The possibility of being surprised, hooked, so to speak, requires the cultivation of a certain kind of availability. There’s an irony to this: I need to make choices that make it possible, once in a while, for my will and intellect to be bowled over, overwhelmed by an arrival that grabs hold of me. In other words, once I’ve purposely journeyed into unknown territory, sometimes I need to put down the guidebook and simply drift. There might be long seasons of incubation that feel like walking through the same gallery over and over again, unaffected. But that is the discipline of aesthetic availability: training for surprise.
It is this necessary cultivation for surprise that is undermined by the cliché. The arts in the vicinity of faith seem especially prone to give us what we already love, to keep returning to tropes that are familiar, hence comforting. This is how to make the world smaller, shrinking it to the size of what I’ve come looking for, what I’ve come to expect. The comfort of the cliché is a buffer against surprise. …
A life hungry for aesthetic surprise does not settle for daily doses of predictably poignant comfort; instead, I need to expose my palate to strange, maybe even unsavory tastes as a way of making myself available for the sublime. While we can’t manufacture the surprise, we can learn to make ourselves available. …
Granted, there’s an objective force to works of art that can do this. It’s no accident that Bach and Cézanne hook so many. The mystery is what it takes for them to hook me. What did I have to go through for the epiphany to dawn, for the artwork to arrest me, unsettle me?
thesis and antithesis
To Ross Douthat’s recent (less-than-helpful) pieces here and here—neither of which are worth rereading—I can hear Nadezhda Mandelstam responding to some who “find comfort in the doctrine of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”:
They hope they may last out till a new “synthesis” which will allow them to come into their own again with a vengeance. …
For my part, knowing that permanent ideas are formed in youth and are rarely revised later in life, I can only watch with hope and bated breath as more and more people read poetry—and the “Fourth Prose.” Between people like myself and those who stand on the other side, there is a clear division: we are thesis and antithesis. I do not expect to see a synthesis, but I would love to know whom the future belongs to.
Hope Against Hope (246)
Angus Pinker writes words
Laura Miller on Angus Fletcher’s ability to read without seeing shit.
Unfortunately for Fletcher, literature is made of culture, not neurons, and any given literary work can’t be fully appreciated if separated from the thousands of cultural, social, political, economic, and historical factors that affected its making. . . In place of the rich and often fascinating cultural contexts that fostered these works, the reader of Wonderworks is served lukewarm potted neuroscience.
Jerry Fodor, on Steven Pinker’s similar treatment of reading:
And here Pinker is on why we like to read fiction: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?” Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance.
Fletcher’s treatment of literature seems worthy of every ounce of that same thick, enjoyable sarcasm.
C.S. Lewis, however, would go a little further in analyzing the problem:
Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer’s ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say ‘This is the poem’. Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists.
the incarnational poet
The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer — to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not — I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.
That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people — all people! — who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.
elfland ethics revisited
It takes one durable person to believe that fantasy is as potent as reality. Seeing too far into others’ lives can make you cynical. Novelists face danger, spending their lives imagining adult temptation and corruptibility. Holding on to the great “What if?” requires a willingness to live wide-eyed. A readiness—even an eagerness—to go on being surprised. When I’m writing from a child’s point of view, I sometimes find it helpful to literally get down on my knees and walk around the house. I’m once again a creature four feet tall. You can see the undersides of tables. Electrical outlets near the baseboards become fascinating again.
caritas
“What is the purpose of interreligious dialogue?” asks Abraham Joshua Heschel:
It is neither to flatter nor to refute one another, but to help one another, to share insight and learning, to cooperate in academic ventures on the highest scholarly level and, what is even more important, to search in the wilderness for wellsprings of devotion, for treasures of stillness, for the power of love and care for man. What is urgently needed are ways of helping one another in the terrible predicament of here and now by the courage to believe that the word of the Lord endures forever as well as here and now; to cooperate in trying to bring about a resurrection of sensitivity, a revival of conscience; to keep alive the divine sparks in our souls; to nurture openness to the spirit of the Psalms, reverence for the words of the prophets, and faithfulness to the Living God.
If a loud restaurant overwhelms you, the sound of pots and pans crashing send you into a rage, or you find a roller coaster at breakneck speed to be oddly relaxing, then perhaps you recognize yourself on some spectrum or another. The sensory world is a weird mix of human bodies, each of us moving around in a singular flesh envelope. We traverse the rooms and streets we like and we hate, turning the little knobs of the world’s sensation by our choices of what to wear, how to walk, what to include and what to shut out. Augmented by headphones or a hat pulled low, decked in seamless socks or technical Lycra or fuzzy sheepskin, wrapped tightly or loosely, rocking or fidgeting or chewing our nails—each body makes a stream of conscious and unconscious choices, knitting together a habitable personal universe minute by minute by minute by minute. When I see Stephen mapping the world in lines, breaking its space to tame it, all I can think is how perceptively he’s externalized an invisible but fundamentally human need: to build bridges that temporarily edit the shapes, or sounds, or sights of the world. And I wonder: Who else is looking for lines, a little lost in space? Who else is seeking a way?
ab initio, in medias res
From Sara Hendren’s very enjoyable book, What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World:
Desire lines can provide low-tech crowdsourcing for urban planners and architects, letting the habits of the walkers dictate to them how a space is best traversed, rather than trying to decide it up front. Some large campuses have postponed the paving of pathways until desire lines have first been created. One celebrated case was in the remodeling of the Illinois Institute of Technology, a project taken up by Dutch architect Rem Kookhaas and his firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the late 1990s. That campus presented a particular conundrum for achieving social cohesion. It had doubled the footprint of the original institution but had only half the enrollment. What kind of building would energize and unite the school? The OMA group studied desire lines and used them to plan the campus center, unified by a long single roof. The building wasn’t so much a new creation as an observation of extant use: it effectively enclosed the pathways and connections between on campus that were already established. The single-plane building is like an archive, capturing activities in motion. It took its form from travel behaviors made newly visible, not from a series of architectural types pre-identified for recreation, shopping, and the like.
