March for our Lives: Poets, Prophets, and Silence; some disorganized thoughts

Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”

Mark 4:13-20 

Photo NBC NEWS

I got to attend the March for our Lives in DC yesterday. To say that it was a powerful time would be an understatement. There are many wise and insightful reflections on the march which have already been published. I would like to particularly highlight this piece by Megan Garber at the Atlantic and this photo reflection by my friend Benjamin. My thoughts this weekend have been circling around the ideas of poetry, prophecy, and silence.

Today is Palm Sunday and that seems, to me, relevant. On Palm Sunday we celebrate Jesus' triumphal entrance into Jerusalem. It is, in Christian tradition, one of the more mysterious of our celebrations. The celebration comes just days before Good Friday, when Jesus is killed by sinful humanity acting through a violent colonial empire. The celebration itself is understood to have been indelibly marked by plans to murder the very king it celebrated. The religious establishment and the secular government shook with fear and fury as children celebrated the Prince of Peace, the God-man who chose to ride to his final confrontation on the back of a mule rather than on a war horse. On Palm Sunday, Christians celebrate the one who defeated death by embracing his own pain and death.

I hope that the parallels are obvious.

Children, students, should never have had to lead the movement against gun violence. Children should never have had to lead the celebration of the one who delivers humanity from death. Children should never have had to, but children did have to. They had to because of the silence of those to whom the task was given. Two thousand years ago, in the face of adult silence, children sang. Yesterday, in the face of adult silence, children sang.

I don't know all of the reasons for our silence, and I don't know all of the reasons for their song. Some of us have been silent because we have given up hope—their hope is not exhausted and they share it with us. Some of us believe that the message of peace is too good to be true, we have chosen to accept the inevitability of violence—they still believe that peace is stronger. Some of us do not want peace, some of us have never wanted peace, our power comes from violence—they have chosen peace. Some of us want a King who will kill our enemies for us—they have embraced peace. Some of us were just too tired—they could not keep silent.

Alex King and D'Angelo McDade photo The Star

They could not keep silent.

They could not keep silent.

They could not keep silent.

But neither were they afraid of our silence. Christians believe that, in dying, Jesus overcame death—that Jesus turned the agent of his destruction and of ours against itself. In the words of John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so...

Death, thou shalt die. 

Yesterday I saw the students who, a month ago, looked at death, at a man whose ability to kill had been preserved by our silence, and turned silence against itself. Yes, they called out our silence about gun violence; they called out a nation's weary quiet—the deadly stillness that invariably returned weeks, months, or years after Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, and Pulse. But more than calling out our silence, they used silence against itself. I saw it in two ways yesterday.

Yesterday, teenagers were given the attention of a nation. They took that attention, they waited till we were all listening to them, and they told us to listen to someone else. Their own pain had driven them to hear the voices of communities of color, the voices that we have ignored, and they reminded us that those voices have been shouting the whole time. They stood back and silenced themselves so that we would be forced to hear from D.C. and Chicago ("see, the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone"). One of the most powerful voices of the day was the voice of eleven year old Naomi Wadler who condemned us with:

I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news, I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential.

 They gave time on the stage to students from Newtown and they reminded us of Columbine.

And then there was Emma González. She has become, with good reason, a particular celebrity among the Parkland students who are speaking out on this subject. Her speech just days after the shooting was powerful and impassioned. One politician has already had to drop out of his race after he attacked her on twitter. When he went after her he was running unopposed, within days he had an opponent, and shortly thereafter he suspended his campaign. She owns her identity as a bisexual Cuban-American woman with pride and grace and has already learned the strength of what others might call her vulnerabilities. Yesterday, we all wanted to hear Emma González speak. We all wanted to hear the sort of impassioned power which has been so central to all that is happening. We showed marched yesterday because we care, we marched because this matters, we marched because we are learning to listen again, but I know that a part of me marched yesterday because I wanted a show. I wanted to see what would happen, I wanted all of these students and especially this student to perform for my encouragement and I know that I was not alone. The world was watching and asking her for a show.

González rebuked us with a poem and with silence. 

The woman everyone wanted to hear, read a poem about others and then stood in silence—weeping, defiant, and powerful—and forced us to listen to the silence of 17 graves. 

And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place.

