIII

This is the last thing I painted for my MFA show in the spring of 1986: a Madonna. It is my personal icon - the one thing I've painted that I treat as an icon, a window onto the spiritual. Currently it is hanging in the hallway of our house in Decatur. I shall carry it up to Durham soon. I remembered when I painted it, in oil, that I gouged the surface with a knife, regessoing some spots, in the hopes of creating something that had the ambiance of Paul Klee's paintings. Klee is a particularly important painter for me. It took me some time to enjoy his work: he disdains traditional imagery and paints in a way that might seem childish. But when you live with Klee, each one of his small works (and none of them are much bigger than 16 x 20 inches, certainly not the size of the abstract expressionists, who I also admire and learned from) grows on you, gets into your soul. They did with me.
This year I'm taking more seriously what I do well: paint and draw. I don't know how this will play out in terms of my call - which I will continue to pursue in terms of ministry as a pastor or chaplain. One difficulty with being an artist is that the lack of seriousness the Church attaches to art can effect the artist. When I say that the Church in general and in particular doesn't take at seriously, I mean just that: that the Church could pay a million dollars for art - but that expenditure in no way would indicate taking art seriously. Or I could say that the Church takes banners and stained glass seriously. But the art, in the person of the artist and what the artist struggles with and where the artist's expertise is, is dismissed.
And so I say that it is difficult to be in an environment where what I do isn't taken seriously - where I must take what I do seriously.
Is there any discussion on this?
Does anyone have a sense of how art and spirituality are joined?
It is this kind of discussion: where art as a spiritual discipline can take the Church.

Living in the penultimate

In the Spring of 2003, when I began at Columbia Seminary, I took the last class Walter Brueggemann would teach to non-doctoral students, before his apotheosis into an emeritus faculty. Cousin Cheryl was in that class, as well as some other friends. We took a class on Old Testament Theology and our text was Walter's book on Old Testament Theology - his magnum opus that looked at the older testament as a meeting place of testimonies with divergent trajectories of justice and purity, testimony and counter testimony, where the text creates a world of 'differance'. One of the things I took from this class is the impossibility of having the last word - or in some ways, the danger of presuming the last word. Ecclesiastes says that of the making of books there is no end, and She's right: this verse is descriptive of the ancient perception that a last word is impossible. Impossible in these ways: such a last word's use becomes inadequate to explain the quandaries of tomorrow; such a last word becomes irrelevant the longer it is untested by new circumstances - that is, such a last word becomes an idol. In this way, such a last word becomes a mask that hinders looking at the thing itself. And so it is that a last word is non-resistant to evolution.
The problem is that people demand certainty. Certainty I believe is the graven image that God warns us about in the ten words.
And so we're opened up into a world of questions, where even authority is questioned. Authority depends on inerrancy, but where inerrancy is questioned there is freedom. It will be sometimes claimed that authority grants some special freedom, but that is the freedom it wants you to have. What is that exactly?
I've posted two images of the same painting: "out of chaos" that I painted during chapel week in 2005. Each image is of the same state, yet different color ratios obtain. I can not tell you which is the final word on this image. Even if we should determine a correct color ratio, questions of scale would remain. Over the passage of time, with the possible loss of the originals, such questions proliferate.
Hence the need to state and restate. That is the freedom penultimacy gives us, the freedom to reexamine and evaluate. Of course this feels uncomfortable: in the midst of change individuals cling to things stated as certain, wanting to conserve some absolute place where things are as they remember them. Such a place is an idol, an illusion.
Why has God put us in such a world? A world where we are exiled from the certainties we grew up with. A world where we find ourselves in search of new orientations.

We've been married one year

And it's been a wonderful year. A year ago we were married at Oakhurst, dined with family and friends at Sala in Virginia Highlands, and packed for a trip to London. The above photos were taken in London, probably the pub in Hampstead where we'd visited Keats' house.

A year later we're in Jackson Hole, WY with our family. Today Jami went snowboarding - trees whizzing past her, while I sauntered over in the snow to the Star Bucks, where I drank an Americano and drew cowboy pictures, while reading Barth's Humanity of God. Tuesday we're going snow shoeing. Tomorrow we're visiting the Wildlife museum. I'm expecting lots of party relics, remnants of various Elk and Moose happenings.
It's a Wild Life is the little remarked sequel to It's a Wonderful Life. The children of It's a Wonderful Life grow up to protest the Vietnam war and join the counterculture, funding a commune called Pot R Ville with their inheritance from the savings and loan.

A year later and we're both ecstatic. I love her very much.
Thanks to all reading this who were there last year.

Holiday fun

Tomorrow we're taking off for the holidays, heading for the hills, for snow upon snow, - what fun we'll have.

skating

skating. I can't skate but I'm going snow shoeing in a few days. This picture was taken in Budapest in 2005 when I was on alternative context. We'd stopped at a restaurant and there was a rink below us. We had left the art museum on Hero Square.

The drawing for an earlier post

Take this as an example of "art as exegetical method." While I spent that Sunday lunch with my friends from church, 3 adults and 3 children and myself, I began drawing out my vision of "people arriving for a train departed."
Faced with the problem of a vast plain of people I drew hot air balloons as an alternative. The people keep a coming but the passage of the train goes unremarked.

