Category: art

An Ill Fit

“Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.  And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.  Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” (Mark 15:37-38)

“Creation was subjected to futility. . . . We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves . . . groan inwardly while we wait for the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:20-23)

This second quote is not our reading for the morning, but it is what came to mind as I reflected on our text and reflected on Lent as we draw closer to Easter.  Paul is coming a little late to the story.  He was not a disciple during the life of Jesus and does not seem to have been present during the events surrounding Easter.  And perhaps for that reason Paul seems to be hit all at once with the futility of creation and how humanity exists within it.

There is a certain type of futility that must be faced as we approach Easter.  At Palm Sunday crowds are ecstatic, celebrating their potential Messiah, their king, but Jesus does not mount a war horse rather he ambles in on a donkey.  Pilate, the one in charge, examines Jesus and seems to be more interested in the crowd’s response then in executing justice.  The soldiers let off some steam adding insult to injury with their mocking punishment of Jesus.  The whole story seems to be a practice in futility.  No one really gets what they want.  The people do not get what they want and they do not give Pilate what he wants.  And Jesus seems to be deliberately instigating a denial of these desires.  Jesus evades the religious, social, and political expectations imposed on him that keep us from feeling the futility around us.  To recognize Jesus then, it seems would simultaneously be to recognize a certain futility, the futility of trying to build a kingdom that does not fit creation.

In light of this context what sort of recognition did the centurion offer staring at the cross and the dead Jesus?  The words out of his mouth were simple, This person really was a son of God.  Some scholars read the statement as an extension of the soldier’s mocking of Jesus.  Jesus dies, the whole trial and ordeal is over and here, this man who couldn’t even last on the cross as long as other convicts, have a look everybody this man is truly a son of God.  The irony and the mocking continue.  The centurion remains hardened, he has probably seen it all before and at some point it always ends up this way.  Hopes are ignited, expectations are frustrated, and the powers re-assert themselves.  Another reading of the text interprets this statement as the very first conversion after at the death of Jesus.  At Jesus’s death this Gentile centurion sees the light of salvation, makes his confession of faith, and becomes a member of the kingdom of the God of Israel.

I think these two interpretations reflect our tendencies in how we encounter the seeming futility in life at times.  Sometimes we simply buckle under it. We resign ourselves to the fact that nothing changes and nothing will change and so we find our expressions tainted with cynicism, sarcasm, and despair.  The other tendency is to respond to possible futility by creating beautiful and symbolic visions that can help transport us out of some of our more difficult material realities.  We have hope in what is possible through faith expressing itself in work, prayer, and imagination. This position does not buckle under the futility but it can also lead us into illusions and denials about some of the realities in the world.

So which was it?  Was the centurion’s statement a hardened cynicism or an enlightened confession?  There are grounds for both interpretations.  On the one hand it is truly hard to imagine a centurion uttering these words affirmatively because it equals treason as Caesar the ruler of the Roman empire is called the son of God.  And second, there seems to be no implications to his statement.  The centurion goes about his work following Pontius Pilate’s orders in the following verses.  On the other hand it is also clear that early interpretations of this passage viewed the centurion as offering a faithful confession of Jesus as divine.  While still open for interpretation both Matthew and Luke offer slightly different accounts that seem to view the centurion as being much more affirming as a confession of faith.

This morning I want to consider the centurion as someone stuck between the possibility and futility of the world.  In the Roman army a centurion is essentially one step up from a regular soldier.  A centurion commands a group of one hundred soldiers.  Centurions were often soldiers promoted from within the ranks.  As a soldier there was a chance for advancement.  A centurion would have known and experienced that change and improvement was possible.  It was possible to imagine and work for something within the larger faith of the Roman Empire.

