I’m fascinated by people with slightly asymmetrical faces. When I say slightly, I mean, only really noticeable by looking at a photo, where it’s easy to verify your hunch by covering first one side and then the other with a piece of paper. The results of the comparison can be quite startling: we forget how often apparently harmonious and self-consistent images and narratives result from an unconscious blending of disparate parts. Just as it’s possible to become familiar with the Bible and never notice all the disparities between the first and second chapters of Genesis, so is it often the case that you can know somebody for years without noticing that one side of his or her face is significantly sadder-looking than the other. Or more troubled, or more thoughtful. Because that’s what I’m talking about here: faces in which the persistent, infantile positivism of our culture has been stalemated by a gloomier or more realistic cast of mind. At least, I think that’s what’s going on, but perhaps I’m reading too much into it. It may in fact be the case that all faces are at least slightly asymmetrical, in the same manner and to the same degree that their owners are right- or left-handed: one side is simply stronger than the other. The weaker side will tend to wear a more relaxed or cheerful expression, since — as motivational speakers are wont to remind us — it takes more effort (if not necessarily more muscles) to frown than it does to smile. But if that be the case, why would the asymmetry only be detectable for a certain, small percentage of the population? Do the rest of us somehow unconsciously correct for a default tendency toward asymmetry through complex feedback loops between our own facial expressions and those we see on others? If so, then the question becomes: why and how do certain people manage to escape the influence of such pervasive, unconscious social pressures? And why would the results of such nonconformity so often strike us as beautiful?
Visions
One morning in late July, I had a vision of things from the inside-out: in lieu of a leaf, for example, I saw a two-walled room devoid of green. Bark no longer belonged to the tree, but to the air around it. All flesh was glass.
The elephant-sized boulders scattered through the woods no longer reminded me of anything final. I saw instead that they were tongues of pure thirst, slowly dissolving, giving rise to gray clouds. I sat in a space between three boulders and listened to a hermit thrush. It began to rain.
*
Imagine if, instead, I had caught a sudden glimpse of what that woods would look like just six months later. No vision can measure up to the reality of a northern winter: the ground’s smooth pelt, the deep blue sky, the appalling distances that can open between two trees.
*
You don’t need a grand vision to feel connected to the universe; you simply need to to be mindful of basic ecological principles. However much we may try to pretend otherwise, we are each a part of the food chain, temporarily undissolved pieces of meat in a cosmic digestive sytem. Therefore, in a very real sense, every state is an altered state. And even in the more figurative sense with which mystics or drug-takers talk about altered states of consciousness, the pleasure is in the transition, which can be prolonged and intensified by artifical means, but is still relatively fleeting.
What you get out of those transition states probably depends very much on what you bring to them. Don’t believe the wilder claims of the cannabis-boosters: smoking pot will not magically turn violent assholes into peaceniks; it will only make them temporarily a little less dangerous. Likewise, a simultaneous global orgasm might be amusing, in a guerilla theater kind of way, but it would not bring about world peace, any more than making everyone profess the same faith would. Building peace is hard work. Hell, just remembering to be kind to those you love is hard work. Good visions and good vibes probably help, but only a little.
*
Speaking of visions, be sure to catch Nathan’s story about his adventures as a vision-questing gringo in Mexico in the comment thread to the “cathedral” post. Start here.
Warning label for a cathedral
In the comments thread for Monday’s post, Nathan says, “I’m still trying to imagine what a warning label on a cathedral might say.”
WARNING: Contents under pressure of suspended disbelief. Do not puncture or agitate.
Do not stand under gargoyles during heavy rain.
Do not attempt to scale cathedral without proper climbing equipment.
If ascending bell tower with beautiful, unconscious gypsy maiden, keep one hand on the railing at all times.
Discontinue use of cathedral if any of the following symptoms occur: drowsiness, mild irritation, guilt, vertigo, hallucinations, ecstasy, bleeding of the palms, spontaneous human combustion.
Do not drink from, or launder intimate apparel in, baptismal font.
In case of prayer, make sure kneelers are in the down position. Please refer to special safety instructions on kneelers before use.
Do not stage-dive off altar during mass.
Do not circle structure counter-clockwise during electrical storm while chanting the Lord’s Prayer backwards.
In the event of an overflight by pigeons, cover head.
Do not remove buttresses, as walls may buckle.
Do not stand near windows in the event of an earthquake or theophany.
Failure to follow these rules may result in serious inconvenience or death.
Inside the mind of the Christian Right
Chris Hedges, the former New York Times reporter and author of the magisterial War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, is back with a new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. He summarized his findings in a recent essay on Alternet. An accelerating “Weimarization of the American working class,” he wrote, has bred a “culture of despair,” which he describes with the same empathy he brought to bear in his writing about soldiers and war correspondents. If the essay is any indication, this sounds like another essential study from one of our few genuine contemporary prophets.
The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.
They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.
The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.
