Are tall buildings that tower above their surroundings inappropriate?
I’ve talked with people whose answer to that is “Yes, obviously,” but when pressed, no one has ever given me an explanation that doesn’t reduce to, “I just don’t like it.”
Maybe that summary is a little slanted, but it’s an easy conversation to imagine. For Herriges, this gut reaction presents a problem:
Unfortunately, the vague notion of “incompatibility” has even made it into many city codes and planning documents, where it functions as a catch-all justification for any advocate or elected official to object to a proposal they personally dislike. This trend is harmful to our ability to talk about urban form, urban design, and development regulation in constructive ways. When we frame the debate around “compatibility” or “scale,” it quickly drags the whole thing into culture-war territory.
This is fascinating to think about, for all kinds of reasons. Herriges goes on to talk about the use of “garbage language,” the importance of human scale and function over form, the primacy of horizontal over vertical dimensions—it’s well worth the read. And as far as I can tell, I agree with him.
And yet . . .
While I don’t have any specific objections, I also still agree with Czesław Miłosz (emphasis mine):
In a landscape that is nearly totally urban, just by the freeway, a pond, rushes, a wild duck, small trees. Those who pass on the road feel at that sight a kind of relief, though they would not be able to name it.
It seems clear to me that Herriges certainly has a place for this scene, and for the human emotion behind it—but not for the nameless cause. Miłosz may not have been talking about scale, but the feeling (pardon the garbage language) seems valid, even though the way it’s described here, and the way it is usually felt in the moment, doesn’t defend itself against Herriges’s argument. Still, it seems right to me; and I think it’s right that this sort of intuition be considered, and maybe it should even make it into some city codes and planning documents.
None of that is to say that garbage language doesn’t exist, but it may just mean that some of our conversations have a problem. And though I’m not a city planner, it’s a very human problem that I’m very okay with.
Wesley Hill is one of those extraordinary writers whose words always manage to inspire. Even the use of a word like “exvangelical”—a word that I’m a little too excited to add to my vocabulary—becomes an opportunity for genuine insight, for the encouragement of a critical thought life that is always also longing for and returning to its “naive” faith. From his recent essay on the novels of Chaim Potock:
Even so, the Evangelical faith in which I was nurtured continues to beguile, inspire, and compel me in ways I am still discovering. I can’t be the Christian I used to be, but I want still, very much, to be a Christian. Potok’s characters help me understand my complicated feelings. They are not only interested in the deconstructive moment, in which childhood certainties are relinquished. They strive also for the chastened second naiveté, on the far side of the desert of criticism, that will make it possible for them to go on being faithfully Jewish.
The eighteenth-century aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg says there is “a great difference between believing something still and believing it again.” The novels of Chaim Potok show us what the latter looks like, and in doing so, make believers like me feel much less alone.
I remember talking to one planner about what one wants from others.
“Respect,” he said, “And their utmost effort.” “But all I want,” I said, “is love and a sense of humor.” His eyes lit up. “I see,” he said. “You mean positive feedback.”
Positive feedback. So we debauch our own sweet nature. I don’t want positive feedback, nor do the young. What they need is so much more important and profound—not “skills” but qualities of the soul; daring, warmth, wit, imagination, honesty, loyalty, grace, and resilience. But one cannot be taught those things; they cannot be programmed into a machine. They seem to be learned, instead, in activity and communion—in the adventurous presence of other real persons.
. . .
But if that is the case, my friends ask, what do you do? I have no easy answers. There are cultural conditions for which there are no solutions, turnings of the soul so profound and complex that no system can absorb or contain them. How would one have “solved” the Reformation? Or first-century Rome? One makes adjustments and accommodations, one dreams about the future and makes plans to save us all, but in spite of all that, because of it, what seems more important are the private independent acts that become more necessary every day: the ways we find as private persons to restore to one another the strengths we should have now—whether to make the kind of revolution we need or to survive the repression that seems likely. What I am talking about here is a kind of psychic survival: our ability to live decently beyond institutional limits and provide for our comrades enough help to sustain them. What saves us as men and women is always a kind of witness: the quality of our own acts and lives. This is the knowledge, of course, that institutions bribe us to forget, the need and talent for what Kropotkin called “mutual aid” — the private assumption of responsibility for others.