Christmas: the most wunderbarishe Zeit des Jahrens

I have a story like Jami's Snorky story. But I don't have time to write it now. Here's photos of slides of me at Christmas when I was 7. I think I was 7. Batman was big. I got a bike. Jami comments on the bottom slide that I'm smiling but my dad and granny Wise are quite somber. We looked through photographs and we didn't have one of dad smiling anywhere. Whether he was holding me as an infant on the front porch of my great grandparent's house, standing in front of a personnel carrier in Germany (that's understandable), or posing with a friend in their Boy Scout uniforms - dad remains somber.
We'll see him and granny Wise today and I'll take a photo.

And I have an observation: last night we went to the Christmas Eve service at Oakhurst and I noticed during Silent Night that it shares some melody and rhythm with Blow the Man Down.
Try it. You have to slow Blow the Man Down down a bit. Blow the man down is a cantus firmus for Silent Night. Or maybe it's Silent Night that's the cantus firmus. Blow the Man Down might be more a ostinato.

Merry Christmas

My last post, which while I was writing it, seemed like a comedic tour de force of bathos, erudition, and existential reverie, in the mode of Beckett, instead was a dense, recursive jungle of syntax. I realized this last night when I was talking to Jami, who had attempted at least twice to move through it but was repulsed. She promises she'll keep trying. She's lovely and wonderful, but I know that it may just not be worth the effort. I still like it, though; it is my grotesque child.
Here's the gist: a verse is sung in a holiday hymn where people, who've made a good faith effort to come for a train, discover that there was only one train and that it has moved on without them. You might as well sing a hymn about Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot, except that this would be "just missing Godot."
Let's not start that again.
Here I've put up three Christmas card images I drew 7 years ago. One image I couldn't find, but which I have a paper copy of somewhere in my stored papers at the apartment, is of Santa swigging back a Coke, captioned overhead: "Congratulations! It's December 26th and you've just finished laying off the last of 20,000 elves - the stock will go through the roof! In the Spirit of the holidays, have a Coke and a Smile."
These three depict Santa as Lecher; as falling asleep with the remote in one hand, his cigarette having fallen out of the other onto the carpet where it'll make a nice bonfire; and as Nietzschean anti-hero, shaking his fist at the heavens.
What is this antipathy I have toward Santa? What has made him the object of my shadowy projections?
Oh Yeah.
Well more fodder for my counseling session.

