A Flash Review: Dying Toward Life
Lilith - George MacDonald, A-
I squeezed in the last several chapters of this book just as the new semester ground its gears and wheezed into shaky motion.
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This fantasy suffers from convoluted “action” sequences and dialogue muddied by excessive gusto (!!!), but the rare sense of paradox, which is MacDonald’s trademark, shines through. Some might find Lilith excessively morbid, but in reality this is the last charge one should level at the book. Undeniably, “death” is the central theme; but in MacDonald’s universe, death is life.
Lilith attempts to probe the opaque mysteries of eternal life, defiant evil, genuine personhood, and beauty—and thanks to MacDonald’s humility, coupled with an imagination which few can match—it succeeds. One puts the volume down with a healthily unsettled mind. Those searching for the author’s masterwork, however, will want to read Phantastes.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Lilith - George MacDonald, A-
Friday, February 10, 2006
Soul Correspondence: Lewis & Proust
By a strange and wonderful coincidence, I was reading Swann's Way
Here are a couple enjoyable (and unlikely) instances of correspondence between Lewis and Proust.
For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it, to reach the outside, with a sort of discouragement as we hear around us always that same resonance, which is not an echo from outside but the resounding of an internal vibration. We try to rediscover in things, now precious because of it, the glimmer that our soul projected on them; we are disappointed to find that they seem to lack in nature the charm they derived in our thoughts from the proximity of certain ideas…- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
[There is a] secret we cannot hide and tell, though we desire to do both... Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter... But all that is a cheat... The books or music in which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Contra Mundum Vision
Cultivating a Tendency to Turn the World on Its Head
There’s a certain delight that comes from using an object for a purpose for which it was not intended—thereby achieving a positive outcome.
For example: Turning off your alarm clock with a baseball bat. Opening the fridge with your toes. Watering flowers with your coffeepot. Pumping "iron" with your dog. There’s something rewarding about such defiant improvisation. We should all spend more time flouting the laws of accepted consumer-usage.
I've realized that I find a similar joy in defying the “laws of usage” that govern much of our lives—the ones that, with subtle subversiveness, effect morality, personality, perspective, in other words, life formation—not just how you hang up pictures. Such an exercise has benefits, believe it or not, that extend beyond self-gratifying freakiness.
Consider, for example, monotony. The default response is boredom. But a persistent lack of variety can have a tempering effect on your character when you exploit it. Perseverance, not boredom, becomes the surprising result. Kind of like using dirt on your hands to get a good grip.
Likewise, heaven. For many, the obvious "use" would be a dismissive chuckle at the expense of anyone naïve enough to "blindly believe that." To which I reply, Heaven isn’t an afterthought of this life, but a continuation. You’re laying the tracks for “your” eternity as we speak. In light of this, heaven has a variety of atypical uses, not the least of which is death-defying joy.
In a similar way, perfection (natural use: frustration and driven-ness) holds promise. And loneliness. The list could go on.
My tendency to invert common “life-usage,” for want of a better phrase, makes me wonder if there isn’t a redemptive use for the human trait we usually label “difficult” or "stubborn" and repress. Why not channel latent defiance into a really useful pastime: pitting oneself "against the world" (contra mundum) and turning it on its head?
This isn't just against-the-graininess. Rather, this conscious flaunting of appearances reaches toward something better. Not merely different, not merely counter-cultural, but better. True. This isn't rebellion for fashion's sake, but for truth's.
Such a shake-up makes sense in a world where the most obvious use for any given "object" (I use the term loosely) is seldom the right or best one. This is not to say we live on a neutered earth where everything is actually friendly and cheerful if you crane your neck at the right angle. Rather, it points up some bedrock truths of bittersweetness—that Christ is paramount, even amid suffering, and therefore beauty wracks an ugly world. Even pain has its uses. Evil is evil, but it can be exploited in spite of itself.
In such a context, where Good (God) waits in readiness to throw appearance on its ear, defiance ought to be used constructively. The world as we see it needs to be assertively re-envisioned.
We all have a "mean streak"—whether it's quiet or overt—a core of spiritual metal that, beyond a certain point, will not bend. Abused, it surfaces as ugly hate-all angst, a crisis of misdirected insurgency. What a waste. Channel "defiance" into vision and it's redeemed as contra mundum sight—which could also be known as rebellion with a cause.
Seeing life rightly takes tenacity and knock-down-drag-out perseverance. Devil-may-care verve is also needed, because you are, after all, defying an entire world that lives and dies on common "life usage." Looking past appearances and beyond the edges is a job for rebel-visionaries like Christ, and those who follow in his steps.