But there seems to have been catch with becoming a centurion.  The pay and standard of living would have improved somewhat, but with that advancement you became the most accessible target of a soldier’s frustration and unrest.  The first century Latin historian Tacitus offers several accounts of how soldiers direct their discontent against their centurion leaders.  At one point Tacitus refers to centurions as “the customary targets of the army’s ill-will, and the first victims of any outbreak.”  But in reality the centurion seemed to hold little authority beyond his small group of soldiers.  In fact the blame could also be passed down onto the centurion from higher ranking figures.  After Caesar Augustus died under unknown circumstances Tiberius become the new Caesar and leader of Rome.  After Tiberius became emperor it so happened that one of his rivals also died.  When the death was investigated the centurion who killed the man was called to testify.  The centurion said that he was following the orders of Tiberius.  And as you might guess we find out that Tiberius said that he never gave the orders.

So with the centurion we seem to have someone who can experience very real change and yet, in the end, may still find it hard to believe that anything really changes.  At the cross he saw the soldiers under his charge mock and abuse Jesus and he saw Pontius Pilate above placating to the crowds and he was in the middle of it, striving for advancement but forever the target from below and at the whim of those privileged above.  The soldier in doing his job well becomes a centurion and this promotion makes him the scorn of former comrades and the scape-goat of his superiors.  And so maybe there was something about this event and encounter with Jesus that simply proved too much to take and something changed.

Thinking about the story in this light the centurion reminded me a little of the characters in some of Franz Kafka’s novels.  Kafka was a German novelist who wrote in the early twentieth century.  What I have noticed in Kafka’s novels is that they often start with some dramatic change but the implications and awareness of that change are not fully evident.  In his novels The Trial and Amerika the protagonists both find themselves in completely new situations, in The Trial Joseph K. is placed under arrest without being told his crime and in Amerika Karl Rossmann leaves his native Germany in disgrace and arrives alone in the United States.  In both these stories the protagonists believe, in good faith, that the place and the system they find themselves in will yield positive results so long as they learn and abide by the proper rules.  But in each case the rules themselves are always able to steer and bend things away from their favour.  Kafka is devastatingly relentless in how far he will depict people willing to work with the system only to find themselves further under the system’s power.  And, in turn, how a system (like the legal system or like a country’s culture) is able forcibly, even if subtly, to bend your will and change your beliefs, like the centurion who believed in the work and possibility of Rome.

So if for the centurion his encounter with Jesus is a confession and a conversion experience then it is a strange one, one that we don’t know how to talk about anymore.  It is not yet the promise of Jesus lifting the burden but may be a conversion to the full and crushing awareness of the burden that the world exerts.  It is to be with Paul who hears and utters the true groaning of creation under a system and power that is able to reach and apply its pressure on all people.  This is what Paul calls sin, and it is pervasive.

Towards the end of Kafka’s The Trial we find Joseph K. who experienced just how deep and smothering the legal system is and how it thwarted any good work and intention he might throw at it.  Joseph is talking with a priest, who is also a prison chaplain, someone inside the system of the law.  The priest tries to explain some aspects of this system telling him that it is not truth but the belief that it is necessary that is important.  Joseph responds to the priest saying, “Depressing thought.  It makes the lie fundamental to world order.”  This might be one way of interpreting the centurion’s confession.  In seeing Jesus’s death the centurion also sees clearly the system that surrounded and imposed itself on him.  And perhaps like some Kafkaesque character the centurion has changed but does not fully know it himself.

In perhaps his most well-known novel The Metamorphosis Kafka depicts a character waking up one morning only to find out that he is now a giant bug, a monstrous vermin in some translations.  The change is stark, extreme, and definitive but the character does not yet know what to make of it.  He tries to go about his day as usual but he cannot, his body does not work the same, he does not fit as he once did, despite his continued attempts to fit under the old conditions.

So the centurion continues his duties after his confession not understanding what happened.  But maybe he begins to notice that his helmet does not fit properly anymore.  Maybe his spear that was once an extension of his arm now looks foreign and strange.  The commander’s voice that directed his every action was now emptied of its authority.  The gods that watched over Rome become impoverished images and meaningless rhetoric.  He begins to see that in this situation he will always be despised from below and rejected from above.

