What I am about to write will be sure to garner for me the label of nerd. I accept such a label gladly, and dont really mind being, or even being seen as, an academic. This said, I'd like to announce that I had a breakthrough in understanding Aristotle today. You see, in his poetics, he spends alot of time on tragedy and its elements and effects. He says that tragedy promotes katharsis in the viewer, that is, an experiencing and processing of their own fear and pain through the experince of the events of the play. Such an experience is cleansing and helpful for the playgoer. There is, I think, such power in dramatic catharsis that a play or movie that depicts pain, fear, and sorrow well can be one of the most helpful and real expeirences of our lives. There is pain below the grinning surface of the world, that we all seem to know below our smiles.
And so stories are judged, which tragedy as touching something of the wide and lonesome reality in which we live. Comedy is the facade, the clever mask that grins a fauxing grin. Comedy is the escape to smallness, the escape to an ordered, sense driven universe where falling off cliffs wont kill you and there is always a wedding at the end. Such things, I think, we take as true, and so, perhaps did Aristotle, for we dont find a treatment of comedy in the Poetics, and surely not a concept or power as great as catharsis that cemedy might do unto the human soul.
But today John-Mark suggested something insane: that the katharsis of comedy is that great force which stirs in you, if only for a moment, a recalling of a mirth filled self, the true and sinless self, a god-made self beyond the stars, or perhaps properly in the stars, dancing and twirling with pirhouettes of laughter. What if comedy was not a mask, but seeker of the truth deeper than our shame, our fear, or pain, a seeker of the inmost mirth of man? Then what would we believe about the world––that at its base and structure there is only pain? No, for that would be to mistake a thing for its parts, for it is pain that rips the canvas so that the stars shine through, and only by stripes are we healed.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
late nights
I try not to keep late nights, I really do, but I cant seem to go to bed early! Also, the silhouettes of the trees outside my window dont become meaningful until after 1am. What do they mean? I cant decide yet, but they are full and bristling at the top and they are trying to tell me something from the higher midnight air where the lights of the city are no so bright and the wind is cooler, almost frozen by the silver summer stars, wishing rest upon the frenzied heat of day.
Monday, July 25, 2005
louis hara
From "Manalive" by G.K. Chesterton
"Sir, -- A person answering to the rather extraordinary description required certainly went, some time ago, over the high pass of the Sierras on which I live and of which I am probably the sole stationary inhabitant. I keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut, on the very top of this specially steep and threatening pass. My name is Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you about my nationality. Well, it puzzles me a great deal. When one has been for fifteen years without society it is hard to have patriotism; and where there is not even a hamlet it is difficult to invent a nation. My father was an Irishman of the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian kind. My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old Spanish families round San Francisco, yet accused for all that of some admixture of Red Indian blood. I was well educated and fond of music and books. But, like many other hybrids, I was too good or too bad for the world; and after attempting many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient though a lonely living in this little cabaret in the mountains. In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage. Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun. I had a bowie knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travellers that could climb up to my place. But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man did. Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.
"I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself. Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles; cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous. These terraces and towers of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world. Rather they seem to be its awful beginning: its huge foundations. We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum. For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far, so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near. The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth than planets circling placidly about it.
"All this may have driven me mad: I am not sure. I know there is one angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little, and on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks -- yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night. It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass. Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass. But I had never seen one like this one before.
"He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe. His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about him were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves. The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon. I do not know why he should have used it as a weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed me, an excellent six-shooter in his pocket. `But that,' he said, `I use only for peaceful purposes.' I have no notion what he meant.
"He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one who had travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last something that he knew. Then he sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern of lead and coloured glass that hangs over my door. It is old, but of no value; my grandmother gave it to me long ago: she was devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a crude picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star. He seemed so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our Lady's blue gown and the big gold star behind, that he led me also to look at the thing, which I had not done for fourteen years.
"Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward where the road fell away below us. The sunset sky was a vault of rich velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark mountain ampitheatre; and between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call Green Finger. Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or needle.
"The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction, and before he spoke I knew what he meant. Beyond the great green rock in the purple sky hung a single star.
"`A star in the east,' he said in a strange hoarse voice like one of our ancient eagles. `The wise men followed the star and found the house. But if I followed the star, should I find the house?'
"`It depends perhaps,' I said, smiling, `on whether you are a wise man.' I refrained from adding that he certainly didn't look it.
"`You may judge for yourself,' he answered. `I am a man who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.'
"`It certainly sounds paradoxical,' I said.
"`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the room,' he continued, `and all the time I knew they were walking and talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of different skies, and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable. Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle like a treadmill.'