What we need is contra mundum vision. In the realm of rebellion, body accessories and bitter rants are child's play. Defiance could be much better employed.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Upstart Mentality Boggles Wife
My increased mental acuity is already paying dividends.
On Saturday, I challenged Lindsay to a game of Boggle. Now you would think that such a challenge would play right into my hands, given that I am an English major and president of the Vocabulary Reclamation Project. But in reality, things have tended to play out quite differently. Lindsay grew up with the game, and she is very accomplished. So much so that it would be misleading for me to say that historically, Lindsay beats me at Boggle.
Instead, honesty compels me to admit that in 4.5 years of marriage I have never won. That's the cold, hard fact, and for almost half a decade I’ve had dance to the music. Let’s just say the grin-and-change-the-subject routine was growing stale. It was only the fact that I virtually always won at Scrabble that kept Boggle on the table. That and my perpetual optimism. And finally, on Saturday, it all paid off.
Lindsay watched my chanting, gyrating celebration with an attitude of bemused tolerance. She was shocked at my victory, but after four years of total dominance she was fully willing to be generous.
But yesterday we played again. Her tune had begun to change.
My approach was pure swagger and confidence as I jotted down word after word, dropping verbal barbs each time the clock elapsed, trying to get inside Lindsay’s head. I was positioned as the Cinderella team, the come-from-behind media darling, the Gonzaga of Boggle, trying to knock off Duke. I smelled blood in the water and was determined to exploit my competitive edge. I had all the jocular energy generated by underdog rascality. Lindsay, meanwhile, was playing stiff, short-arming her pencil, writing words down tersely, playing not to lose.
But she did. Yes, she did. And I won, again. In our home, a new star is rising. And if I can overcome the new anti-Boggle laws for which some are agitating, I intend to nurse this dynasty for all it’s worth.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Mysterious Future, Spiritual Prayer
The future, the future, it’s out there. Kind of nebulous and fuzzy, but we like the way it glitters. Similar to the milky way, you see the light but can’t make out the stars, and it’s soothing if you don’t stare too hard.
Close your eyes for a moment, breathe deeply, and then you can go back to sharpening your pencil or eating pancakes, whatever it was you were doing before you got so forward-thinking. Brief contemplation of the approaching future can cleanse the mental palate: Relax, and say a prayer; it’s coming your way fast, and you don’t need to do a thing about it.
The future is a helpful accessory this way and would need to be immortalized in poetry if only we knew what it looked like. But we don’t, and that’s the point. Save the poetry: the future is totally and beautifully beyond your control. You can guess at its shape all night without penetrating its mystery.
You can’t know the future’s form until it arrives, and this should break your heart or send shivers down your spine. Ideally both. If these symptoms are missing, you have anesthetized your sense of adventure, of wonder, and your faith will need to be revived.
The future is a reminder that only God is God—the one who holds time in his hands. Thus, we are reminded of a redemption that God is unwinding day by day, an eternity that approaches hour by hour.
The future, the future, it’s coming. It advances inexorably, and we can’t make out its shape, not yet. But Christ makes this fact a cause for worship.
Monday, February 06, 2006
The Truth About Lies
I had the realization recently that there is some necessary fine print that should be applied to self-deception. A caveat with falsehoods we tell ourselves:
You can’t talk yourself out of your own lies.
Oops—and we had assumed that the things we wrongly believe might be self-refuting at the appropriate moment. But they’re good lies for the very reason that we believe them. Usually, someone else has to shake us awake.
This fact casts some light on the illogical indignation people feel when they are told that they believe something without adequate reason. Lies, held tight to the vest over long periods of time, sink roots into people.
It’s not that we want to be hoodwinked. It’s the thought that we could be that drives us up the wall. Conclusion: we should defend our positions with humility, and probe potentially malignant perspectives with care. Moreover: In a world where self-delusion tends to thrive, other-worldly revelation is all the more vital.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Cunning Light
I like the way that light leaks down
Through canyon strata
Or, if it comes to this,
Through cables jumbled under a computer desk.
Light illuminates the rocks and outlets,
Light navigates the tricky corners,
Light finds a way,
Light filters through.
Friday, February 03, 2006
Land of the Living, World of the Dying
“I would have despairedAt times, the realization creeps in, slightly haunting, but less so that I might expect: this is not the land of the living. This is a dying world. Vitality has yet to fully arrive here. We are still not really alive.
Unless I had believed
That I would see
The goodness of the Lord
In the land of the living.”
- Psalm 27:13
To admit, at least in the privacy of my own thoughts, that this world is peopled with corpses in various degrees of animation, should and does have considerable emotional impact. (“I see dead people…”) But the reaction is different than I would expect. I feel myself recoiling, as from something that you’re ‘not supposed to say,’ something unpleasantly ‘morbid,’ distastefully ghoulish—but not, in essence, untrue.