For the centurion and for anyone who encounters the way this cross, this death, this person who brings into focus the order of the world, the question becomes how you will live out of the change.  How much and or in what way will we continue to invest in trying to fit into in a system that seems to be based on a lie.

As we encounter the death of Jesus and the opening of the Temple curtain how do we continue to try and fit within the world?  I used to think I knew some of those answers.  I used to think I had to change myself but what if, like in Kafka, the change has already happened and we are trying to figure out how to live into it?  And here we need to take Kafka seriously.  In his stories some characters will go to any length believing they will find redemption in the order and system established around them.  Many of these stories do not end well.

So do not stifle the groaning you feel at the parts of this world that do fit the form God has given you.  Do not stifle the groaning that others feel at the forces that push down on them to try and conform or distort them into something they are not.  You are not alone if at times you feel like some monstrous vermin in the light of the powers and the pressures of this world.  It is, after all, a false light.  So continue this Lent as we approach the darkness, lose your orientation to the light of the world’s powers, and wait.

Amen.

Do my words ring

The readings for this Sunday included the following:
Genesis 1: 1-5 – creation
Mark 1:4-11 – the baptism of Jesus
Acts 19:1-7 – an account of Paul baptizing believers and the believers receiving the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and prophesying.

My sermon last Sunday began with tracing the trajectory that connects creation in Genesis to Jesus’s baptism in Mark.  The imagery of creation (chaotic waters/deep, wind/spirit moving over them, dry land/body appearing) has to be one of the best candidates for helping to form a ‘biblical theology’.  I spoke of the culmination of this imagery in Jesus’s baptism and how the words of creation that are now spoken are ones of love.  However, I went on to say that the trajectory does not end there and continues into Acts 19.  Here is the second half of the sermon,

Continue reading “Do my words ring” →

Taking as its medium

I have for some time now moved away from using language that refers to life and action as somehow ‘poetic’.  This shift has happened for a couple of reasons.  First, I had developed a theological writing style that employed a certain type of poetic language.  And what I mean by this is that I wrote about theological topics in a style that was simply supposed to ‘sound good’.  Theology, along with other disciplines, can afford one this opportunity.  No one can really verify if my explication of the Trinity is really valid or relevant.  Rather, it is supposed to move or  persuade.  This style tends to work fine when keeping the conversation theologically ‘in-house’.  As I began to expand my theological discourse I found that my language was running aground on folks who simply did not share some of my presuppositions and basically had the refrain of bullshit called out to me on several occasions.  This presented a clear intersection in how I was going to proceed.  I could entrench my approach and state that the conversation stalled on mutually incompatible presuppositions.  Or I could head back into the workshop and take another look at how I was going about things.  I decided on the latter.

This experience was part of larger theological shift that saw me move away from theology and practice as a discipline of orthodoxy (yes I can be challenged on how I understand orthodoxy) to theology and practice as a mode of understanding and engaging joy and brokenness in the world.  And I should also note that this past year found me heavily influenced by Kierkegaard for whom ‘the poetic’ is a false attempt at immediacy in life which actually puts oneself at arm’s length from life through ‘pretty’ language (I am grossly paraphrasing here).

This process also left a profound mark on how I now read theology.  Theology that was once inspiring now came off flat.  I don’t think I have many illusions about some neutral or material access to reality ‘as such’.  But I am much more interested in beginning from a phenomenological perspective which attempts to describe and not only describe what I see and intuit but also describe my location and perspective.  If I could now characterize my theology I would call it something like an existentially minded attempt at liberation theology.

All this to say that I was somewhat taken aback by Tim McGee’s recent post which outlines James Cone’s understanding of theology as a sort of poetic task.  Now as I read it I could see that the use of ‘poetic’ was different than the understanding I had moved away from.  It still struck me, however, that I had almost completely discarded any expression of the ‘poetic’ in how I express theology and practice.  Poetics for Cone is a response to the possibility of liberation.  We are creative and evocative because we are free.  This is an embodied and holistic poetics.