We could certainly add that life lived as “witness” is able to appreciate the best ways in which we are able to assume responsibility for others while also avoiding the worst: a way of living that takes seriously the profound resonances of that life which we live but with all the inescapable creaturely humility that also is our lot and our glory.
Marin closes:
What we are talking about here are really acts of love, the gestures by which one shares with others the true dimension and depth of the world. Those gestures are a form of revelation, for they restore to others a sense of what is shared.
. . .
That isn’t much, but it is also almost everything . . . The few real teachers I know, those really serving the young, are simply those who try to live such lives in their company, as freely and humanly as they can. The rest of “education” is almost always rhetoric and nonsense.
Orthodox stress that worship and theology in Orthodoxy are harmonious. Typically, though, more attention is paid to worship—especially regular participation in the prayer of the Church, in rites and rituals—and much less to the content of the faith, to theology, resulting in a gap between worship and theology suggested by the examples here.
Though the examples may not come from much of a study, there’s something very true here that could just as easily be written for and from a small-o orthodox perspective.
The fact is that in life—actual life—most of us are still trying to figure out what it is we’re talking about. We all probably have at least a little heretic in us.
We believe in God—such as it is, we have faith—because certain things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit’s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost.
What Billy Collins said of poetry seems closely related to history and community (and pretty much everything) as well. Not that everything needs to be like water skiing, but nothing I can think of requires or benefits from torture—proverbial or otherwise.
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
A conversation on the walk home from work has me thinking about… well, I don’t know what. But this other poem, prose, & praise from late April is close to it.
The Kingfisher rises out of the black wave like a blue flower, in his beak he carries a silver leaf. I think this is the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness? There are more fish than there are leaves on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else. When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water remains water—hunger is the only story he has ever heard in his life that he could believe. I don’t say he’s right. Neither do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body if my life depended on it, he swings back over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it (as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
~ Mary Oliver ~
That poem, which needs no commentary, came to mind reading Barbara Kingsolver’s essay “Seeing Scarlet” this afternoon. She describes a trip in Costa Rica to catch a rare glimpse of a scarlet macaw in the wild—uncaged and, therefore, more truly seen.
As we climbed into the Talamanca Highlands on a pitted, serpentine highway, the forest veiled the new ahead but always promised something around the next bend. We were two days south of San José, in a land where birds lived up to the extravagance of their names: purple-throated mountain gems, long-tailed silky flycatchers, scintillant hummingbirds. At dawn we’d witnessed the red-green fireworks of a resplendent quetzal as he burst from his nest cavity, trailing his tail-feather streamers. But there’d been no trace of scarlet yet, save for the scarlet-thighed dacnis (yes, just thighs—not his feet or lower legs). Having navigated through an eerie morning mist in an elfin cloud forest, we found ourselves at noon among the apple orchards on slopes so steep as to make the trees seem flung there instead of planted. […] On the river safe and sound, with the Golfo Dulce a steady blue horizon on our left, we rattled on southward through small fincas under the gaze of zebu cattle with their worldly wattles and huge downcast ears. Between farms the road was shaded by unmanicured woodlots, oil-palm groves, and the startling monoculture of orchard-row forests planted for pulp. The dark little feathered forms of seedeaters and grassquits lined the top of wires of fences like intermittent commas in a run-on sentence. To give our jostled bones and jeep a break, we stopped often; any bird was a good enough excuse. A dark funnel cloud swirling above a field turned out to be a vast swarm of turkey- and black vultures. With our binoculars we scanned the vortex down to its primogenitor: a dead cow, offering itself up for direct recycling back into the food chain. Most of the peninsula’s airborne scavengers, it seemed, had just arrived for dinner. Angling for position, near the carcass, two king vultures flapped their regal black and white wings and rainbow-colored heads at each other. “Wow, amazing, gorgeous!” we muttered reverently, gawking through our binoculars, setting new highs in vulture admiration.
