A strong sun slants into the afternoon apartment. On a rooftop below me is a secret fountain: a laundry shop’s water-filtering system sparkles mingling water and sunlight. A fat book of priceless Audenalia (why are these collected essays of poets so good?), clotted cream and strawberries, and coffee wait. And the music? Frederica von Stade and Pavarotti. Is not Italian opera the golden sunlight of the late afternoon of Western culture?
Un desio ch’io non posso spiegar . . .
Posted by unknowing on April 30, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/saturday-afternoon-opera/
Strange thing–thinkz Pou–don’t feel at home here anymore.
“This world,” sez the devil, “aint really your home.”
“Thought it was,” sez Pou.
“You got another one.”
Pou swallows hard and stares out the window, wondering. “Pop,” he sez, “where was I really born?”
“You waz born out of a snake-woman I met on another planet, Pou,” sez the devil, a bit tender-like.
* * *
“There’s a picture of your mom, son,” the devil sez a couple of days later.
Pou looks, and it’s Nina Hagen. “What! That’s Nina Hagen!”
“Don’t tell me what I already know.”
“I thought I was from another pla–”
The devil, he jest nod slow-like.
“But she was baptized in a Reformed church!” Pou screeches, freaking out. “She believes in Lordship Salvation!”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” sez the devil. Things sometimes happen to him he don’t rightly anticipate, and I reckon this was one of those moments. “Don’t she say ‘pick up the receiver, he’ll make you a believer’?”
Pou breathes a sigh of relief. “I reckon you’re right. Sounds jest like something Spurgeon used to say.”
“Sure I’m right,” sez the devil. “Now son, you need a long hiatus here. Been doing too much. Why don’t you go on a fishing trip or something, eh?”
“Can I go to another . . . you know–”
“Another planet?”
Pou nods, fingering his collar.
“Sure, that’s no problem. How about Kholob? Ever been there? Make you feel right at home, it will.”
“Why? And what about the blog?”
“Run an archival series; that’s always nice. As to why, why because it is 100 per cent Americun, made in the USA by a guy called Joe, how you like that?”
And the frog, he laugh.
Posted by unknowing on April 29, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/cant-feel-at-home/
And every once in a while you just hate the place.
Yesterday I squirmed out of a colectivo three or five blocks before my destination. We have two kinds of public transportation: the government coordinated Transmilenio–large buses with height and space and, for Colombia, order. Many Colombians hate them, and I know why.
The other form of public transportation are these various buses. They don’t have designated stops, their routes are very wandery, not a single map is ever provided because most people here can’t use one anyway, and the best way to characterize the way these buses move is an unending, spasmodic lurch in a generally forward direction. Many Colombians love them, and you know what? I know why.
I got out of the one I was in when the third stupid fat lady rammed herself in illegally through the back door along with her monumental bags of groceries. I was meeting a Russian woman who is intelligent, orderly and determined. I told her it made me so mad. She told me we were in the third world and there was nothing else to expect.
She’s been here 20 years, and after a while I said: Well, but they are improving gradually, little by little. She didn’t even look at me, just shook her head. There’s no changing them and there’s nothing a foreigner can do. I just got an email yesterday from another Colombian I know, all about how they can improve themselves if they just stop throwing garbage around where they live, respect laws of traffic, do the obvious easy things millions of civilized people in other parts of the world daily more or less manage to do.
You come from a place where those sort of things are more routine and you think it is easy for people to realize and practice. But it is not going to change, and I know why.
The reason is that every Colombian has a soul full of chaos. They don’t have clear ideas or clear thinking or clear aims. Very few of them achieve that–many of those are no longer in the country–and their culture does not provide it. What they have is chaos and undisciplined impulses, and it is those impulses which mostly govern their behavior and society in an unending, spasmodic lurch in a direction relative to that the rest of the world is following but with no real destination. I was told that by an intelligent Colombian who was trying to emigrate. I was agreed with by a fully frustrated Englishman who finally decided to quit because he realized what he was doing was trying to change the anarchy in their hearts.
Colombians decide it is time to get ahead and learn English; they do it all the time. So they sign up for English classes with a qualified foreigner and pay a lot. Then the chaos of their life begins to take over and they are helpless before it. Do they make it on time to class? Gradually less. Do they do their homework? Not a biggish chance. Do they eventually skip and skip, and beg forgiveness without even noticing how egregiously unapplied they are relentlessly driven to be by the chaos? They do. And on top of that they want a discount.