"`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right round the world? Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.'
"`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied sadly. `I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.'
"Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had felt about the world, and of something from whence I came. I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had not looked for fourteen years.
"`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said that we were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy home-sickness that forbids us rest.'
"He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
"Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and stood up leaning on his grassy pole. `I think that must be the reason,' he said -- `the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased. But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.'
"`I dare say,' I said. `What reason?'
"`Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss, `we might worship that.'
"`What do you mean?' I demanded.
"`Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of the idols -- the mightiest of the rivals of God.'
"`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,' I suggested.
"`I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all.'
"With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down the perilous paths below, and left me alone with the eagles. But since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure. -- Yours faithfully,
"Louis Hara."
"Sir, -- A person answering to the rather extraordinary description required certainly went, some time ago, over the high pass of the Sierras on which I live and of which I am probably the sole stationary inhabitant. I keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut, on the very top of this specially steep and threatening pass. My name is Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you about my nationality. Well, it puzzles me a great deal. When one has been for fifteen years without society it is hard to have patriotism; and where there is not even a hamlet it is difficult to invent a nation. My father was an Irishman of the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian kind. My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old Spanish families round San Francisco, yet accused for all that of some admixture of Red Indian blood. I was well educated and fond of music and books. But, like many other hybrids, I was too good or too bad for the world; and after attempting many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient though a lonely living in this little cabaret in the mountains. In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage. Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun. I had a bowie knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travellers that could climb up to my place. But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man did. Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.
"I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself. Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles; cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous. These terraces and towers of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world. Rather they seem to be its awful beginning: its huge foundations. We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum. For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far, so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near. The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth than planets circling placidly about it.
"All this may have driven me mad: I am not sure. I know there is one angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little, and on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks -- yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night. It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass. Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass. But I had never seen one like this one before.
"He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe. His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about him were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves. The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon. I do not know why he should have used it as a weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed me, an excellent six-shooter in his pocket. `But that,' he said, `I use only for peaceful purposes.' I have no notion what he meant.
"He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one who had travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last something that he knew. Then he sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern of lead and coloured glass that hangs over my door. It is old, but of no value; my grandmother gave it to me long ago: she was devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a crude picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star. He seemed so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our Lady's blue gown and the big gold star behind, that he led me also to look at the thing, which I had not done for fourteen years.
"Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward where the road fell away below us. The sunset sky was a vault of rich velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark mountain ampitheatre; and between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call Green Finger. Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or needle.
"The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction, and before he spoke I knew what he meant. Beyond the great green rock in the purple sky hung a single star.
"`A star in the east,' he said in a strange hoarse voice like one of our ancient eagles. `The wise men followed the star and found the house. But if I followed the star, should I find the house?'
"`It depends perhaps,' I said, smiling, `on whether you are a wise man.' I refrained from adding that he certainly didn't look it.
"`You may judge for yourself,' he answered. `I am a man who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.'
"`It certainly sounds paradoxical,' I said.
"`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the room,' he continued, `and all the time I knew they were walking and talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of different skies, and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable. Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle like a treadmill.'
"`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right round the world? Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.'
"`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied sadly. `I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.'
"Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had felt about the world, and of something from whence I came. I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had not looked for fourteen years.
"`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said that we were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy home-sickness that forbids us rest.'
"He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
"Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and stood up leaning on his grassy pole. `I think that must be the reason,' he said -- `the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased. But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.'
"`I dare say,' I said. `What reason?'
"`Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss, `we might worship that.'
"`What do you mean?' I demanded.
"`Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of the idols -- the mightiest of the rivals of God.'
"`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,' I suggested.
"`I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all.'
"With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down the perilous paths below, and left me alone with the eagles. But since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure. -- Yours faithfully,
"Louis Hara."
Half-blood Prince:
That's right, I was one of those poor american consumers who stood outside of Borders at the stoke of midnight last week to pick up my reserved copy of the new Harry Potter book. As I read it, I wondered whether it was worth the 45 minutes in line and 17.99 that I paid for it. really, waiting in line was a great experience: the full, orange moon was low on the horizon, and the girl in line next to me was interested in philosophy and religion, so we had a good talk. She seemed to think it funny that I thought all truth to be unified. But the night I bought it is not the point of this post. What is important is last night, when I finished reading it. I have to admit I had my doubts as I read through it: the romantic subplots were juvenile and barely redeemed themselves even after the book was over; the writing was inconsistant, sometimes with amazing dialogue and sometimes with the most plodding prose I've experienced. But Rowling is not good at beginnings or middles of her books (though she's getting better at exposition). Rowling is known for stingers at the end, and she delivered better than she ever has on this one. Im still a bit stunned at the end, and it's been almost 12 hours since i put it down. Read it. Rowling just may have outdone herself, and set us up for a truly great 7th book.
