Like Pancakes from an Aerosol Can

It seems as if I start off every post with an apology for not writing more often. My intention really is to write at least three times a week, but that falls by the wayside with regularity. I am finding it difficult to balance the things in my life: work alongside relationships and the other sundry things I must do. Life gets even more complex during those weeks when I have a symphony concert (such as last week). I barely have time to breathe, much less write.

The hectic nature of my life right now gives me pause to stop and think about why we rush around so much. Why are we angry that speed limits exist; why is punctuality a most treasured virtue?

Last week I heard on the radio probably the worst performance of Rhapsody in Blue I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. No, the notes were not wrong and the tone was perfectly acceptable, but the piece was ruined for the simple reason that the performer took it much, much too fast. He rushed through every little cadence, goading the orchestra on with him. The piece lost the wonderful, relaxed feel of improvisation which lends it so much of its charm. I wanted to shake the pianist by his shoulders and say "SLOW DOWN! Everyone knows you can play the notes. Take time to enjoy yourself!"

Two confessions from my past. The first relates to the above paragraph. After I learned the Gigue from the 3rd Bach Suite, one of my favorite things to do was to challenge other cellists to race me by seeing who could play this tricky movement the fastest. I can only pray that Bach finds it in his heart to forgive me the travesty I inflicted on him. The Suites are first and foremost dances, and the joyful rhythm gets lost at high speeds.

Confession number two: as a child I hated the slow movements of pieces (especially concertos) and would always skip them when given the choice. My sister and I would battle about this, and I would always give the explanation that I found the slow movements boring. Truly, when I was a child I thought like a child and spake like one.

Thankfully my tastes have matured a little. Now I find few things as pleasurable to listen to as a beautiful slow movement. Whether it be the delicate unfolding of the second movement of the Dvorak Cello Concerto, or the hearrending slow build of the third from Shostakovich's 5th Symphony, I find that slow movements give me the breathing room I need to fully digest what is happening.

Life is like this, of course. We buzz from flower to flower, our eyes set to narrow focus, looking only at the task in front of us. Brute efficiency rules the day. We cannot stand the dead moments of life; we require constant stimulation to shield us from inactivity. In this way slowness relates to silence. We hate them both because they push us toward reflection. Our whole lives are an effort to crowd out the things which make us stop. Video on demand. E-mail. Instant messaging. Instead of all things in their own season, harvest time goes year round (this is true in a literal sense of the foods we eat. No longer do we have to wait for the spring to eat fruit -- it is always at our fingertips).

We call it convenience, praise it for making life "easier". What we really mean is that it makes life faster. We think that, the more we cram into our pitiful existence, the happier we will be. We just need that one extra experience, that one film or album or whatever: then life will satisfy.

Who fully understands what is lost in this Faustian bargain? Certainly we harden our hearts, dull ourselves to the little moments, the slow build of truly beautiful things. If we cannot acquire something instantly, we gripe and complain -- even question the point of having such an inconsiderate thing.

I think this way about grace. One of the unforunate side effects of the modern view of conversion is that it defines the experience as a one time, chosen event. It misses the thousand-thousand little moments of grace built up over time in our hearts as God calls and nudges. The song of spring's first robin. Beethoven's 3rd Symphony. The smile of a stranger and the arms of a friend. The brokenness of losing someone you love, or having a friendship fall apart. The ineffable experience of real forgiveness. All these are minor miracles, cataclysms that shift the tide of our lives like twigs in a flooding riverbed.

Prayer is a bit like walking up to an ATM, at least in my mind. I swipe my card, press the PIN, specify the amount, and voila! Cash, ex nihilo. When I pray for my friends or even for myself, my general expecation is that I will begin to see results almost immediately. The problem with this expectation is not that God is slow to answer, but that my eyes have been dulled and reined in to the point that I cannot see that slow build up of grace that is metered out to me daily. I want things to be the way I want them as soon as I want them. Just add water.

Next time you are in a rush to accomplish some oh so important task, take the time to slow down and think of all the things you might miss. Turn off the t.v. for one night. Put down even your book of the moment. Just sit and think on the delicate slow build of grace that has led you to where you are.