You start a Greek class with some chaps who are intelligent. Do they buy the books? No, they try to get by with some kind of knock-off (and if they can do that in the English class they’ll do it too; with anything really; they don’t even have the vanity of liking to have the thing look professional, well-printed, etc.). Do they apply themselves? As long as there are absolutely no distractions, interruptions or holidays. And then they complain to you because really their life is full of activities. They do get up at 4AM, they do get home at 10PM, and they spend a good 4-5 hours flung chaotically back and forth and sideways on their beloved colectivos, and continue in this unendingly lurching spasmodically toward . . . not finishing, not accomplishing, not anything, relaxing amidst dust and garbage under a tree with a beer and the dogs.
You watch it, and it would seem pathetic. It is as if they are passively in the grip of something relentless and spasmodically lurching them on toward that day when it vanishes, it mercifully falls through in a series of absurdly prolonged holidays which are the only constant meticulously observed phenomenon in all of their life. I know the direction! It is the twilight of the dogs there in the dust under a rubber tree in the tropical night loud with insects and measured by a growing stack of empty beer bottles provided by calculating and industrious Germans.
No he almorzado, they’ll say. Because you aren’t organized, you’ll think. How hard can it be for an intelligent person to work a meal into their schedule? Sorry I’m late, they’ll say. Because you refuse to allow time for contingencies, because the transportation system here is chaos since it is run by people like you, and because traffic can’t flow unless it has some organizing principle, the which too many of you continually refuse to acknowledge, you’ll think. I’m really tired, I didn’t sleep last night. Because you don’t have anything remotely resembling a culture of consideration and as a result everybody here is uninhibited in their tremendously noisy, night-long parrandas which even the cops, because the corruption does not permit you to give them the power necessary, can’t stop it, you’ll think.
If you have chaos in your heart and nothing else, you are prey to impulses. If you want to see what life looks like almost exclusively given over to the direction of spasmodically lurching impulses, come to Colombia. It has its moments in this land of plenty, this winterless nursery garden of God for the thumb-sucking. Which is why many of them, when they get beyond thumb-sucking emigrate to more desolate regions of the world.
I used to get irritated with people in Minnesota for living their lives without due consideration. Here!?!
One of the interesting things about that conversation with the Englishman was that I realized my job is connected with the chaos in their hearts, and the gradual steady change of that towards order. You know how it makes you think? It makes you think long-term. And I’m not talking decades.
Posted by unknowing on April 29, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/not-a-rant-i-dont-believe-in-those/
Does it matter that tomorrow the world will have a new princess? You know, I would really like to think it does and that it is wonderful that we live in a world in which they still make princesses. I like the idea of a princess and I think having them is a fine thing. A real princess must be an astonishing thing. And I think that because I’m a metaphysical realist. (I say that for all the hard-boiled out there who think it is fatuous of me: get a serious epistemology, idiots.)
But it isn’t the same, is it? It is like these movies based on myths–very bad for myths in general and no good for movies either. Our perception of the idea is so deteriorated there’s no way it can be true. It would be fatuous, it seems to me, not to mention sentimental not to see it otherwise. What isn’t false about it? What isn’t Disney? What transcends?
Leaving only one question: Is there some creature that can kiss the girl and somehow make a real princess out of her? Some kind of humble, Chestertonian frog perhaps?
Posted by unknowing on April 28, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/a-chestertonian-frog/
Not to mention the 6 Uruguayan documents I got to back it up . . .
Posted by unknowing on April 27, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/why-i-cant-be-president/
or, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
I don’t come up with these on my own, folks. The suggestion was tweeted by the excellent author of this blog.
Posted by unknowing on April 27, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/reflection-on-the-themes-of-national-debate/
The sun shone in the yard
and Pilate’s wife, Dementia,
stared at the stained wall
from suffering in absentia.
In absentia govern thou,
she said, and Pilate tried.
He tried a symbol with his hands;
his symbol was denied.
The sunlight was refused that day,
and in the foregone night
Dementia in her chambers stared
and Pilate called for light.
He saw the gods of Egypt pass
to where his sweating wife
received them at the very hour
when Christ gave up his life.