The People keep a coming but the train done gone

Advent gives us the word "adventure". I remember a sermon of my friend Karl's where, in explaining Advent, he reminded us that Christmas is not the same as Advent: Christmas is a destination, but Advent is about not arriving yet. I got the sense that Advent, like Holy Saturday that separates Good Friday from Easter, is too infrequently enjoyed, savored, experienced, mostly because people have a low tolerance for delayed gratification. We've got to get to the point; things have to be about something and we've got to get there. And so the danger is that weeks before Christmas people want to sing hymns about the baby being born in the manger. Advent says, "not yet." "Don't open the presents; don't read the last page; don't fast forward to the ending." Instead live in the present, live with not knowing, live with expectation: all of which go against our nature, our desire for closure, our desire to read the epilogue. Advent is an adventure of non-closure, an opportunity to hear God's story that winds around and suffers so many digressions that the point is buried like a seed in the earth. Can we enjoy such a journey?
This Sunday at Oakhurst we sang a hymn about the baby in the manger (why so early?) with the refrain I quoted in the title: De Peeple keep'a cummin' but de train dun Gone. I have no idea what this refers to. The underground railroad? But "the train done gone" - that's hardly hopeful - not the hope we find in the incarnation. The people keep a coming: how depressing. They're coming across the plains, through raging rivers, in danger from injuns and highwaymen (Dennis Moore on his horse Concord); they suffer from dengee fever and berry berry and bunions and migranes; they wander in the wilderness; they stand in line waiting for a stamp. And throngs of them advance toward the rails, footworn and slipshod, wearied and worn, famished, pushed beyond endurance. Wave after wave breaks upon the tracks only to discover, Ahhh the anguish, the despair, the wailing and gnashing of mashies and nibbling of niblicks, that the Train done Gone. The train is Gone, Done Gone, exerunt, locomotivus fugit, absented, vacated. And still the people keep a coming, continue their itinerary, pass over on in their passage. And what recourse do they have? A continual advancement, their Advent a misadventure peradventure inadvertent vertiginous. De Peeps 'l keep'a combing butter train'don gaw'n: that doesn't help much. They keep coming; the train is already gone.
When I labored over this problem at the Croissant Monde last Sunday after Church, my companions, all seminary trained thinkers, expressed solutions to this conundrum. Solutions that collapsed under the weight of the assertion: these people continue to arrive even in view of the fact that whatever train stops here is already passed through - nothing is said of another train. In fact the emphasis of the song tends toward the conclusion that the Train Done Gone is Gone for Good, for certain, final, fine, fin, without leaving room for the adumbration of a suspicion of a rumor that any kind of locomotion will revive along this way. Better just tear up the tracks. The third out of the last half inning of the last game of the world series has been made, the umpire has signaled, and the last uncorked bottle of champagne has fallen to the ground spewed and emptied on the last sober player of the year celebrating in the victor's clubhouse; the claret jug has been hoisted; the trophies dispensed to victors left and right. Not another inning, not another down, not another click of the clock remains for the aspirant, the hopeful, the expectant. All the potencies of potential and possibility have been drained, dregged and micturated, sopped, sucked up and filtered back to the source. This train is absolutely and irrevocably gone on and still, and yet, impossibly, implausibly, people, human beings like you and me, continue to set out, embark, commence a journey for a point of disembarkation, a certain station, stop, shelter, from where a vehicle of excursion might transport them on parallel tracks, conveying them safely and with all their goods and bodily possessions, wits and faculties, to some place of desire and finality and away from some place about which it might be said that "from there they've done gone." That even before people have commenced their procession toward commencement, the train is done gone. I feel like I've just sung an assertion that 2 plus 3 equals six. It makes no sense. The people keep a coming but the train done gone: what is that? There is no answer. It's neither a comfort, a consolation, a warning or a promise. Who are these people? What is this train? How do the people know where to go or where they're going? Is there a time table? Is there another train? Is there a station agent responsible for feeding and housing, at least diverting and repatriating, all these people: people who've been misled - one can only say that the failure of this song is that people are engaged in futile behavior? I would feel better about singing, "people quit a coming when the train done gone." We could sing, "people begin arriving well in advance of the train's departure." That would be all right, even though people might arrive too far in advance and sleep through the train's departure or starve, if they'd not brought anything to eat. People might also continue to arrive after that train's departure - but not so many as it might be said that they "keep a coming." "Some people might arrive just as the train's leaving and miss it," but they wouldn't keep a coming. If they keep a coming they're like wildebeests crossing a river and drowning. When I was a kid I saw this very thing on one of those PBS nature specials: the wildebeests kept a coming to their doom. None of the near by natives of the region engage in such futile activity - they've learned from nature - unlike the people of this hymn. One of the hallmarks of wisdom literature is that people do learn from nature: God has put nature here for us to learn from the behavior of animals. Perhaps this hymn enjoins us to read Ecclesiastes, Proverbs or the Song of Solomon during Advent. "Thy breasts are like two fawns, but the train done gone." "To every thing there is a season, but the train done gone." "I Wisdom sported with the Lord in the beginning, but the train done gone." While I was with my friends at the Waxing Gibbous, I drew this scene out on a the back of a children's menu - the biggest clean white sheet of paper I could find: people lined up along the hillsides converged enmasse to a set of empty rails, a wisp of smoke coiling from the horizon. Across the plain hot air balloons are ascending in various stages. I thought perhaps the train is done gone, but that doesn't mean the people are at a loss: we may discover ways to embark on our own. What was expected of this train anyway? Was it even certain that it could have contained all the people coming to ride it. Did it even go, punctilious in following it schedule, nearly empty. Would the people want to be on this train? Traveling from Prague to Budapest in 2005 I was with a group that endured a six hour trip where the, according to the conductor, "the dining car didn't go." No sadder words could have been spoken. These words were much sadder than "the train done gone." The people eventually got on the train, but the dining car didn't go - ahhh, what bitter respite! I'm suspicious of this train. It's capricious, perhaps promising more than it can deliver, never intending to carry people to some destination at all. And what kind of destination? Is it markedly different enough, a contrast between aridity and fecundity, to warrant such a mass evacuation of one indeterminate location for another. "The people are remaining in place in deference to the train's indifferent passage." And so drawing balloons that the people might get in seemed a grand solution. People might get some height and some perspective on the whole train done gone situation and judge for themselves. And that is Advent, a time for us to judge for ourselves, to gain some perspective, and perhaps decide that trains of indifferent passage are freighted with too much baggage to warrant our interest. Instead we might discover our own locomotion. "The people were engaged in discovering more habitable and liberated destinations and more certain conveyances than trains, confined to inflexible courses and schedules, might provide."