I had posted a comment on Tim’s blog stating briefly something of what I here stated above.  After that comment I went to a hospital to do some visits.  At the hospital I encountered what we all encounter at hospitals.  I saw bags of urine stacked on a cart in the hall.  I saw a bloody skid mark on the floor next to one person I visited.  I hear the calls for and saw the silhouetted nursing aids clean soiled patients.  I saw a neighbouring patient with a foot bloated literally like a blown-up surgical glove.  I heard sounds and moans coming out of doorways; one with the never ending refrain
Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me . . .
I experienced all these common hospital scenes and I thought of the pretty words that people hold on to in this time; the pretty words people look to me for in this time.  It is many of these pretty words that I am trying to speak less of.  I am trying now to understand what theological poetics would look like and sound like taking as its medium the piss and shit of these places.

Who ain’t?

Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, however the old sea captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

And so I have begun to wade into Moby Dick for the first time.  This quote is from the first chapter where Ishmael frames his calling to the sea.  It reminded me, even if tangentially, of an image I saw driving home today.  – 10 C can be biting with a wind chill here in Winnipeg.  In that wind I saw a man scouring a patch of frozen pavement for usable cigarette butts.  A pathetic image, but not an image of laziness.  A shameful image of addiction but only because of this addiction’s object.  Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  The sentiment reminds me of the fine line of how little separates a certain subjective drive between an impoverished addict searching for a fix and a wealthy addict looking to increase on abundance.   You will not escape the universal thump there will always be a larger hammer than the one you are able to wield.  Those larger hammers will likely always create circumstances which will determine a level of external comfort our addictions will afford us.

How does Ishmael’s knowledge and acceptance of this reality play out?  I’ll keep you posted.

The problem of presence

It would seem that a work or ‘the works’ of a particular philosopher cannot be complete without addressing the question of presence.  Do we have access to some-thing?  This was first impressed on me when I was introduced to philosophical hermeneutics and the question of meaning.  This question seemed stretched to its logical conclusion in the work of Derrida who denied our ability to capture or lay hold of meaning explaining that the nature of language is to remain in motion always being deferred in relation.  Kierkegaard picks up this question in Practice in Christianity when raising the question of ‘reflection’.  He criticizes the pastoral movement in his time that encourages ‘reflection’.  I think this marks a shift in this thinking away from earlier formations of developing ‘inwardness’ as the arena of faith.  Or at least he is developing a corrective or preemptive claim.

To reflect means, in one sense of the word, to come quite close to something which one would look at, whereas in another sense it implies an attitude of remoteness, of infinite remoteness so far as the personality is concerned.  When a painting is pointed out to one and he is asked to regard it, or when in a shop one looks at a piece of cloth, for example, he steps up quite close to the object, in the latter instance he even takes it in his hands and feels it, in short, he gets as close to the object as possible.  But in another sense, by this very movement he goes quite out of himself, gets away from himself, forgets himself, and there is nothing to remind him that it is he that is looking at the picture or the cloth, and not the picture of the cloth that is looking at him.  That is to say, by reflection I enter into the object (I become objective), but I go out of or away from myself (I cease to be subjective).  . . .

For Christian truth, if I may say so, has itself eyes to see with, indeed, is all eye; but it would be very disquieting, rather quite impossible, to look at a painting or a piece of cloth, if when I was about to look I discovered that the painting or the cloth was looking at me – and precisely such is the case with Christian truth.

Kierkegaard is interested in contemporaneousness with Christ.  And it took me a little while to realize is how dramatically this must be distinguished from historical knowledge of Christ, that is reflection on Christ.  There are of course many questions to be asked about this distinction but it always pushes for, better or worse, is a subjective engagement.

As I was writing out this quote I was reminded of a recent art installation I happened across as my wife and I were walking in our neighbourhood.  The installation was inside the new Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art.  It was created by Lani Maestro and entitled ‘her rain’.  The installation was sparse and what I would call ‘conceptual’.  Below is a picture of one of the works that made up the four room installation.