Night unto night
Seated between the quietly humming computer and the cold-air return vent for the furnace, I begin to hear voices. It’s not the stirring of a crowd united in passion for some cause or spectacle, nor the whispers of a moss colony buried by snow, but a simple and pleasing cacophony — the kind that grows from any gathering in which many conversations blend and merge. Picture yourself in some cave-like station or terminal where every other person is speaking animatedly into a cell phone. They might as well each be talking to God, except that, from time to time, they pause to listen. That’s what this pause is like. I’m tired and I’ve run out of things to say, so I give listening a try. The furnace stops, and a moment later the refrigerator shudders into silence. I power down the computer; the voices merely rise in pitch, till they are thin as the hairs on a fly. Call it sensory deprivation if you want. It’s past midnight, the full moon is hidden by clouds and I’m sitting in the dark, accompanied by the white noise of angels in which I do not believe.
The path that was never ment to be tooken
Archives are a funny thing. As I mentioned back on January 3rd, Via Negativa does get occasional comments on older posts. And despite the likelihood that web searches account for the largest single group of visitors to this or any blog, it’s always a bit of a shock to realize that posts one thinks of as existing in the past are still quite present.
It would be interesting, as an experiment, to design a blog with no time and date stamps at all, and a completely randomixed archive. The links from post to post would work the same way as those “Next Blog” links on the top bar of Blogspot blogs. Instead of a “Recent Posts” link list, the sidebar would feature a random list of “Other Posts,” and the front page would display a single post from the archives that would change every time the page was renewed. When you wrote a new post, it wouldn’t be singled out in any way; there’d be no pinging, no feed. The search bar would be the only way to find a particular post.
That is, in fact, the kind of website I used to fantasize about creating back in 2003, during the nine-month gestation period for Via Negativa, when all I had was a lousy Geocities site. I still think it would be a neat way to share a large collection of poems: curiosity would keep people clicking, and the inevitable repetitions of some poems would encourage re-reading.
This would also be a good way to display a sacred text, wouldn’t it? There are already those who treat Google as an oracle, or who use random selection software for a cyber version of stichomancy. So the internet is already a source of revelation for some. I figure it’s only a matter of time until some whacked-out newage prophet decides to try and harness that vatic power for some revolutionary new covenant between humanity and the spider-god of the web.
*
Yesterday, my post on mushrooms from last July received this delightful comment from Anonymous:
Shrooms are the best shit u can have. Thanks to them I am able to see the future and know what lies a head. I have seen humanity rise and fall many times but in the end it does not matter for what reasons that we face now and things that we ignore will haunt us for our lives, for there will be consequences for every action done or word said. There is no hope but only hell to come all to have fallen victims to the ways of the path that was never ment to be tooken, those that sleep for eternity will once rise and except whats coming to them for they know but did not act, all is well that ends well, for those that ment good.
*
On message
Along the old highway, soon to be replaced by an interstate, a billboard touting the benefits of advertising on billboards: THINK BIG, it says. And right beyond it, a billboard with this message:
There are times when she pretends
to be delighted with your gift.
This won’t be one of
those times.
It is an ad for, I think, diamonds. I only spotted it at the last moment as we sped past, my mind on the Engineered Rock Placement Area — the mountain of toxic rubble that will soon begin to take shape a quarter mile away along the creek.
*
In the patio outside the new wing of the library named after the football coach, the university sold the rights to inscribe names in foot-wide bricks for $2,500 apiece. The coach and his wife, public-spirited citizens that they are, each purchased a brick. You can’t have your name in too many places, I guess. Some of the bricks contain clever messages: one alum admonishes people to stop reading the bricks and go study. Another brick simply paraphrases Pink Floyd, “We are all bricks in the wall” — kind of silly, since this is manifestly not a wall. I do like one of the messages, though:
A few feet away stands a sculpture entitled Stacks, by an alumnus named Peter Calaboyias (see photo at top). Four large, bronze tablets lean together conspiratorially like football players in a huddle. They are embossed with a hodge-podge of glyphs with no collective meaning.
Those images were created out of twenty-five scripts, including the foundations of Cherokee, Armenian, Thai, Greek and symbols of Braille and Hieroglyphs. The sculpture is supposed to visually represent the function of a library as a repository of methods and systems for communications. The plate images only represent characters and symbols of communication, not languages, according to a University Libraries’ Office of Public Information and Relations press release.
To me, though, the unreadability of these tablets makes a statement about the occult nature of the specialized languages peculiar to academic disciplines. And the artist’s vision of information as context-free code rather than message seems highly compatible with an emphasis on “electronic information resources,” the purchase of which is supported by those $2,500-dollar bricks.
By contrast, the faí§ade of the other wing of the library, named after a pioneering professor of American Studies back in the early 20th century, features much more conventional carvings of cap-and-gowned scholars with the messages, The Library is a Summons to Scholarship and The True University is a Collection of Books. These sentiments seem more than a little mossy now: the part of the library’s budget dedicated to buying books continues to shrink as more and more funding goes toward electronic material. That wing faces southeast, and stands at the head of an elm tree-lined walking mall. Its nearest neighbors are office buildings for the College of Liberal Arts, and have the names of Great Men — Kant, Goethe, Shakespeare et. al. — carved in Roman letters all around the entablature. It is, as the kids say, very old-school.