Our anniversary is in fifteen days

Rain, here in Decatur where we've gone so long without, reminds me of our honeymoon in London. It rained in London but the temperature was the same as back home in Georgia. In this photograph you can barely make out Jami. She's standing next to a puddle that is near in size to the present holdings of the reservoir for Durham. We're on the south bank, walking past the Millennium Wheel, having discovered that the Saatchi gallery was closed, and making our way to the British Film Theatre. We watched two Bogart movies: Sahara and The Big Sleep. [spoiler alert] No one wakes up from the big sleep. Bogart had earlier made a movie called The Good Sized Nap in the Middle of the Day that was Interrupted by Routine Water Line Maintenance Outside on the Street. GSNMDIRWLMOS, as it was known, much as Gone With the Wind is known as GWTW, or Fellini's Eight and One Half is known as 8 1/2, or Costa-Gavras's Z is known as Z, detailed the story of a small time hood turned detective turned sous chef turned detective as he makes a journey through the Parisian underworld in post-Vichy France searching for a room with a private bath and a view of the street that he has found hinted at in telling clues left on the body of an ex-associate who was taking a nap in the back of a bootlegger's van that contained lost art works destined for a nobleman's lost artwork collection (a collection of artworks that is either unknown as to location, or if located, of unknown contents). GSNMDIRWLMOS is a gem and at the same time difficult to find. It was last screened in the US in the early 60s. I saw a bootleg version on video that had been partially taped over with an ELO concert. The odd thing was I think I was at that concert. I'd gone with some friends of mine in high school to hear them at the Omni in Atlanta: the cellist breaks a string in the same place while performing "Can't get it out of my head." I remember that it rained that night and traveling that night back on I20 we told many outrageous stories. At the time I drove a Ford Futura, a Falcon with chrome. I drove that car another ten years. At times I miss it. But not when it rains - towards the end of my ownership, it had become nearly impossible to start in the rain and I had to dry the points off many times to get it running. Now I drive a Prizm, which is a Corolla made for GM, and it's very reliable. I bought this car six years ago this month, after my previous car, a Celebrity I'd driven around New Mexico, was stolen from a parking lot at the FBI building here in Atlanta. My car was the only car stolen from the lot in the year I worked for the web company that operated on the 8th floor. It was stolen on a rainy day. I remember that it was rainy because I went down to the lot to get my umbrella out of the car. I wandered around for half an hour before I realized that I wasn't going to find it. That is: neither the umbrella or the car were likely to be recovered. I lost a good set of jumper cables too, as well as a wool over coat and some cds. I also lost a copy of Barth's CD IV.3.2, which I regretfully left on the back seat. The replacement copy I purchased was later water damaged when my cousin put a lunch box filled with ice on it. I was a little disheartened but I put my library training into practice and rehabilitated the book as best I could. I still have it. The damage is less annoying now and improves with use. You can see me reading this copy in this blog: at a ball game and at the beach. Jami took each photo, and I'm reminded on such a rainy night as this, thinking about walking in the rain with her in London, or considering that we'd be trading witticisms by the fire, how much I miss her and wish that I were up in Durham. Our chimney up there has no chimney swallows like the one down here does. Sometimes a swallow comes down the chimney and flies about our house, like the Holy Spirit in a pin ball machine. Jami, tender soul that she is, retrieves the errant bird and returns it to nature. I've seen her do this twice. The cats have seen her do it many times and express an eagerness to help. I remember Thelma one afternoon springing up from a nap, launching herself onto the sill of the dining room window, from where she espied a tiny peeping fledgling that had wandered onto our screened porch through an aperture in the mesh. The motherly concern in that cat's eyes was unspeakable. I went outside and opened the door for the plaintive piping chirping bird to go out on the patio. When I returned Thelma was back in her sunny spot, napping. You'd never know that she'd moved. What a time we had in London. I can't wait to return. As Johnson said, "when you're tired of London you're tired of life." That was easy for him, he lived there. Finish this phrase: When you're tired of Atlanta you're tired of --------.
We returned to Atlanta from London and thus began our first year of marriage, excited about life together.

Imagine, above us, Ouranos

Tonight Jami is writing about the Bridge of Terror - bigger than the Bridge over the River Kwai, Higher than the bridge of San Luis Rey, more fraught with danger than a Bridge Too Far. An action packed, double barreled thrill ride of a roller coaster over a cascade vaulting over the briny deep's salty shallows. Sailine estuary harboring nautical bouyant seas keeled over hauling mast better schooner than yawl think. Last summer when we propelled ourselves over the water on this bridge, I thought to myself, "we're on a metaphor." We were like Theseus vying along the cliff road into Thessaly, confronting the giant Procrustes. We were like Oedipus knotting and knitting out the riddle of the Sphinx. Would we face the Minotaur; were the waters below haven to other animal-human hybrids? And the skies above a domicile to chimera and griffin? On either side of us Scylla and Charybdis? Had we forgotten lamb's blood in order to placate the shades of Hades, where we might inquire of Teiresias, he alone among them having his mind entire? Would bar-b-que from Hog Heaven suffice?
Sing muse the transmission's roaring engine whine
The tread and phalt of asph
The Triumph Spitting fire
Anchises chassis sizzling ceaselessly
The crash clanging craggy waves
Spouting capered whiting ruffian orange
Fluking flounder bottomed surf scuffing
Shore.
O Homer deranged
Ware he'd ear indie
ant elope splay.
And then just as quickly: we were over the bridge and my thoughts returned to normal.
In our rear view mirror the Bridge of Terror flailed its tentacles and banged its masticators in delirium. Its roar flung out after us and I repeated, "who has troubled you Bridge of Terror - No Man that I know. " We made it over with no serious toll upon our senses.

Now I must go to Figgo's and eat. But what: lamb ragu? a salad? something to demonstrate that I am not given wholly to meat eating? Shall I feast on greens like Nebuchadneezer, the roots and flowering of the Earth?

Indeed, the theater seats have been rescued from obscurity and honored with a place in our home. The note I wrote that I republished here actually succeeded in returning them to me. And now they grace our home, waiting for a flat screen TV, where our movies may be displayed and we may eat buckets of pop corn.
Or we may watch the MythsAmerica pageant.

I only wish that we were sitting together tonight, both of us working in Durham and our house sold here in Decatur.
I love her more than words.