This neon light filled a room accompanied by second mirrored piece which ran ‘NO BODY LIKE THIS PAIN’.  The works throughout the installation are ‘unframed’.  They are meant to immerse the space they inhabit which include the subjects and subjectivities that move past them.  What I appreciate about this installation is that it makes it difficult to both take it seriously and remain objective about the pieces.  One has the option of dismiss the installation as being ‘artsy-fartsy’ rubbish but one can hardly ‘admire’ it or ‘reflect’ on it in the Kierkegaardian sense above.  One moves through it and must make a subjective decision about it.  It is bodily but not framed and so it opens itself to touch other bodies.  It is subjective.  This word has been so maligned that I think it is time again to slowly build up its intended place, which is not only a place, but also and primarily its impact.

Deep calls to deep

I became an ordained minister this past Sunday.  While it is not always the tradition to do I decided to speak at my own ordination.  The preparation for this ‘sermon’ was different than how I had prepared for a sermon in the past.  My guiding thought was not about communicating the meaning of some particular text but in communicating a sense of how I understand my role and my calling.  As such the sermon developed more along the lines of ‘imagination’.  It was, I guess, poetic.  I sat somewhat uneasy with that direction.  I became concerned that it was too pious or was just some pretty window dressing.  My hope was that it was an inhabitable imagination that would draw, challenge, and invite change for those who heard it.

Well, in any event, here it is.  Based on Psalm 42:1-2, 7-8.

Continue reading “Deep calls to deep” →

A post on an essay on abjection

Having comes across the use of the abject as a conceptual tool to think through political theology and pacifism I did a little digging and came across Julie Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (link to full pdf); a text cited as forming some of the theoretical basis for the concept’s later development.  The opening paragraph is worthy of a slow read,

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts
of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate
from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope
of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite
close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and
fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A
certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which
it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same,
that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere
as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable
boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the
one haunted by it literally beside himself.

And the concluding the opening section,

A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it
might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries
me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not
nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a
thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing
insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence
and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge
it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.
The primers of my culture.

Kristeva in her work on abjection attempts to hover over a fundamental human experience; perhaps the fundamental human experience which is the inability to acknowledge or face our impotence in subsuming life within the bounds of our meaning.  To acknowledge that there is ‘something’ that I cannot recognize as a ‘thing’.

This is the literal shit of human life that I cannot rid myself of so I must always cleanse myself.

This is the desire for mother/father that is at once good and evil (or neither or both).

This is the inherent decay of death within food that is needed for life.

This is the eternal coding of a divine people who will not be assimilated.

These are seemingly universal realities which we cannot live with or live without.  These experiences raise fundamental questions of boundary.  Inside/Outside; Self/Other.  I came from my mother but I cannot return there.  Shit comes out one end but I would vomit trying to put it in another.  I desire to relate intimately but I cannot maintain the space between us I only vacillate between control and abandonment.  What cannot be assimilated as One or faced directly in opposition forms the abject.  A live body can be loved or fought but a dead body . . .

Kristeva traces the expression of abjection primarily in the Judeo-Christian stream orienting herself in Freud and then looking at taboo and ritual in Mosiac law and then the internalization of abjection in Christianity and with it the formation of ‘sin’.

Kristeva then spends several chapters exploring the content of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.  Celine is a writer of the abject as he continual hovers over the points of life where boundaries break down and where the abject is named and gagged over in fear and attraction (the Jew, the mother).  In his writing Celine attempts to push back the coding of the word to arrive at expressed emotion and with the allowance and facing and expressing of horror.  There is an attempt to explore expression that eludes or throws off the over-structuring and binding of the symbolic.  Kristeva offers this description,

With Celine we are elsewhere. As in apocalyptic or even
prophetic utterances, he speaks out on horror. But while the
former can be withstood because of a distance that allows for
judging, lamenting, condemning, Celine—who speaks from
within—has no threats to utter, no morality to defend. In the
name of what would he do it? So his laughter bursts out, facing abjection, and always originating at the same source, of which Freud had caught a glimpse: the gushing forth of the unconscious, the repressed, suppressed pleasure, be it sex or death. And yet, if there is a gushing forth, it is neither jovial, nor trustful, nor sublime, nor enraptured by preexisting harmony. It is bare, anguished, and as fascinated as it is frightened.