Sunday, July 24, 2005
home
The waning moon had a tail of cloud tonight
As we stepped carefully in the darkness toward
An understanding of home, ad understanding
of when to hold on and when to let go.
Hope bent the screen door for want of looking up,
And on several occasions more than my two eyes were blurry.
How is a soul moved? we asked
And where in words lies self?
And when before the dawn of thought
Did my love for home begin?
As we stepped carefully in the darkness toward
An understanding of home, ad understanding
of when to hold on and when to let go.
Hope bent the screen door for want of looking up,
And on several occasions more than my two eyes were blurry.
How is a soul moved? we asked
And where in words lies self?
And when before the dawn of thought
Did my love for home begin?
Saturday, July 23, 2005
1 am
..is a quiet time.
My fan tries in vain to suck the cool air form outside
Through my closed window curtain into my warm room
and I can no longer hear the traffic outside.
The hot night has slowed the cars,
Perhaps even melted the rubber of their ties to the thick asphalt,
itself gummy, itself maleable even in the faux darkness
Of a Los Angeles nighttime.
My fan tries in vain to suck the cool air form outside
Through my closed window curtain into my warm room
and I can no longer hear the traffic outside.
The hot night has slowed the cars,
Perhaps even melted the rubber of their ties to the thick asphalt,
itself gummy, itself maleable even in the faux darkness
Of a Los Angeles nighttime.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
when i was young...
...my favorite poem was Lonfellow's "A Psalm of Life". This was partly because my father told me that it was my grandfather's favorite poem, and after saying this, would quote the last stanza with tears in his eyes and a crack in his voice. After reading the poem for myself i realized that he quoted it wrong usually, his meter unbalanced, his memory blurred. But when he spoke it I felt a truth passed from father to son over two generations: a strange truth, with meaning more in the sound and the incantation perhaps than the words themselves. It ends:
Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate,
Still acheiving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
what is this last stanza calling me to do as a son, as a man? Is it simple or complex? more basically: is it one or many?
What is the will and how does it act?
What is the soul and where is its will?
It has left me like memories written and forgotten;
Oh that we had heeded the king when he rebuked the god!
Then would my memories stay within me,
Here at my heart to act into speech.
And what is speech but the clothing of thought,
Or the moving image of idea?
Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate,
Still acheiving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
what is this last stanza calling me to do as a son, as a man? Is it simple or complex? more basically: is it one or many?
What is the will and how does it act?
What is the soul and where is its will?
It has left me like memories written and forgotten;
Oh that we had heeded the king when he rebuked the god!
Then would my memories stay within me,
Here at my heart to act into speech.
And what is speech but the clothing of thought,
Or the moving image of idea?
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
science: a false mistress?
I'm a little worried about science. This has come out of some discussions lately with my friend ben. we both have degrees in philosophy and haven't taken a science class for about four years, so the conclusions that came out of our discussion should be taken, I belive, iwht a grain of salt. That being said, I think modern science is terrifyingly dangerous. I think this because whenever we talk about how we know or percieve or behave, we automatically want to go to the physiological explaination of thse things. Once we find that explaination, we stop and think ourselves wise. Scientific findings about the physical world masquerade as complete explainations, as holistic answers, and I fear if I and we are not careful, they will gorw so large as to blot out the stars and all we shall see is the unreal cosmos of material interaction and lose sight of all that is not matter. It looks so much like truth! and it is true, usually, as far as it goes. But God save me from its snares: its experiments, its control groups, its data and its polls. Tie me to the wall of uncertainly before I follow it down the raid to a shadowland of seeming sense!
craft.
I was talking with ben today and realized that I may not have a unique talent. I dotn have something that I and only I am good at. I dont think I mind this. In fact, it is a bit comforting to think that I can be insignificant and normal and so live a quite life, not having to stand in front of kings, the one and only master of my craft. I can find a woman, get married, raise kids, teach them about Jesus, and so do my small part in the great and eternal kingdom. It is comforting to know that I will not change the world. It is encouraging to know that in knowing that, I may just change it yet.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
andreia
So I was talking to keith today about fear. What is fear? What, conversely, is courage? The greek word for courage is "andreia", which can be translated as "manliness". Surely this is different than "manness", right? In the dialogue Laches, Socrates talks about the relationship of courage to knowledge. Is courage a type of knowledge? In the dialogue, Nicias says that courage is knlwedge of the fearful and hopeful. hmm... more on this later.
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