A reprint but a good one

Some months ago, when Columbia Pres next door had a yard sale, I bought a set of seats. This was no ordinary set of seats: this set was arranged together like theater seats. They were three simple seats grouped together. The frame was iron and the seats were wood veneer. Attached to the back was a hymnal holder and a holder for tiny communion cups. I could not believe my good fortune at coming across such a thing. It was a prize and evocative of an era when churches experimented with practical alternatives to pews. I figured that this alternative was about 1935 - 1940. Immediately seeing the possibilities of such a seating arrangement, Geza, who was with me, helped me move it back to my dorm. We set it out in the hall, across from a blank spot on the opposite wall. Geza and I sat there and toasted our good fortune to be in such a place and be sitting in such seats. He later told me that as he sat there he had a revelation: he saw how it was possible for free men and women, under the eye of God, to sit on folding theater seats, made of wooden laminate, and dream visions and see thoughts of visions, and visions unthought of, and dreams unthinkable. For that moment we were the most fortunate of men. Geza and I weren't the only people to sit in these chairs. Others told me of their experiences. Some spoke of recovery, others mentioned a feeling of peace. It was a pacific set of ecclesial theater seats, iron framed and wood laminated. It welcomed all. Late at night I would hear couples speaking in low murmurs; old friends would come during the day and reminisce. Often, when I was coming back to my room, I would espy evidence of solitary contemplation: a prayer written on a small paper scrap and inserted in the iron-work, a tear-stained handkercheif left on an armrest. Some might say I was mad, and I can be easily faulted for leaving these seats out in the hall. Like the Moor, I loved not too wisely but too well, and out of a tender heart I left them there. Their vulnerability pinching my heart with a sweetness transcendental and immanent - and now I am bereft of them. Mistaken for derelict and cleaned out with the other hallway detritus, they were removed to the dumpster's vicinity, and from thence further removed by annonymous hands into obscurity. This removal occured while I sat in a theater, in stadium-style seating,watching a space opera. How much I feel my infidelity, as if I had traded the form fitting wood laminate for the cold companionship of a cup holder and the mesmerizing thump of dolby stereo. How now I ache for the simple welcoming appearance of this set of seats in my silent hall? What dark force now grips myheart? A force of memory at once bitter and at once sweet. Sweeterbit? I asked, "Oh ecclesial theater seats, can it be that you are lost to me forever?" The night drew me out and I searched. The thickets of the brambles among the trees scratched and tore at my skin. I stumbled along stream banks and thrashed my way through kudzu. At last I came to my senses in an open field under the stars. I looked up at Orion and the Plieades. I navigated the zodiacal signs and my own ignorance rebuffed me. What is left for me now but to continue on, to live with my loss, and to let this minor grief merge with all the sad grieving that runs through the great world like a river with uncountable tributaries.

Another Annunciation

Actually this is the second annunciation I've posted today, but in the blog it reads first - an instance of time being folded on time. I painted this (as I mentioned in my posting for March where I took this image from) in New Mexico, where it was purchased by my friend Shannon Webster. Now it hangs in his home in Birmingham, AL. This painting is more expressionist and less concerned with the individual Mary or the individual Gabriel. The angel here appears in a flame of fire. Fire is a peculiar symbol for God and is rooted in the Hebrew scripture, notably in Song of Songs 8:6 where it reads "[my memory's translation follows] Love is strong as death and Jealosy harder than sheol; [young's literal translation following] its burnings are burnings of fire a very flame of Jah." This is echoed (notably as well in the burning bush episode) in the New Testament in Jesus' desire in Luke 12 to baptize with fire, and later in Hebrews at the end of chapter 12 where it is said that "our God is a consuming fire."

Today in looking up more information on Mary (via Wikipedia - yeah, I know, but it is a good starting place) I came across the concept of panagia, or Mary of the Sign, where the Lord and sometimes the Trinity are depicted in Mary's womb in a cut away view. The intriguing notion here is that when Mary contained Jesus, she contained the universe as well. My mind immediately went to the possibilities of space travel. This concept does explain gospel fragments found in Egypt, written in Coptic, that describe, seemingly, that during one of Mary's visits to her OB/GYN the position of the big and little dippers reversed for 20 minutes; also contained in these fragments, and a puzzle to scholars, is a reported conversation between Mary and Joseph, in that while she was pregnant, she had to excuse herself, telling Joseph that she had to visit the ladies' room and that "this might take a while." Thus are the travails when you're peeing for the universe. In a later instance, while visiting relatives at a wedding, Mary apparently ate the whole spread, when no one was looking, escaping detection because she was fairly tiny, and the volume of food consumed was enough to feed 200 people. Such are the travails when you're eating for the universe. In some gnostic texts Mary didn't ascend to heaven so much as go behind a bush to relieve herself while on a journey to Ephesus. Some say that she is still there, reading magazines, doing crossword puzzles, and learning French, and that when she finishes the Messiah will return and speak in Duke chapel.