-Walter Brueggemann: The Prophetic Imagination

And I Really Do Mean That

  I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

....
  But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.

 The  Senior Demon Screwtape, to his Nephew Wormwood

Transcribed by C.S. Lewis -  The Screwtape Letters

I was thinking about hipsters recently (I promise, I am going somewhere with this) thanks to an article my friend Steven Leyva posted. Specifically, I was been thinking about their use of "irony". The article (by Christy Wampole) deals with the idea terrifically and I do not propose to pirate and reword her observations. What did strike me though, is the similarity between "irony" as a hipster byword (which at the end of the day seems a little more sarcastic than ironic) and Lewis's treatment of flippancy in The Screwtape Letters. Both are ways of hiding and, probably more importantly, both criticism without substance. If Ms. Wampole is correct, the Ironic Hipster is mocking sincerity and the past in precisely the same way that the flippant man is mocking virtue. The Hipster does not tell us what it is that makes mainstream music, media, fashion and culture ridiculous; he simply treats them as though they are.

 Not that there isn't plenty to criticize in practically any culture- there certainly is. But criticism needs to be grounded, I am free to dislike the music and media image of Madonna only as long as I can say why I dislike them. To treat them as "obviously ridiculous" and mock them by becoming ridiculous myself while facetiously wearing or playing them is simple meanness. It is the difference between discernment and bullying. 

 
More serious though, is the relationship that the Ironic Hipster and the Flippant Man have to Joy. One aspect of Joy is that it is profoundly serious. A clever man may be able to make a Joke about virtue in general, it would be very hard indeed to make a good Joke about Joy (possibly something rooted in its use as a name but I'm not sure that even that would work out). But this difficulty does not arise from any intrinsic link between somberness or melancholy and Joy; indeed, Joy is often great fun, rather I am using "serious" to mean something closer to "weighty" or "significant". Joy really matters, and because it matters, it is out of reach for the flippant, insincere or ironic person. For the Flippant Man, sincerity is anathema - it explodes his facade of cleverness, an illusion built on the circular idea that the object of ridicule must be ridiculous because  it is being ridiculed and attended by the impression that the ridiculer is somehow above or better than that which he ridiculed. (If you don't think this is true, have you ever been ashamed of a song, book or movie only because someone else used it as a comparison to something they didn't like "whoa, that was worse than the country muisc"). I think it would be fun to go up to the next hipster I see wearing an Alf t-shirt and exclaim "You like Alf too? Awesome, so few people get how truly great that show was" I think they might be a little ashamed. 

Maybe I am particularly worried because I am generally a rather sincere and occasionally insecure person. I was taken aback a few weeks ago to discover that my high school students think of me as a hipster. On investigation it turned out to have a lot to do with the way I look. I have shoulder length brown hair which I generally keep tied back, I wear large sideburns and a goatee and my usual work attire involves a corduroy cabby hat, a selection of cartoon and comic-book ties, a tweed vest and a pocket watch. I do not really blend in. That said, while I am aware that hipsters often accoutre themselves similarly, we do it for entirely different reasons. I genuinely like Captain America, Bugs Bunny and Dr. Suess (got a 1-fish, 2-fish, red fish, blue fish tie for Christmas), I am a hopeless anglophile and bibliophile and happen to think that people in the 1920's looked really cool. It turns out the hipsters are mocking my style, or at least, the styles I have adopted!

I like sincerity as well. I write because I want to express something profound, I delight in books, music and movies which inspire me to sing, weep and cheer. I want to live an abundant risk-filled life, to drink deep and drain life to the dregs; I want to experience the laughter and sorrow the pain and the mind-shattering Joy. I want to see God and be undone.

A father

I would raise a glass to the carpenter

of whom so little is said

the story was told all about him

whilst men spoke of horns on his head

He taught the saw and the hammer

pulled splinters, healed cuts with his spit

Was it he who taught you a living

who taught you to heal with the mud?

Yesterday's message got me thinking...

 It doesn't quite manage a form but I find myself fascinated by the thought.

And the Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

About three quarters of the way through one of my notebooks is a reminder that "science fiction and philosophy would be a good blog post". I remembered to write this without it.