Look Underneath the Floorboards...

"Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says:

“‘You will indeed hear but never understand,
and you will indeed see but never perceive.
For this people's heart has grown dull,
and with their ears they can barely hear,
and their eyes they have closed,
lest they should see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their heart
and turn, and I would heal them.’

But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it." -- Matthew 13: 10-17

Believe it or not from the opening quote, this is actually a semi-sequel to my last post. It was rather late when I wrote it, so I published it unfinished just to get it out there. Because of the advanced hour, I think I failed to adequately communicate one of my main points about Paul Simon and Sufjan Stevens, which is their propensity for, to use the Kierkegaardian term, "indirect communication".

Let me step back a moment. One of Kierkegaard's obsessions is how one communicates about faith; he believes it to be impossible to do so directly. In the speaking of words about faith, something essential to the faith is lost. Therefore one must communicate indirectly through means such as irony and paradox. Though frustrating, these means help others by forcing them to appropriate faith for themselves.

Now, one does not have to wholeheartedly agree with Kierkegaard in order to recognize the value of indirect communication. Jesus used it often; without having done a tally, I would venture to say that a majority of what he says in the Gospels is indirect, whether through parables of merely intentionally veiled sayings. I remember Dr. McMahon, in his lecture on the Prodigal Son, mentioning that one of the purposes of the parables was to act as a catalyst for inward reflection -- to see oneself inside the parable.

We Americans have a distaste for irony and paradox. Our pragmatism pushes forward -- if words don't solve a problem, what's the point in wasting your breath? That is perhaps one reason we cling to science and technology, which give us a place to hang our hat; they promise straightforward answers which require little reflection (whether that twin headed beast actually delivers on that promise is more of an open question than some might imagine -- but that is a post for another day). Put another way, we love answers but despise questions.

So what does all of this have to do with Simon and Stevens, ostensibly the foci of this post? Well, part of what I tried to communicate last post (perhaps so indirectly as to be a bit too obscure) was that they were both masters of communicating about the lives of people not through lists or chronology, but through abstract word pictures, metaphors which succinctly capture what a human life is like.

Tonight I wish to expand on that a bit, because there is a double layer of indirect communication which often takes place in these songs (oh wouldn't Soren be proud!). At the same time as they use abstract pictures to convey the lives of people, Simon and Stevens also use those lives as illustrations of abstract concepts -- what a reflection! Let me give examples...

Paul Simon's song "Train in the Distance" has always been a favorite of mine off of his criminally underrated album Hearts and Bones (his lowest selling album, but in the top three of my favorites). On the surface it is a simple narrative: boy meets (married) girl, they fall in love and have a son, they start fighting and drift apart. It is filled with wonderful images (e.g. "She was beautiful as Southern skies the night he met her") which describe the process of two people falling in and out of love. But in reality the song is about more than just telling a story. It is about the restless longing which drives people ever onward, and sometimes drives them apart from what would really satisfy. This is best shown through the line which appears from verse to verse: "Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance; everybody thinks it's true". What a beautiful, mysterious phrase. The train sounds its whistle, sweet and appealing from far away. Certainly it must continue to bear down on us, rooted inevitably to its track. Yet we ourselves are moving it along its terrible course; we fulfill our own predictions through the chug-chugging of our desires.

Sufjan Stevens is perhaps best known for his announced intention to write an album for each of the 50 states. Some see this as a tiresome gimmick, but what they fail to realize is that Stevens is gifted enough to make the idea work. What he is ultimately interested in is not cataloging the idiosyncracies of each member of the union (and thank goodness; I can only imagine the thrilling masterpiece that would be "North Dakota"), but using whatever concepts he chooses as platforms for his musings. Most of the tracks on his album Illinois work both as a description of things unique to Illinois and as meditation on some theme, often spiritual.