An Annunciation reprised

I painted this annunciation last year and our friend Bob King bought it. Jami told me the other day how she wishes we still had it, but that's how art is: you can't hold on to things. Well you can, but the idea is that paintings get out into the world and hang on different walls where they're appreciated by a vast numbesr of people. The image of the annunciation is so charged for me that I'm bound to paint it again. Not that I'll paint a copy of this one. I do like the mirror element; in the past I've indicated God with a large hand pointing out of a cloud at a small girl reading. This annunciation takes Mary's sexuality into account. The angel, Gabriel, in Jami's words, looks like Snape, Alan Rickman. I suppose with the mirror I'm refering to, among other things, Brokhurst's image called Adolescence. Mirrors figure heavily in art: Vermeer and Van Eyck made great use of them. Manet's Bar at the Follies Bergere uses the mirror as a way to flatten and expand space at once. So is the mirror an indication of God? Does this say something about our image of God being fraught with our own projections, desires and fears? Gabriel has announced God's intentions to Mary and turned away, downcast (much like the angels in Wings of Desire), while Mary gazes at her body's reflection. If I were to recreate this painting as a color field painting it would consist of two vertical bars: deep violet and rich red - these two colors dominate the painting and create a mood of foreboding? Melancholy, perhaps. The prospect of giving birth to the messiah is a somber one and charged with sexual anxiety. We have stories of God impregnating humans: Zeus with Europa, Danae, and Leda. I think that this story is prevelant in other cultures and religions as well. The story of the annunciation resonates with these ancient myths: perhaps not so much for us, but for the first hearers of the gospels, the echoes would be unmistakable. Mary eventually absorbs Aphrodite (and takes her title "star of the sea") and Isis (taking her title "queen of heaven") - so that Mary, as God's vessel, becomes a space ship as well as an ocean going ship. By now though these associations are nearly forgotten when people think of Mary. The protestant tendency is almost reductionistic: to see Mary as simply a girl who gives birth to Jesus (leaving out the clasuse, "who God impregnates.") In the Middle Ages, when piety could not imagine Mary ceasing to be a virgin, even after giving birth, Mary's impregnation is typically depicted through the ear - the Spirit speaks a word (The Word) in her ear. This kind of reverence leads us astray though: When we refuse to imagine God being sullied by the very creation she created, and in maintaining this docetic comception we fall prey to the notion that matter is evil and unworthy of God - a gnostic error. Rabelais teaches us that God immerses himself in creation, rolls in the muck, eats the tripe, knocks up the maiden - and that these activities are the very locus of salvation, the very foundational things that God heals in sending Jesus to us; and it is in these things and through these activities that her creation is reborn. It is jolly, festive, feasting, grotesque (in the sense of hyperbolic abundance being celebrated) and it is for us, his creation. So my next annunciation will be slightly different - or maybe very different.

Historical re-enactment

Who doesn't remember the stories of yesterday, the stories we grew up with: stories of a brontosaurus, Horatio, flying with the 8th bomber wing and braving the flak strewn skies over the Teutonic motherland. When he returns home he is greeted with a hero's welcome, a parade down 5th Avenue, a date with Rita Hayworth, and his photo on the cover of Life. But when all the acolades are over and the limelight fades, he finds it difficult holding down a job, wearing a suit and sitting behind a desk. He yearns for the joy and comradship he felt at 25000 feet, dropping payloads of happy explosions down the throat of the Axis powers. Where can he go? Back to the Silurian miasma - hardly!
Calvino's Cosmicomics has a character that is a dinosaur who lives beyond the age of the terrible lizards (not that they were bad at being lizards). People remember how fearsome dinosaurs were but have forgotten what they looked like. In Calvino's story, the dinosaur goes about his business, falling in love, raising a family, hoping that no one notices what he really is. Even today dinosaurs could lurk among us, selling real estate, managing banks, delivering candy grams.