In absentia Pilate sat
the sunlight strong and stark;
he wondered if his wife was right
and listened to her bark.
Posted by unknowing on April 23, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/in-absentia/
The church flings forth a battled shade
Over the moon-blanched sward:
The church; my gift; whereto I paid
My all in hand and hoard;
Lavished my gains
With stintless pains
To glorify the Lord.
I squared the broad foundations in
Of ashlared masonry;
I moulded mullions thick and thin,
Hewed fillet and ogee;
I circleted
Each sculptured head
With nimb and canopy.
I called in many a craftsmaster
To fix emblazoned glass,
To figure Cross and Sepulchure
On dossal, boss, and brass.
My gold all spent,
My jewels went
To gem the cups of Mass.
I borrowed deep to carve the screen
And raise the ivoried Rood;
I parted with my small demesne
To make my owings good.
Heir-looms unpriced
I sacrificed,
Until debt-free I stood.
So closed the task. “Deathless the Creed
Here substanced!” said my soul:
“I heard me bidden to this deed,
And straight obeyed the call.
Illume this fane,
That not in vain
I build it, Lord of all!”
But, as it chanced me, then and there
Did dire misfortunes burst;
My home went waste for lack of care,
My sons rebelled and curst;
Till I confessed
That aims the best
Were looking like the worst.
Enkindled by my votive work
No burnng faith I find;
The deeper thinkers sneer and smirk,
And give my toil no mind;
From nod and wink
I read they think
That I am fool and blind.
My gift to God seems futile, quite;
The world moves as erstwhile;
And powerful Wrong on feeble Right
Tramples in olden style.
My faith burns down,
I see no crown;
But Cares, and Griefs, and Guile.
So now, the remedy? Yea, this:
I gently swing the door
Here, of my fane–no soul to wis–
And cross the patterned floor
To the rood-screen
That stands between
The nave and inner chore.
The rich red windows dim the moon,
But little light need I;
I mount the prie-dieu, lately hewn
From woods of rarest dye;
Then from below
My garment, so,
I draw this cord, and tie
One end thereof around the beam
Midway ‘twixt Cross and truss:
I noose the nethermost extreme,
And in ten seconds thus
I journey hence–
To that land whence
No rumour reaches us.
Well: Here at morn they’ll light on one
Dangling in mockery
Of what he spent his substance on
Blindly and uselessly!…
“He might,” they’ll say,
“Have built, some way,
A cheaper gallows-tree!”
–Thomas Hardy
Posted by unknowing on April 22, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/the-church-builder/
The sky is silver blue,
and in the evening light
arising from the tufted grass
crepuscular brown beetles pass.
In this Egyptian hour,
before the last bell sounds,
the clouds in a majestic light
hold the hieratic night.
Inside the dimming city
the roaches also rise
in the interstices of towers
conjuring decaying powers.
Gleaming, laminated bugs
a catafalque intend.
A distant whistle ends the day-
what night does this portend?
Posted by unknowing on April 21, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/mr-eliots-maundy-thursday/
We have a curious young chap, a student of music composition at the National U. who also likes to read John Owen online. So he came out of the local ABWE conglomerate (quite a large presence here with radio station and lots of property) when he became convinced of limited atonement, and wrote the leadership there a letter explaining his convictions and came over to our church.
We live close so we come home together on Wednesday, and we talk about things. Last night it was 1 John 2:2. Apparently John Owen says the apostle speaks the way he does because he is somehow speaking in a Jewish context (ironic, because this young chap also, of course, left the dispensationalism and all that rot one never could buy about how this is for the Jews and that only this little bit is not, etc.). Of course, John Owen’s–if those are indeed his arguments, I’ve not read Owen on this, but I take this chap at his word; the detail seemed persuasive and he’s an honest kid–explanations do not satisfy either him or me.