I am completely and unrepentantly partisan in favor or genre fiction. A friend asked me the other day why genre fiction gets such a bad rap in literary circles and as I launched into an answering diatribe it occurred to me that I am not precisely balanced on the subject. And I am alright with that. There are enough people out there fighting for the sanctity of "realist prose", and enough of them still occupy positions of power in various prestigious universities that I am able to feel as though I am still supporting the underdog in my defense of genre. Granted we are seeing more and more "sci-fi and fantasy" courses in English departments and I even know - oh frabjous day -  an instructor at the Naval Academy who was teaching a course on modern graphic novels (these are really long comic books like Watchmen and Persepolis for those of you who are not quite as immersed in geek culture).

Nevertheless, the wizened guardians of the literary canon are still debating The Lord of the Rings and Asimov's Foundation series. Let them bicker, history is on our side (well, mine anyway). But just in case it isn't; or in case I haven't made enough grumpy retorts to a nebulous literati, let me explain why and how I think that science fiction is the most philosophical of all genres (including realistic fiction).


Philosophers are huge fans of hypotheticals. Generally there is some attempt to make a hypothetical sound more impressive or intellectually worthy by calling it a "thought experiment" - this might also help with funding humanities departments - but ultimately the game is to imagine an unreal situation with it's own sets of rules for the purpose of playing out a theory to see how it might work in the absence of real world complications. And I think that this is a wonderful thing; hypotheticals give us all the opportunity to test something without having to worry about irrelevant details. A while ago I mentioned an ethical dilemma involving a train and several groups of people. The point is to imagine a situation in which someone's morality comes to the fore in a clear way. It does not matter that the situation is incredibly improbable, what matters is that it is a test case for at least two different ethical systems.


In science fiction, the author gets to do the same thing. What better way to explore philosophical anthropology than to imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is on a par with or even surpasses our own (Aasimov's Robot books)? If you want to expound a pre-modern cosmology in a way that modern thinkers will be able to understand how could you improve on a contemporary professor being shanghaied into a trip to mars (C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet)? Is there a more effective laboratory for investigation into the implications of a  perfect signifier-signified relationship than a novel wherein the enemy alien's doomsday device is an entirely accurate language (Samuel R. Delaney's Babel 17)? And how could there be a more thorough thought experiment into the cosmological implications if Plato's theory of the forms and their impact on multi-verse theory than a book about intellectual monks under attack from a world more distantly emanated the good (Neal  Stephenson's Anathem)? I could go on; and on and on and on.

 

Science fiction gives a writer the ability to imagine the specific set of circumstances which would most clearly demonstrate their own innate philosophies and world views. Of course when that is all they use the novel for (in fact when anyone uses a novel for much of anything other than as a medium for good story), they tend not to write very good books. But what if the author is a philosopher? What if they are writing not in order to preach a philosophy but to tell the excellent stories their philosophies inevitably produce? Some authors certainly are mere preachers - though sometimes they preach well - and some are tremendous story tellers and not very good philosophers (I would but Heinlein into this category). But some authors are genuinely both. Philosophers with a knack for recognizing a good story and the skill and craft to tell it well. It is probably going too far to call them philosopher poets but that would point in the right direction. That is why I find science fiction so intriguing, beguiling, thrilling and ecstatic.

Also laser guns, robots, space ships and aliens.

The Golden Mask

So this post is one of those "being vulnerable because I am doing something I don't do well" deals. Having a friend who actually is an excellent poet and a circle of friends who write this stuff on a semi regular basis turns out not to have made my brief attempts in the arena any easier. Ah well, I'd better just take the plunge:

The Golden Mask


I tell a tale to turn from unknown truth; too long known
and seek instead a kindergarten color wheel.
Your palette is too subtle; your pastels strained my eye
I never could connect with grays and browns
and purples faded, washed in detail, tassels, minutia,
death.

Instead I long for fairy queens and war,
for melodies, trombones and marching bands.
The cross, the stone, the bread, the cup, the fish
smother my soul with a nuanced earthquake devoid of Flame.

But quiet winds, drifted from English pipes
to children's minds are lightning from the sun,
and dragons and ships and warriors and crowns.
a whispered wardrobe starts a carousel.

Such simple themes must overwhelm my eyes
with red and blue and brassy green and gold
And that fierce name by which I loved Him first
is Love and Death and Joy without renoun.

"My King is coming, riding on a fawn;
I could not love Thee till I loved Aslan"

By - me

Be gentle.