My Palate

Over time paint builds up on my palate and I cut it off. When I did this the first time it yielded great surprises and the second time as well. I take a mat knife and very carefully peal back the paint slab and slice, inching my way across the surface. Here I went ahead and cut it in half. I am very careful not to cut myself. And the result of the process is a surface (which is the undersurface) covered with swirls and eddies with bursts of reds and yellows. I would never have guessed that such a psychedelic experience was occurring underneath the surface.
Jami tells me that cat brain waves are similar to the brainwaves of someone on LSD. This gave me a new perspective on the lives of our cats: that for them the world is one big Peter Max poster with radiating lines, cubist structure, and futurist indications of movement: like one big Giacomo Balla painting. Cat nip actually gives them relief from this state of affairs. I think I'm remembering this right - I'm sure that Jami will provide a correction if I'm mistaken in this. So understand this about the kittens you see: for them life is a magical mystery tour and you really are the walrus. I am the egg man. The other day, sitting in a glass onion, elevated above the tree tops about 45 feet, I reflected on the course of the sun, how Phaeton's chariot forms that figure eight over the span of the year, and here we are nearing the winter solstice, sacred to Druids, and the Druid heels are near us in Decatur, what with the price of oil, how sustained our clothesline wanderings and trappings are, when an idea occurred to me. I must admit it gave me a start but not a finish, nor a swede, and I ambulated over to the mantel over the fireplace and under the earth's crust, where I gazed upon the firmament, no slack loose mint a firmer meant and former meint, as Frommer's meant a star grazing reville, the boggy woggy bagel boy of companionish Beh. I prayed for strength and a spring in my step and a fall in my foot. Winter went here spring Sumerian Awe Tum - oh great pill o fight. The Pleiades, a pillow flight, take wing and walk, so tired, where wrest ye thimble nimble quick a caroling jangling jaw popping presents of mind, a mime mummer mamma's bo'sun on my shoulder makepeace tanquarey. Gin. Among the flavored vodkas available: merlot and PBR.
*************************************************************************
And now I must return to my paper, a cpe final evaluation. A drab recounting of what I've learned and what I've felt and how I've felt and where I've felt and felt and flannel and cotton blends to make iodine. The bureaucracy of daily life, the Grendel of our times. As we live longer the wait becomes longer. Mark the score Langsam - which seems even more drawn out than the Italian direction Largo - which is equally slow. In high school band we hungered to play Presto or Vivace or Scherzo; Andante gave us fits. Adagio for now.
Yesterday, a mother was helping her son in the ICU. The son was in agony and the mother said, "think of something slow. Think of Brahms." Yes the Passaligia, that would be slow. Not as slow as some Wagner I remember performing. It's the slow movements that require the greatest intensity - fast movements are mainly precision and technique, but slow movements - how the mind wanders. Playing a double whole note at Langsam: it is similar to driving the speed limit on the interstate. Years ago my friend Mark and I were at the Atlanta Symphony when they performed Ligetti's Lontano - a massive set of whole notes. It was a revelation to us. The cherry on top was a woman who got up, threw her stole around her head, and walked out, demonstrably, in a huff. So delightful. I've been to hear other experimental or contemporary pieces at symphony hall, but people are possibly too well trained now - or else the woman in the huff stays away.
One of my favorite pieces of music is Pierre Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, or Fold upon Fold. My blog's title refers to it. It's filled with wonderful bumps and clangs. How I enjoy it. Try to hear the performance with Christine Schafer on Deutsche Grammaphone. Or better yet, simulate the performance with percussive objects at hand. All life is music and music is always right at hand.
Sometimes when I am in the house now there are bumps and clangs. When the cats were here I could just roll over and go back to sleep. Now I hope it's the ice maker. It is all langsam.
I miss Jami. I love her and being away from her so far away is not good for me. I can only hope to amuse myself with arcane projections of art until I fly to Durham this Friday.

The CSX rolls through Decatur

I have always loved trains. Some of my first memories drawing were of endlessly figuring the curve of tracks around a bend with curly plumes of smoke. I believed the only real trains were the old steam locomotives; diesels turned me off: where was the romance? The opening credits to Petticoat Junction thrilled me with the smokestack puffing along the rails. At that age I thought nothing about the health issue of people swimming in the water tank. As I grew up I rode trains at theme parks, where fake soldiers and card sharks played out "19th century class struggle scenarios in some locale dissonant with even the slightest historical connection to the purported events" - as I reported in one eighth grade essay on what I did over the summer. Jami and I both have photos of our sojourns in these parks: Maggie Valley and Panama City and I have memories of this happening at Stone Mountain - an unlikely confederate vs yankee shoot out. What would have made sense might have been a KKK vs FBI shoot out - being Stone Mountain and all. When I think about it I am amazed at how much of the history I encountered was reified, preinterpreted, homogenized, and packaged for consumption. Amazing too is that these are the criteria for deconstruction - that is, these states of affairs make deconstruction necessary. When I hear people decry deconstruction for removing certainty from the text, I am reminded of instances where the last thing a text needed was certainty, a stamp of approval, because to give such approval would be to participate in a lie. So let us deconstruct away.
And hence, as I've grown up, I have become less fond of the steam locomotive - at least the old conical smokestack, bilging smoke, while laboriously chugging, chased by Indians, wild bunches, desperadoes, soldiers, and other trains, while gentlemen with derringers jumped from car to car. There is something to be said for the sleek, art deco, streamlined engines of the 20th century, smashing their way across the Scottish moors or the Canadian shield.
I remember when my dad began work at Southern Freight and Tariff Bureau (later called Railroad Publications and referred to as Southern Frightened Giraffe Bureau by those who worked there), when there was still passenger service: how excited I was about the possibility for a family trip on a train. But we never went. Shortly after dad took the job, passenger service was discontinued. The old stations in Covington and surrounding counties became derelict, only decades later being reborn as restaurants. Old tracks have been torn up and the right-of-way has reverted to nature. And now I love these old diesels. When I lived out in New Mexico and I drove between Roswell, NM and Lubbock, TX a lot, I would come up alongside trains or come upon trains, as the road often paralleled the tracks: great long trains traveling fast and I could feel the energy come up through the ground.
Now when I work in my studio trains are just outside my door. Here I've stopped to stand near the edge of the tracks to capture the passage of a freight train from the crossing at Chandler Road past the Carpe Diem restraunt. When the light filled up the lens it took my breath away. I had to check and make sure that I was a good ten feet off the rails. And there was one shot of exactly that, which the shutter didn't cooperate on: the light filing up the lens. And how do you take a shot of thunder? Painting sound is a real challenge. I want to paint thunder.