I explained that my position on limited atonement was reached through theological persuasions rather than exegetical, and he agreed with that. We always defend it as a logical implication of doctrine we cannot by any means deny. Nobody is really worried about 1 John 2:2 contradicting the logic of limited atonement, it is just a matter of how to take it. He’s only 21 but remembers the arguments nicely and is quite applied to it all–explained to me John Owen’s interpretation of other passages involved all by memory. Apparently one of the leaders in his old fundamentalist circles wants to talk to him about this worrying defection. I told the kid not to worry, that the likelihood that he himself knew the issues better than the leader were pretty high. Seriousness about doctrine or studying Scripture is not something your average fundamentalist missionary is often guilty of (I can hear them asking about John 3:16 but not much else). Our chap is coming to us because he’s becoming serious. One of his heroes is Paul Washer whose moral earnestness seems hard to exaggerate–from the little exposure I’ve had (and I encourage them to listen to Paul Washer not only for his integrity in handling the Gospel but also because they’ll get some family integrated influence, of which there isn’t a lot here; besides, he can do it in Spanish). And nothing is lost by learning to answer hard questions about what you believe–should that unlikely eventuality come about in this situation.
All that to say, not about that issue but the aftermath (I began to root around and see what interpretations there were in our defense), it is interesting how both Augustine and Calvin take the passage to be about the Church in the whole world. Augustine with no controversy, and Calvin even saying: I don’t mind a universal provision (sufficient if not effective for all: what we are taught as Amyraldians by so-called 4 point Calvinists, and the explanation you’ll read in the NAC volume), but that’s not in view here.
In other words, without the controversy in view they side with an interpretation favorable to limited atonement. I think that is awfully curious–not in the sense that I’m advancing any polemic . . . too much–they actually leave me with little more than a sort of hermeneutical blink–just observing how it falls. It was not what I anticipated.
Posted by unknowing on April 21, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/how-things-used-to-be-taken/
Sometimes, the right person for the job is simply the right person for the job, and when it comes to describing the tangles of this web, Bixby of all people nails it.*
Nicely done and great conclusions.
___________________
*And I also have heard him speak.
Posted by unknowing on April 20, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/shelobs-lair/
I remember the old days–and I remember that in the old days I would remind myself to enjoy the freedom, the freedom that is not altogether mine now. The freedom to work my way through Yeats plays, through Hardy and Muir at random, I mean. The freedom to plough steadily through quite a few books in a way I don’t achieve anymore.
I need a bit more of it, I think. I’ve earned the freedom of moving with ease through most poets: it doesn’t cost me to pick something up and read one poem the way it used to. Before I would have to read uncomprehending half a volume before I started picking up on things, and even then, not too clearly. Now, I think, the understanding comes a lot easier.
Odd to think about. I graduated from seminary an illiterate, and have since learned to read. At least now I have a surer confidence of what I read when I am done. It makes me wonder about commentaries and study. Perhaps people use commentaries instead of studying because they’re really illiterate with all but contemporary academical unimaginative prose–when it should be to us of all literature the most alien.
The sun was finding ways through this afternoon, and after having studied a long time I took the hints from the chinks and read “The Hound of Heaven” again, with its romantic and unanticipated imagery. Isn’t it amazing how during the most luxuriating scenes and descriptions (the casement, the angel and the hair, the breasts of heaven) he manages always to maintain the wild sense of the pursuit? It is a feat.
Posted by unknowing on April 19, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/when-the-sun-shines/
I like Carl Trueman, for now.
Posted by unknowing on April 19, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/contrarian/
Sounds like the sort of thing one wants to know more about.
Paul Violi, Obituary.
David Lehman, explaining his choice of two poems by Mr. Violi for inclusion in “The Oxford Book of American Poetry,” singled out “his wit, his ability to find the poetic resonance of nonpoetic language, his deadpan and his ability to get serious ideas across without didactic earnestness.”
Posted by unknowing on April 18, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/new-to-me/
Saturday, so there are chaps wheeling washing machines to rent around on their cargo tricycles. Two things about that: 1 – you would not believe how light a Korean washing machine can be, and 2 – the cargo tricycle is like the back end of a bike with a movable, low platform with two wheels on the side before. I’ve seen three already today making their way between the houses and apartments. They’ll lug it up to your fourth or fifth floor apartment and rent the thing to you for some hours or a day, and then come back and bear it all away.
Saturday, and so the restaurants begin a little later. Tip about your average, non-chain, home-grown restaurant–the variety most prevalent. From 12pm till 2pm or so, but maybe later on a Saturday or not at all that day, they usually have a regular and an executive lunch, besides the menu, if they even have a menu. When a foreigner enters a Colombian restaurant he is automatically given the more expensive menu. Ask for the regular or executive lunch. Usually exactly the same as you’d get on the menu, or more, for half the price. Saturdays here are for having tamales for breakfast, and then later on (though unlike in Mexico, they don’t lunch all that late. Never before 12, but seldom after 2, unless it is a weekend) an awful hearty lunch (note I did not say an awful, hearty lunch).