And then further,

A laughing apocalypse is an apocalypse without god. Black
mysticism of transcendental collapse. The resulting scription
is perhaps the ultimate form of a secular attitude without morality,
without judgment, without hope. Neither Celine, who
is such a writer, nor the catastrophic exclamation that constitutes
his style, can find outside support to maintain themselves.
Their only sustenance lies in the beauty of a gesture that, here,
on the page, compels language to come nearest to the human
enigma, to the place where it kills, thinks, and experiences
jouissance all at the same time. A language of abjection of which
the writer is both subject and victim, witness and topple. Toppling
into what? Into nothing more than the effervescence of
passion and language we call style, where any ideology, thesis,
interpretation, mania, collectivity, threat, or hope become
drowned. A brilliant and dangerous beauty, fragile obverse of
a radical nihilism that can disappear only in “those bubbling
depths that cancel our existence” (R, 261). Music, rhythm,
rigadoon, without end, for no reason.

With Celine we reach a sort of climax in which our abjection has moved from external taboo and internal sin to the practice of literature as able to evoke the fascination, fear and power of horror.  In her conclusion Kristeva then asks, And yet, in these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasizing the horror of being?  Here are excerpts of her response,

For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of religious,
moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals
and the breathing spells of societies. Such codes are
abjection’s purification and repression. But the return of their
repressed make up our “apocalypse,” and that is why we cannot
escape the dramatic convulsions of religious crises.

Kristeva then turns to the (psycho)analyst in conclusion,

And yet, it would perhaps be possible for an analyst (if he could manage to stay in the only place that is his, the void, that is, the unthinkable
of metaphysics) to begin hearing, actually to listen to himself
build up a discourse around the braided horror and fascination
that bespeaks the incompleteness of the speaking being but,
because it is heard as a narcissistic crisis on the outskirts of the
feminine, shows up with a comic gleam the religious and political
pretensions that attempt to give meaning to the human
adventure. For, facing abjection, meaning has only a scored,
rejected, ab-jected meaning—a comical one. “Divine,” “human,”
or “for some other time,” the comedy or the enchantment can
be realized, on the whole, only by reckoning with the impossible
for later or never, but set and maintained right here.Fastened to meaning like Raymond Roussel’s parrot to its chain, the analyst, since he interprets, is probably among the rare contemporary witnesses to our dancing on a volcano. If he draws perverse jouissance from it, fine; provided that, in his or her capacity as a man or woman without qualities, he allow the most deeply buried logic of our anguish and hatred to burst out. Would he then be capable of X-raying horror without making capital out of its power? Of displaying the abject without confusing himself for it?

Probably not. Because of knowing it, however, with a
knowledge undermined by forgetfulness and laughter, an abject
knowledge, he is, she is preparing to go through the first great
demystification of Power (religious, moral, political, and verbal)
that mankind has ever witnessed; and it is necessarily taking
place within that fulfillment of religion as sacred horror, which
is Judeo-Christian monotheism. In the meantime, let others
continue their long march toward idols and truths of all kinds,
buttressed with the necessarily righteous faith for wars to come,
wars that will necessarily be holy.Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for myself, as I lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of
civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing
aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; the horror that
they seize on in order to build themselves up and function? I
rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of frustration,
and hollowing—probably the only counterweight to abjection.
While everything else—its archeology and its exhaustion—is
only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses
in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us—and “that cancels our
existence” (Celine).