The new wing faces in the opposite direction, toward the big new Spiritual Center across the street. This is mostly happenstance, of course, but I do think that information resources make a far more comfortable fit with spirituality than knowledge. The former term makes no implicit claim about truth-status, and thus doesn’t threaten the sovereignty of that mix of assertions and emotions that most people mean by the term spirituality. And whereas the acquisition of knowledge might lead to wisdom or inspire ethical behavior, the gathering of information serves merely to empower. Knowledge is active and alive; information is passive and inert. I like the inviting quality of the “Stacks” sculpture, but if I’d been the artist, I would’ve dispensed with all the exotic glyphs and covered the tablets instead with ones and zeros.
On the 13th day of Christmas …
My writing table is clean for the first time in three years. Digging down through the piles, I discovered some unopened correspondence — can there be anything more melancholy? — and four envelopes that I’d put stamps on, presumably for letters I never finished writing, or wrote and then decided not to send.
With two or three years’ perspective, one has a better idea of what’s really necessary to keep, and what can be pitched. I found multiple copies of minutes from old meetings I couldn’t remember having attended. I found articles that I had set down where I would see and read them, but then quickly buried with other, more urgent things. I had to create four new file folders, and in the process reacquainted myself with my filing system, which is not organized alphabetically but by logical relatedness.
For example, in one of my file cabinets, a folder marked “Me” — for expired passports and the like — is followed by “Stuff” — owner’s manuals and warrantees — and then “Financial Crap.” Beyond that, the back half of the drawer holds files of correspondence from family and friends — letters and postcards, poems and photos. Going in the other direction, “Me” is preceded by “How-To” (which is practically empty; I’m not very handy), “Herbs,” and at the front of the drawer, a number of bulging folders devoted to beer and brewing.
So here I sit at my clean, almost empty table, struggling against the blankness of this virtual page. I feel suddenly very exposed. But that NY Times article I blogged about the other day, “Saying Yes To Mess,” frightened me. I never like thinking I might be part of some trend or movement.
*
Last night we asked my cousin Morgan, who is still young enough to believe in Santa, how her Christmas had gone. “O.K., I guess,” she said. “But I have so many toys now! Next year I’ll have to have a little talk with Santa, and tell him not to bring me too many more toys.” I’m not sure she realizes that many of her cousin Elanor’s toys, including some that were in my parents’ living room last night, had once belonged to her.
Of course, Elanor is young enough to be happy with practically anything: an empty plastic pint container can provide hours of amusement. And Morgan’s attention is drawn often enough to natural objects — a mantid egg case, a goldenrod gall. She brought the magnifying glass that my mother had given her on an earlier visit and wanted to take a close look at everything.
Most interesting of all — to me, at least — is Morgan’s penchant for spinning stories. A toy or other object no sooner attracts her attention than it is endowed with a personality and a basic trajectory of needs. We humans are all still animists at heart, I think.
Reasons for the Season
1. The earth is tilted on its axis by 23.5 degrees
2. Other seasons all quit
3. Generals in the Salvation Army threatened a coup
4. The eager, shining faces of small children opening presents help us forget the emptiness of consumerism and greed
5. Halls needed to be decked
6. “Christmas” sounded better than “National Overweight Bearded Guy Awareness Week”
7. If we don’t cover our houses with lights, inflatable snowmen and giant plastic reindeer, the sun may never return from the underworld
8. Magi hadn’t heard the one about the camel and the eye of a needle yet
9. God had promised to bless the seed of David, whence Joseph, but, uh… never mind
10. Seven days between December 26 and January 1. Seven Basic Principles (Nguzo Saba) of African culture. Coincidence? I think not
Demonology
Here’s another recycled, pre-owned, gently used, like-new, encore presentation of a post. The wordier original version was here.
Speak of an itch & it will appear,
pure miserable temptation
to turn on ourselves,
to rub our bodies clean
of all sensitivity. Existing
mainly in the details,
its names are legion:
arm itch, thumb itch,
calf itch, back itch,
breast itch, chest itch,
lip itch, rib itch,
forearm itch, foreskin itch,
elbow itch, ankle itch,
facial itch, anal itch,
mouth itch, muscle twitch,
groin itch, gum itch,
head itch, heel itch,
wrist itch, fingernail itch,
kneecap itch, behind-knee itch,
leg itch, neck itch,
nipple itch, nose itch,
scalp itch, stomach itch,
eye itch, eyelid twitch,
vaginal itch, clitoris itch,
testicle itch, penile itch,
thigh itch, shin itch,
underarm itch, eyebrow itch,
ear itch, cheek itch,
sole itch, shoulder itch,
knuckle itch, upper arm itch,
buttock itch, foot itch,
hand itch, finger itch,
palm itch, jaw itch.
Even an amputee’s missing part
can somehow itch, on the other side
of an unbridgeable absence.
It’s a bait-&-switch.
What we miss — we’re convinced —
is simply the scratching.