I’m not sure vultures are ever as attractive as macaws, or do anything as perfectly as a kingfisher, but there is something in the awe even of predators and scavengers. If I had it in front of me I would add a picture I have somewhere at home, of the first I recall ever admiring a vulture. It was on a hike Pennsylvania several years ago, and two black vultures landed like helicopters barely more than an arm’s length away from where I was sitting on a cliff. I couldn’t tell you now if I felt at home in that moment or completely out of place.
One of the reasons I’m so enjoying Wiman’s Joy anthology is because I keep finding fresh ways that it—the theme broadly and the poems specifically—points such a paradoxically direct finger at that question that I keep circling around: How do I remain academic while simultaneously trying to break the didactic hold on so much of life and faith? (“For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven / From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.”)
I’ve been reading (slowly and very intermittently) a book with my pastor by Esther Meek called Longing to Know. Meek’s basic goal is to expand on one key sentence, largely derived from her dissertation on the Hungarian chemist-philosopher Michael Polanyi: “Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality.” A loaded sentence, for sure. But one thing it necessarily means—and this fact is what has driven me to people like Polanyi and Meek and Wiman (and Jesus)—is that much of life consists of and abides within the ineffable.
Thus, Frederick Buechner:
And the answer that she could not have heard even if I had given it was that it was not an idea at all, neither my own nor anyone else’s. It was a lump in the throat. It was an itching in the feet. It was a stirring in the blood at the sound of rain. It was a sickening of the heart at the sight of misery. It was a clamoring of ghosts. It was a name which, when I wrote it out in a dream, I knew it was a name worth dying for even if I was not brave enough to do the dying myself and could not even name the name for sure. Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you a high and driving peace. I will condemn you to death.
I’m not ready to tackle those last two sentences. (Is there something in that high and driving peace and death that’s necessarily and inexplicably bound up in the just-out-of-reach lump, itching, stirring?) But there is something indescribable, ungraspable, and always elusive that is yet no less real for its mystery or its secrecy, and maybe more real just because of it. (And no less alive for the death it brings?)
I was doing some reading for a discussion in class last week and took a quote from another of Wiman’s books, Ambition and Survival:
Some knowledge must be partial in order to be knowledge, the poem tells us, and there are experiences we can only have if we never quite have them.
There’s something oddly complete in the partial and the never-quite. Maybe it’s something like the view of a wild, uncaged scarlet macaw; and maybe it’s better—maybe it’s always better left implied, pointed at. Though Wiman was commenting on Thomas Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone,” he could just as easily have been commenting on a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which he has quoted often and which, along with the book itself, may very nearly capture the paradox:
For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is the foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
One of my favorite passages from Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace:
For the followers of the crucified Messiah, the main message of the imprecatory Psalms is this: rage belongs before God—not in the reflectively managed and manicured form of a confession, but as a pre-reflective outburst from the depths of the soul. This is no mere cathartic discharge of pent up aggression before the Almighty who ought to care. Much more significantly, by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face-to-face with a God who loves and does justice. Hidden in the dark chambers of our hearts and nourished by the system of darkness, hate grows and seeks to infest everything with its hellish will to exclusion. In the light of the justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness. Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion—without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and himself or herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and imitate God’s love for him or her. And when one knows that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.
In the presence of God our rage over injustice may give way to forgiveness, which in turn will make the search for justice for all possible. If forgiveness does take place it will be but an echo of the forgiveness granted by the just and loving God—the only forgiveness that ultimately matters because, though we must forgive, in a very real sense no one can either forgive or retain sins “but God alone” (Mark 2:7).