"John Wayne Gacy, Jr." is a startling track, unlike any other of which I can think. Relatively stripped down for a Stevens song, it is a tender acoustic number about everyone's favorite touchy-feely subject, a man who raped and killed teenage boys. What is so unnerving about the song is the tenderness which Stevens affords to Gacy. He details John Wayne's childhood traumas and treats his subject with remarkable sympathy. In the end his intention becomes clear: the song is a meditation on the hidden depths of sin in people's lives. Just like John Wayne hid the bodies underneath his floorboards, and hid behind a clown's facepaint, so Sufjan hides every day from those around him. The secret evils of the heart are buried deep, and we would rather no one stumble across them.

Two songs about an uncomfortable subject, the hidden destructiveness of sin. In Simon's song, the heart is a locomotive, charging ever forward to its wayward goals. For Stevens, the heart is a serial killer which hides its victims in shame. Hard words to hear, but that is the critical point. For indirect communication will always drive some away with its hard words -- indeed, that is the point! But without the offense there cannot be true faith, true greatness. The buffoon of much of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments is the bumbling Assistant Professor, who is ripe with self confidence but low on actual greatness. He pontificates but never really creates; he is to be pitied above all others. This is essentially because he believes things can be known and communicated directly, out in the open; that things are easy to understand. This man, when he bumps up against the paradox of indirect communication, has no idea what to do. Jesus described himself as both the cornerstone but also the rock of offense, the stone of stumbling! Either you will balk at the paradox or embrace it.

One final point: I think that indirect communication is one hallmark of great poetry. It is not enough to simply record events; the role of the poet is to translate them into imaginative language. This is why Simon and Stevens are among the most poetic of songwriters; they transcend the song form and acheive real poetic value. Anyone can speak directly about life, but it takes a poet to tell you in veiled ways.

Ghosts and Empty Sockets

Little revelations are wonderful. I feel as if lately I have had several striking insights into my tastes and preferences. There's a post in the works about my preference for documentaries over realistic fictional films (the reason for this came to me like a flash while I was showering one morning), but I thought I'd take a detour tonight to write about another startlingly abrupt realization.

Those of you who know me well are aware of my deep passion for the songs of Paul Simon. He is a giant of American pop music, at once capturing the hopes and fears of the moment (decade after decade) and also pushing his listeners forward into unexplored territories. Well, another favorite artist of mine, one more of my own generation, is Sufjan Stevens. I think some people find Stevens a bit off-putting, potentially for several reasons. His music is bizarre: minimalist but with lush orchestration, with lots of jangles and oddities and a shifting meter. His lyrics are strange and often obtuse.

Thinking about this brought about the aforementioned insight. Their is a lyrical connection between Paul Simon and Sufjan Stevens, a talent they share that few others possess, and something which draws me back to them both time and again. I realized that Simon and Stevens have a unique knack for narrative songs (with a little twist to be discussed later). Most songs you think of deal with a theme, an idea such as love or loneliness. They dwell on this subject for all of their three minutes. There is a good reason for this: how would you give the plot of a novel in song form and still get radio play? The format of pop music forbids drawn out narrative. The magic of Simon and Stevens, then, is that they both excel at providing what I will call "snapshot narrative". That is, they manage to tell a story in their songs -- often giving a life's worth of backstory -- but they do it in ultra-condensed word pictures.

For the purposes of comparison, I will pick a favorite song of mine from each of the artists. Simon's title track from his seminal album Graceland comes very close to perfection. The singer talks about a trip he is taking to Graceland in Memphis with his son. Packed into this is his sadness over the failure of his marriage. But Simon does not give us a run down of everything that went wrong, or the reasons his wife left, or even a detailed description of all the pain he felt. Instead, he gives us an infinite nothing: "She comes back to tell me she's gone; as if I'd never noticed, as if I didn't know my own bed. As if I'd never noticed, the way she brushed her hair from her forehead." Years of arguments and heartbreak are jammed into that little line, one of the most powerful I know.

There is so much going on in Steven's "Casimir Pulaski Day" that it can be hard to keep it straight. Stevens sings as a boy who loses his dear friend (and potential love interest) to cancer. Like Simon, Stevens can succinctly capture the complexity of relationships in a few words. "Goldenrod and the 4-H stone: the things I brought you when I found out you had cancer of the bone." The key to this writing is mystery: we do not know exactly what significance those gifts had, but the image opens up a window on the tenderness between the two.