This kind of practice is a human-centered design approach to landscape, paying close attention to the details of movement and patiently observing an area over time. […]
But desire lines may also be evidence of something more than pure practicality. The casual disobedience of a desire path as an alternative to the formally prescribed walkway is remarkably simply as a human choice, willfully out of step with the way things are. Cities and towns are often planned, well, by planners, by people tasked with creating systems that make mathematical sense for groups at the scale of hundreds or thousands. They roll out pathways conceived around the efficiencies of use and cost-benefit, shunting people up and down stairs or elevators , nudging them between turnstiles and onto trains for the fastest transport. And these efficiencies are often to the good. But the emergent, informal, human-made lines are organized not only by efficiency but by desire. The human individual is also making a path through life, through interiors and exteriors, a life that cannot be measured in abstract bureaucratic terms. […]
Interesting enough on its own. But… What if creation is meant to be something similar, or even had to be. What if, to be truly incarnational, the world had to play itself out, to be “caught” in motion by God?
What archive could ever fully house the evidence of desire in the millions of walkers who daily traverse a cityscape, all the wishing and wanting that drives each path, with all their untold forms of assistance, all the getting “organized” that got them out the door and into the street? “Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust.
And walking with is a mode of being in the world as well as making it.
a politics of greebles
From 99% Invisible, Interstellar Illusions: “Greebles” Lend Large Sci-Fi Structures a Sense of Scale:
In the world of physical modeling, creating variations to make things look big can be as simple as gluing small pieces onto models and allowing these accretions to suggest immense structures. […]
One pending suggestion for a dictionary definition of greebles shows that the term’s use has broadened over time, too, including any “cosmetic detailing added to the surface of a larger object that makes it appear more complex or technologically advanced on film sets and on toys to make them appear more realistic and hand tools to give the impression of higher quality.”
Not to hijack the point, but there has to be a corresponding effect for almost all political discussions, especially the ones on TV.
dispositions before discourses
James K.A. Smith at Image:
And how do you teach a body? Through embodiment. This is why the formation of the imagination is fundamentally incarnate. The way to the imagination is through the body, which is why embodied, material media captivate and shape it. Philosopher Charles Taylor talks about what he calls our collective “social imaginary”: “the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings” before they ever think about it, the way we perceive others and our collective life in an instant. Our “take” on others. Importantly, Taylor points out that our social imaginary is “not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends.” In other words, the social imaginary is shaped by the ways artists show us the world: our storytellers, image-makers, and performers of all kinds enact a story about who we are.
This, of course, is also where we go wrong. Our imaginations are susceptible to malformation depending on what images we feed them, what stories they soak up. It’s the imagination—well- or malformed—that determines what I see before I look. . . .
To change our world means telling a different story, inhabiting a different story, transforming my habits of perception to change what I see before I even look. “But this story,” Stevenson concluded, “requires a different symbolic landscape.” Arguments made in a courtroom are important; they might change minds and laws. But it is this sculpture, this memorial, that seeps down to the imagination. The soul that descends into this work of art can never see the world the same way again.
all will be well
It is true that [in her Long Text] the Lord rebukes Julian for her anxieties about sin, but what she thereupon corrects herself for having thought is not that God could have created a world of free human agents who did not sin. Instead, she corrects herself for assuming that all would have been well only in such a sinless world. Her inclinations on that subject, until corrected by the Lord, were the same as Hume’s. They were also the same as those of the biblical Job. What the Lord tells her is that all is well in just this sinful world, and that puzzles her all the more. . . .
It is the “not yet” that matters here, the provisional. What is provisional is Julian’s theological refusal of both the logical completeness of Plantinga, which would purport to demonstrate the formal consistency of an infinite love’s creating just this sinful world, and the narrative completeness claimed by Milton, which would purport to finish the story that “justifies the wayes of God to men.” For all her doubts about how it could be true, Julian accepts that “sin is behovely.” But I think she knows enough about how the logic of the behovely works—as narratives do—to understand that we could see how sin is behovely only if we were in possession of the complete narrative that makes sense of it, and we are not. All we possess is but a narrative fragment, a torn-off corner of the manuscript of salvation history, and it tells Julian of nothing but the paradox of an innocent man judicially executed for a reason he too begs to know of, though he dies, as we will, the reason why denied us all. Somehow, Julian knows that the meaning of sin, its character as behovely, lies in that incomplete narrative of the Cross that is at the heart of her showings, a narrative whose incompleteness is necessary, for “not yet” belongs to the nature of human existence in time. . . .
In the meantime, there is but the meantime, the “not yet.” And Julian does her theology obedient to the temporality in which neither understanding nor living can yet be “completed.” Julian is the theologian she is because she knows that all theological writing submits to a necessary condition of incompleteness, and like Hume she refuses an easygoing and peremptory ultimacy. For writing that is pretentiously “finished” is not theological; it is parody.