Saturday is when everybody shops. Not having got enough of it the other days, and still not organized enough to have done it all by Sunday, Saturday is for stores to open and people to wander around with all kinds of plastic bags (Buying the chicken yesterday I came home with no less than five plastic bags). Of course, they wash their cars (not a single mechanized car was in the whole city), they sit in the bakeries having coffee and eating bread and cakes and such, they sit in fast food places having every conceivable form of grease-drenched goodness and all with a bare minimum of napkins, finish chicken, consume Noah’s ark’s entire provisions’ worth of fruit, lick ice cream of every conceivable shade, and generally Saturday the day away in the activities of leisure less refined.
Me, I go and take a walk in it and then I write.
Posted by unknowing on April 16, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/unexamined-bogota/
Apropos of nothing, it just seems to me that when it comes to the division between Science Fiction and Fantasy you have American accents populating the former and British accents populating the latter. Why?
Well, I have been wondering about that since I heard an adaptation of the Lord of the Rings in which Elrond had a southern accent. It just was not right. But why? I think it is that one set is new and the other is old, and the various accents have their symbolic resonances, they have associations.
And the more aristocratic the person is supposed to be, the more likely to have an English accent they are. They’re the chaps with kings and all. I have this race of reptilians and of course they have peculiarities with their sibilants, but they’re kind of aristocratic, and so they tend to have English accents. And yes, I have had characters with accents bordering on the southern in some of my writings . . .
Posted by unknowing on April 16, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/random-observation/
Curious the talk about the TV adaptation of A Game of Thrones: gritty, real, with characters that are not black and white. How does this translate?
“Thrones” also has wolf pups, which is always cool. But then we’re back to the familiar favorites of the infantile:, e.g., spurting blood and gore, bastard sons, evil vixens, blond nymphets, quasilesbian action, crude talk among men about their private parts, incest, rough couplings and more random bare breasts than any other contender in the adolescent-boy-action-show contest this month.
That’s from the Wall Street Journal (scroll to the end). You can hear the fans of GoT saying: Martin’s world is not limited by a moral imagination, not even maturity (ironic, considering the whole reason HBO is the one putting it on is that it is considered to be for a mature audience–and no doubt will be a key to its success).
If you want a real hard look at evil and why it must be resisted to the death, read The Sons of Hurin. And it makes an interesting comparison: not gritty–it has betrayal, greed, characters facing moral dilemas badly and even incest and suicide, not because Tolkien has a degraded notion of reality, but precisely because he is showing a metaphysical dream of the world ordered by the moral imagination.
Posted by unknowing on April 14, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/got/
I got it from the Ochlophobist’s new and rather leftist site. Make of it what you can, it is decidedly . . . too good to be true. Who needs Chron of F when you got this? Who needs David Bowie or even Lou?
Go here if you are curious about more. I recommend number 6 or 9.
Posted by zartman on April 13, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/medium-and-the-message/
All day drizzle. I like these days and the excellent breakfast thereof.
Excellent breakfast. Nothing like a hearty breakfast when it is raining.
Done with the dilemma, I think, of teaching. Am in Genesis 2 and things are getting deeper and deeper and better and better.
Apparently one of the mild observations about my teaching is that some wish I had more applications. I give them all that I can come up with.
More of a scholar, I think. Knowledge for its own sake. I enjoy studying, especially on rainy days.
It is a pleasant place to be though, and I can work on smoothing things out better. Helping them understand what difference chiasms make. It’s not rocket science.
It is like the apartment. Eventually we’ll have a few cowhide rugs, good pictures, comfortabler chairs and maybe even a lava lamp.
Man, I miss my lava lamp. I hope the temporary lack of one (it is going on two years since I’ve owned or even been in the light of one) doesn’t ruin my SF efforts.
As long as I can keep writing stories, I don’t feel like my life is being wasted vainly pursuing what I am not altogether convinced I should be doing.
Posted by unknowing on April 12, 2011
http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/twitters/