Part of the job of the poet is to take experiences and translate them into imagery. It is not enough to describe; the creative genius of the poet lies in reimagining events in a new light, with new language. By this measure, Simon and Stevens are masters of the form; they are the rare singer/songwriters who are accomplished poets. They are not content to catalogue events; they translate happenings and emotions into beautiful pictures.

Turn, Turn, Turn

Today Leslie and I had two of the last cups of Ethiopia Sidamo Koratie that Doubleshot will brew for a very long time (possibly ever). What a way to go out. It was the most perfect cup I have had in quite some time. Before he poured it, Garth described it as "buttery", and I could see what he meant. The mouthfeel was delicious, so chewy and viscous. The usual Sidamo richness was there, but this time I would swear that it tasted like Earl Grey. How could it get any better than my two favorite hot beverages melded together?

I always get sad when Doubleshot stops roasting a particularly good bean. When they stopped the Tanzania Ruvuma (still the best coffee I have ever had), it was a terrible day. Or the Sidamo MAO Horse, which tasted exactly like blueberries. I change very slowly, and take great comfort in familiar things. Because of this, losing a coffee is a bit like saying goodbye to a dear friend.

One of my favorite ideas in Lewis' Space Trilogy comes in Perelandra, when it comes out that, on Venus where no fall has happened, no creature wants anything out of season. That is to say, no one wishes for more of something when it is gone, or wants something outside of its limitations. What a beautiful image of what our lives should be. Accepting things as they come to us; enjoying them while they last, and letting them go when their time is over.

Friendship is like that. We so desperately want our friendships with people to stay exactly as they have always been; we tremble at the thought of undergoing any alteration. Yet change comes to us all; bodies move, or worse, souls drift apart. Though it is right to mourn the loss of these things, it is sin to keep longing after them when gone. What is more, it is only blindness which gives us these thoughts. We grasp to what has come before, not knowing that what comes next will be just as glorious, in its own way.

It is the terrible tension of our fallen state to want things we cannot have. We are torn apart from those we love without the capacity to deal with the separation. The state which would give us freedom to accept this comes only in glory. People often imagine heaven as one continuous togetherness with loved ones. This strikes me as a misunderstanding. In actuality "heaven" will be a physical reality on the new earth, with life restored to its original balance. We will work and see the fruits of our labor unfrustrated! Perhaps then, "heaven" does not entail never being apart from those we love, but being able to know that it is good to be with friends, and good to be apart from them. That we can find a sweet satisfaction in the moments we share with one another without wishing to prolong them forever.

It is like this with coffee, too. In some ways it is better that Sidamo Koratie go away, in order that new coffees might be roasted, might present their striking flavors to my tongue. It would be a sin for me to only want Sidamo Koratie for the rest of my life. Not merely a sin, but stupidity! Who knows what wonders I would miss out on, clutching at my cup of overworn Ethiopia? It is better this way. As I sucked the last life breath from the cup and threw it in the trash, I was content. What more is needed?

Mimesis

Isn't it amazing how art evokes other art? I woke up this morning, fresh off of Karl's recital last night, with the desire to write poetry. Everything about the pieces he wrote was so raw and wonderful, so deeply affecting, that it made me remember why I write.

Sounds silly, maybe, but I think this week I almost forgot entirely. I started my job -- HR Temp at a hospital -- and I am grateful to have it, but something about working with Excel all day (or maybe it's the suffocating atmosphere of corporate America) choked out my remembrance of writing. Have you ever worked an 8 to 5 job? When you get home, all you want to do is fall onto the couch and play video games. Creating something of value really does take effort; I find it physically exhausting, and who has the energy to do two exhausting things in one day?

But good art is worth the trouble. To see Karl up there on stage, baring his soul, not hiding at all, moved me to tears. To hear such personal thoughts combined with sublime music was indescribable. I may never write anything half as good as Karl's songs,but he makes me want to try.