psychiatric action figures

It seems unlikely that Jami's step dad would have psychiatric figurines: but here's a guy on a couch talking with a bearded guy writing. When I saw this I immediately thought of Freud burrowing into the substance of people's dreams. What if this was an early session where Freud and Jung analyzed each other. Perhaps this is right before Jung made Freud faint. But what is the guy on the couch holding? It seemed to be a musical text of some sort. I was also nonplussed by Freud writing with a quill pen.
Last year I bought an action figure of Van Gogh, which I left in its case. He came with five canvases and a french easel. A french easel is one of those things that fold up into a box and which can be set up outside. It's called a french easel because the english easel requires helpful badgers, an eagle and a donkey that is lost, away from home, on an epic journey of discovery and valor that will test their loyalty and prove their friendship. I think that's more the CS Lewis or Beatrix Potter easel.
Today in church I was scanning the hymnal and came across the hymn "there's a wideness in God's mercy" which I always read as "a wildness in God's mercy". It makes more sense to me that God's mercy is wild than that it be wide. Wideness goes without saying and the fact of it being wide is not interesting to me, not as interesting as that that mercy is wild. God's mercy is untamed, untrammeled, pristine in a natural state. God's mercy sneaks up on you, overflows its boundaries, floods, grows over, blows through. Who knows when God's mercy will bump into you. Wild!
More disturbing is the hymn misreading "while shepherds washed their flocks by night." I can see this as an action figure though: it's not surprising that ancient shepherds washed sheep at night, bonfires blazing, buckets filling troughs. All this time the cattle are lowing, sometimes hitting a C below the staff, and the deer baby sleeps - how does he sleep? Fawningly.
But the little lord Jesus, no crying he makes? Give me a break. Tell me he bawled like a baby. I'm tired of these docetic Christmas hymns. What isn't assumed isn't saved, as the ancient adage goes, and it's important for the incarnation and all that follows from it, that Jesus be typical in terms of feeling and needs.
A friend of mine is sermonizing on Acts 17 - the episode where Paul preaches in Athens. Metzger's textual commentary indicates a great textual variety in this section. The passage begins with Paul being left in Athens where he's disturbed by the profusion of idols. It seemed odd to me that he was disturbed about that: certainly idols are all over the place in that world. It may be the display and splendor of those idols that disturbed Paul. Acts is an interesting book. I think that it only vaguely reflects Paul's actual activity and personality: a memory, a trace, used for a history based on the epic form, like the Aneid and others of that time. Paul is presented as a type and acts according to the rules of honor and shame. Whereas in the letters, Paul is keenly aware of these rules and pictures himself as someone who has no ostensible honor. I'm sure that there are areas where my conjecture can be criticized: sections of letters where Paul is concerned with how his honor is perceived or passages in Acts where Paul acts without recourse to how he's perceived. I think that the preponderance of instances points to a Paul who in his letters works to subvert the honor/shame system of the ancient world, while the Paul of Acts doesn't exhibit that subversive program. The most interesting Paul of course is the one shacking up with Thecla in Spain - essentially the Paul of my imagination. The girl baptized a lion right after she baptized herself (in the only instance of baptizomai in the middle voice in koine literature) in front of friends and family at the Roman equivalent of NASCAR.
Paul and Thecla action figures would be great - accompanied by that lion. Their child, called in utero Pauline, with her full name, Pauline Theologie.

Now December

Almost 11 months ago Jami and I were in London, on our honeymoon, and we had a wonderful time. I can't wait to go back. I can't wait to walk with Jami along the south bank of the Thames again, visiting the Courtauld and National Gallery, exploring more places, venturing further afield. Sure its cold and wet, especially in January. But cold and wet is part of the ambiance in London. Here's a photo of Nelson's pillar: it's admirable. Nelson had it made as a door stop to a country cottage he planned to retire to. The cottage itself was only partially built when Nelson sailed away for the last time. Some say that he never died but is frozen in a block of artic ice, still living, where he guides the course of the British empire through telepathy and has set up a pen pal correspondence with King Arthur and Charlie Chaplin. Legend says that when Nelson is thawed out he'll return to England, and a new age will dawn, where he'll finish building his cottage.
Speaking of returns from "Death's dream kingdom" and "Death's other kingdom", Jami took three hours Saturday to sit in Duke Chapel in order to hear the Messiah and he never showed up. I say "he" never showed up, but of course, Christ could return as a woman. If he returned as the girl in the Golden Compass that would freak everybody out. I'm all for freaking people out when they're so grounded in their expectations that they're writing God's script for Her; what are the Sinister Derriere books but an attempt to write God's script. Traditionally God takes a pranksterish view to these prewritten scripts, and so Christ coming back as a 12 year old girl and sitting on St Peter's throne shouldn't surprise us: people who are accustomed by the media to seeing only people in expensive suits, who travel with large entourages and security details, as emblematic of power, as worthy of making the 'big' decisions - as if only these people are the only ones worth listening to. Yet it's these people, educated in the world's best schools, who've got the world in such a bad place. How far are we from the monkeys banging femurs in front of a black obelisk, despite all our culture and technology, when our propensity to solve problems through violence is near indistinguishable from early primates.?
Nelson, come back and finish your cottage.