Some hate for The Tree of Life; Or, my apparent obsession with AUFS

I wrote an initial comment over at AUFS on my first impression of The Tree of Life.  And the more I think about it the more I can’t stand the film.  This is a reflective position and not a commentary on aspects of the film.  However, the movie lends itself to being processed in a larger cultural and political context and I think the context demands more of the movie than it offers.  I think the movie can be viewed in part if not entirely as Jack processing his childhood.  So Jack wakes up aloof from his beautiful wife (who I don’t think he says a word to).  Lights a candle for his dead younger brother.  Goes to work and sits atop a high tower.  Calls the other alpha male (his father) to apologize for something about the dead brother.  As I process the movie another conversation at AUFS comes to mind in which Brad states that the church has never been able to appropriate or face up to modernity.  That may be true but why is there any need when you have a movie like this which causes modernity’s implosion in the psyche of the man who builds modernity (powerful ‘modern’ architect).  This modern man traverses and encompasses all of evolution in order to find meaning for the death of his brother.  Oh, and who was that middle child again?

I don’t think it is helpful to minimize the white middle-class male experience but how can this expression not invite scorn in our context?  What if Jack was the First Nations man I encountered walking down the street a month ago.  I suspect he might have a few more things to ‘process’ from his childhood experience but he has no high tower in which to brood.  In this neighbourhood being young and native tends to invite things that do not allow for contemplation and so he is jumped and hit with an eight-ball over the head.  He continues on down the street with blood flowing down over him.  Oh wait, where was I again?  Oh yes I was up to the dinosaurs.  The AUFS view of this movie is all the more striking with its general tenor of liberation.  There seemed to be nothing here that would change the modern capitalist man or system.  He found his inner-peace.  Isn’t this the kind of thing that gets disemboweled over at AUFS?

It’s funny I was actually planning to right a post on my ‘conversion’ experience that I attribute in part to the posts and related scholars and thought that floats around at AUFS.  I am trying to shed vacuous and bankrupt theological language or at least press it for its implied meaning and implications.  This is a good time as I am entering into the ordination process with my conference and need to comment on our confession . . . well, we’ll see how good it turns out.

In any event I am not trying to take some jab at the general thinking and expression at AUFS.  I just find the engagement with this movie to be a little dissonant with the larger environment.  I should also point out that many of the comments were not actually made by AUFS regulars.  But as I mentioned in my comment over there I was really surprised it did not get a harsher review.   I suppose it provided some good intellectual and aesthetic fodder . . . and maybe that is all that it amounts to though the movie and the conversation seemed to be pointing to more.

There were two audible responses to the movie in my theatre.  First was a loud yawn.  This was only a partially accurate review in my mind.  I was sucked into the ‘evolution’ (but would have been just as happy to see it as an I-Max piece) as well as moved by many other visual landscapes.  Some of the social and psychological commentary was suggestive and provocative (as Brad elaborates in his original post).  The other audible review was probably more accurate.  It was a sarcastic wow-wee.  Of course this probably spouted by a white middle-class male.

On being seduced

I am almost finished the first volume of Either / Or and as I have mentioned earlier it has been a more rewarding experience than the first go round in which I did not finish.  The book seems to read with two clear book-ends.  The first is Mozart’s Don Juan. Don Juan represents pure and immediate sensuality.  The highest form of this is music.  As soon as the focus shifts to lyrics then an element of reflection is immediately introduced.  The closing book-end is the Diary of a Seducer which is collection of reflections and letters in which a man seduces a young woman to engage him.  This still represents an aesthetic mode like Don Juan but is clearly now also a reflective mode.  What I find interesting about the Diary is the way in which it begins themes which will later be taken up by Kierkegaard.