When I’m driven to the point of honesty, I find myself agreeing with king David’s assessment, even though I know it’s uncool. This world can be realistically pictured only through the lens of the next one. And in light of heaven, no one I see around me is really alive—let alone me. This world of the dying makes a kind of sense only when stacked next to the “land of the living.”
The present earth, “this dying life, or should I call it living death?” (Augustine), is a system whose inequities cannot be comprehended without additional conditions. But the ‘sanctifying’ provision does, in fact, exist. David calls it the land of the living. Add this reality to the world we see around us, and something altogether transforming emerges.
We live in a mysterious atmosphere where death, in the end, can be good, where people rise from funereal sleep and awake into unbearable glory. For some people, death will confer a deathless vitality. As George MacDonald puts it in his novel Lilith:
On some faces lingered the almost obliterated scars of strife, the marrings of hopeless loss, the fading shadows of sorrows that had seemed inconsolable: the aurora of the great morning had not yet quite melted them away; but those faces were few, and every one that bore such brand of pain seemed to plead, “Pardon me: I died only yesterday!” or, “Pardon me: I died but a century ago!”
Death will have its uses. Because the fact remains: this is a world where death may not be avoided, despite all efforts to the contrary. ("If your thoughts should turn to death, gotta stomp ‘em out like a cigarette;" Bright Eyes.)
This fact of death, supposedly the trump card of the anti-theist, is actually the ace up the sleeve of the Christian. This is where, metaphysically, we unabashedly cheat. Because death is not what it seems.
We don’t see the whole panorama yet. But the day will come when the temporal picture frame of this life will break up, disintegrate, as all makeshift things do—and then we will spill out into the untapped land of the living. This will be a kingdom without borders, where death has already served its turn.
In the land of the living, death will be denatured. In the land of the dying, death is essential—and not only in its physical form. As Augustine says paradoxically, “One who has not died and risen may live on but he lives evilly—and if evilly, not really living. Let him die, lest he die. How can he die lest he die? By undergoing conversion lest he undergo damnation.”
In a dying variety of world, you had better die. And you had better do it quickly (and often), before ‘death’ steals from you the chance. A death to self, and a yes to Christ, repeated throughout life, subdues the apparent morbidity of this world to a hidden reality.
And so we bend our lives to this death-shaped mold, and by doing so, we find that the mold has already been shattered. Broken by Christ. Why do we tolerate this deathly pattern at all? In the words of Paul, the brilliant theologian and martyr:
“…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10-11).
We die in order to defeat death entirely, and live with Christ. Therefore, appraising this dying world honestly leads not to despair, but to the vision that sees beyond. In this land, we die. In the living world, we will have a new preoccupation.
In the meantime, remembering the address of our current residence can make all the difference.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Jayhawk Joy
Oh yeah. I should also mention that I returned home to discover that the fortunes of KU basketball have been very much restored. I can confidently say that the Jayhawks will make the NCAA tourney, and are back in the hunt for the Big 12 title. Rock chalk, baby, rock chalk.
God Mends Minds
Well, I’m back.
Yesterday I arrived home from the Desiring God conference, and a half-dozen lovely ‘theological’ topics are percolating upstairs. The resulting brew will be steaming, dark, and very strong; this conference was coffee for the soul, but without the merely ephemeral good effects. I’m juiced, but not ready to dispense it just yet.
I did want to note something, though, maybe purely for my own benefit? Hard to say with this kind of story. But here it is, in abbreviated form.
I arrived at the first session with a kind of lingering fatigue that I’ve been fighting doggedly the last several months—the kind of tiredness that makes you feel worn out when you climb out of bed. Sometimes I felt like I had to drink coffee like water just to get my head clear. I told Lindsay, it was kind of like trying to drive with a fogged-over windshield. At any rate, when I sat down in the auditorium in Minneapolis the first evening, began listening to a passionate, riveting speaker, and still felt myself nodding off, things came to a head. I thought, This can’t go on.
That night, I prayed and prayed about it. The next morning I woke up, and rediscovered, as best I can put it, mental acuity. No epic struggle to generate focus and alertness. No profound physical inertia to overcome. My mind was just there, working smoothly.
As I write this, I have the feeling that I’m probably failing to convey the strange wonder of this realization. After months of prodding myself wearily to think, think, think—grinding out research papers and force-feeding textbooks to myself—the reality of quiet physical efficiency was almost startling.
How do things like this happen?
How does chronic weariness get wiped away like fog; how do mental gears get oiled and recalibrated? I think, if I’m wise, I won’t look for much more than a one word explanation.
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