Having done some earlier research on Kierkegaard’s influence on psychology and counselling much was made of his approach as ‘mid-wife’, that is, of clearing space for the individual to come to his or her own conclusions; to existentially engage the individual, to set them in motion (though without knowledge of this having been facilitated by someone).  Towards the end of his life Kierkegaard reflects on this practice as an author but already here in the Diary Kierkegaard uses similar language as a seducer.  Leading up to the proposal of engagement the seducer writes,

The whole episode must be kept as insignificant as possible, so that when she has accepted me, she will be able to throw the least light upon what may be concealed in this relationship.  The infinite possibility is precisely the interesting.  If she is able to predict anything, that I have failed badly, and the whole relationship loses its meaning.  That she might say yes because she loves me is inconceivable, for she does not love me at all.  The best thing is for me to transform the engagement from act to an event, from something she does to something that happens to her, concerning which she must say: “God only knows how it really happened.

Then later in the Diary are collections of short ‘notes’ that are to arouse the erotic (the immediate) in her.  These are notes of absolutes and totalities.

I am poor – you are my riches; dark – you are my light; I own nothing, want nothing.  And how can I own anything?  It is a contradiction to say that he can own something who does not own himself.  I am as happy as a child, who can and should own nothing.  I own nothing; for I belong only to you; I am not, I have ceased to be, in order to be yours.

It does not take much to see how these notes extend from the aesthetic to the religious.  But first it seems they must pass through the ethical.  And I am about to enter volume II.

Controlled Irony

I finished Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony yesterday.  While the majority of the text worked through Socrates thoroughgoing negativity the final section looked at “Irony After Fichte.”  This was essentially a commentary on Romanticism.  I think I missed something in this section.  While Kierkegaard was not entirely critical of this expression he also did not view this movement as either reflecting or going beyond Socrates.  In browsing over what I underlined I saw what might be a paradigmatic statement at the start of the section;

It was in Kant, to call to mind only what is generally known, that modern speculative thought, feeling itself mature and come of age, became tired of the guardianship in which it had lived hitherto under dogmatism and, like the prodigal son, went to its father and demanded that he divide and share the inheritance with it.  The outcome of this division of the inheritance is well known, and also that speculation did not have to go abroad in order to squander its resources, because there was no wealth to be found.  The more the I in criticism became absorbed in contemplation of the I, the leaner and leaner the I became, until it ended with becoming a ghost. (272)

Turning then to Fichte he talks about how he “infinitized the I in I-I. . . . But this infinity of thought in Fichte is, like all Fichte’s infinity, negative infinity, an infinity in there is no finitude, an infinity without any content” (273).  I don’t entirely understand why K. becomes more critical of this ongoing need of irony to ‘free itself’ (he was hardly critical of Socrates in this regard).  The criticism comes, it seems, on the shift towards making everything myth as a disingenuous mode of irony (contra Socrates); a sort of unfair play by irony to keep its thinking free.  This [Romantic] ironist ‘poetically composes’ but is not ‘poetically composed’.  This would require a limiting within actuality.  There is no content for the Romantic and transitions are nothing.  “At times he is a god, at times a grain of sand” (284).  So while Romanticism offered a cool breeze its tragedy is that “what it seizes upon is not actuality” (304).

So at the end of his 35o page dissertation he offers a brief 5 page conclusion, “Irony as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony.”  Here he treads carefully along the contentious line relating the life of the poet to the poetic work.  K. agrees that the poet’s life is no concern of ours.  “But in the present undertaking it should not be out of place to point out the misrelation that can often exist in this respect” (325).  I am still not quite sure what that sentence means.  As an example he points to Goethe.  “The reason Goethe’s poet-existence was so great was that he was able to make his poet-life congruous with actuality.  But that in turn takes irony, but, please note, controlled irony” (325).  K. accuses the Romantic of being incongruous with his work.  The point here seems to be that poetry is nothing if it does affect lives . . . and should it not affect the poet above all!  K. continues making the intriguing statement “what doubt is to science, irony is to personal life” (326).

As I am re-reading this short conclusion I am realizing that it is much more suggestive than I first realized.  I think I will end it here for now and spend a little more time working directly through his conclusion.

I am also almost finished the 100 pages of notes Kierkegaard took on the lecture series he attended by Schelling.  It is a supplement added to the Princeton series . . . I kinda of wish it wasn’t.  I doubt I will post anything on it.