Elegy to a Beard

Themes: Art and Imagination, Beauty

The Highwayman lies severed,
cut down in the way,
shorn from his mount.

And the hand that did it rises trembling.
And the eyes rise trembling to behold it
To meet their accuser’s eyes wide. And trembling.

It was a rough deed, done with razorrrs
Watched with glass, that razor-sharpt eye
Done in a cold light, boding unforgiveness

We reach, each for the others face,
To sand the rough lines.
But stand, unfeeling him, and naked.

And ashamed, pupils pinpricks like conscience
Wide, whites-wide, shock of eyes
Track the reach for grace.

But there is none.
For them that slayed the Highwayman.

 

I. The Highwayman was the name for my beard. It was a good beard, about 3 months old, but bushy and red: the kind of beard that makes a man feel like he’s in the middle of something. The Highwayman was intended to be a grand project; a once-in-a-life-time snatch at hirsute glory. I was waiting ’til I could square cut him across my neckline, like a Victorian Bushranger. I’m grieving. I cut him off in front of the mirror on the weekend.

 

II. An Anglican Divine of Moore Theological College once called the Highwayman, “One of the World’s Great Beards”. I kid you not. Verbatim. He whispered it to me last week in the middle of a lecture on Emotions. I was moved. Although, on reflection I think it is deeply unfair to the present Archbishop of Canterbury. But, seriously, what did you expect at Moore College?

 

III. There is a lot of masculine identity bundled up with facial hair. I hadn’t realised this so intensely until the past few days. The Highwayman was a matter of comment for most of his life, his absence also was not without its pontificators. Blokes give other blokes a hard time about their lack of beard-growing prowess; and the beardless die a little inside. I once watched a piece of performance art in a gallery in Queensland where a bloke videoed himself drawing all over his face in texta. Again, I’m not kidding. It was strangely enthralling. Making a point about hair and manliness.

 

 

V. It was painful to look at myself in the mirror after the Highwayman went down. Hair shapes the face. I needed to get to know myself again. I should have expected this, I’ve been wearing glasses since I was a little kid. Glasses become a part of your identity. I don’t think I could stop wearing them now, even if my eyes were suddenly 20/20. It would be too much like a unilateral re-legislation of my identity. These things require negotiation. The swipe of a razor blade is too sudden.
But sometimes things just end suddenly; with a jerk. Such is life.

 

VI. It’s hard work growing a beard:
Firstly, it’s just basically uncomfortable.
Secondly, one must cultivate the moral fortitude to bear up under the comments and glances of the full gamut of society: from mates to random blokes. And women always have opinions, which they are willing to share…
But ultimately, one must persuade the Mrs.
It was the Mrs what done for the Highwayman.
My Delilah.

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In defence of the proximate.

Themes: Art and Imagination, Beauty, Hope, Philosophy, The Future, The Trinity

Defence of the Defence (2 sentences)

1. Not the ‘approximate’, although it is worthy in its way. It is an attribute of God to be proximate to all and thus (a)proximate to human understanding. There are pleasant idle hours to spend in contemplation of the alpha privative. (Particularly one as odd as the ‘a’ in approximate). I nod in friendly estimation toward the Negative Theologian. But the via negativa is hardly a road, more of a fence to keep you on the road. We must journey further on the Way who proceeds.

2. And I challenge anyone to question my commitment to the ‘farther off’. Many of the finest things are farther off, don’t you think? Mountain ranges are an obvious case. In fact a double case: fine to behold from afar, and when you’re perched on the crest, making far-off things fine.
I long for the Delectable Mountains, to be shepherded in Immanuel’s Land; for the glimpse from Mt Clear of the gates of the Celestial City. I am tortured with the thought that perhaps they will always be farther off.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?

Psalm 121:1

This, of course, is the dangerous ambivalence of the ‘farther off’. It can be constantly removing itself to the horizon. Perhaps because something in the human heart was created for visions, for anticipation and expectation, the ‘farther off’ is the most powerful of the modern techniques of power. Some things that appear farther off are not really there at all, no matter how fast you run. No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no line. The desire for the ‘farther off’ when undisciplined, when cultivated without wisdom or direction, flowers into an infinite dissatisfaction whose-not-entirely-approximate name is Hell.

The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages a double aesthetic: on the one hand, a disciplined appreciation that somethings are fine simply because they are distant; and therefore one must keep one’s proper distance to love them truly. On the other, acknowledging that there is a ‘farther off’ which beckons us come closer: its name is ‘promise’. The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages in this aesthetic discipline: cultivating joy, wonder, reverence, sublimity at the contemplation of the essentially ‘father off’; and yearning to come closer to the promised. (the cultivation of this discernment in human affairs is one of the true uses of philosophy, even of the post-modern hermeneutic of suspicion). This double aesthetic is the heart of Christian worship: it is its dynamism and transcendence; it is what makes it interesting for all eternity. It is the double aesthetic of the resurrection: the place where the true lover of the ‘farther off’ learns to cultivate discernment, to learn what it is that beckons us closer, and what demands that we remain distant. It is the double aesthetic of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is the character of God.

3. I rest my defence of the defence.

 

In defence of the proximate:

The proximate is neither approximate, nor farther off, nor promise.
It is what we must be in order to love them truly.

You and me and the friend
who draws near in faith.

“And they said one to another,
Did not our heart burn within us,
while he talked with us by the way.” (Luke 24:32 KJV)

I rest my defence.

(for Emma on her 30th Birthday)

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Piercing the Wall

Themes: Art and Imagination

I watch the girl on stage. The spotlight is away from her, the cues which direct our attention direct it elsewhere. She is now a prop, a frame. She shifts posture slightly every half-minute. Clearly, the way she sits – weight on her one wrist, feigning watching TV – is uncomfortable. Her shifts of posture belie the steadiness of intent with which she watches. She is consciously unconscious. When I look closer I can see the faintest glimpses of the thoughts that are hers, running along behind the facade of a girl watching.

Then it dawns on me: the middle distance into which she stares, is me. Row D, Seats 16 & 17. Front, Centre. Best seats in the house. Right in her line of vision. I’m pretty sure she can’t see me, but maybe she can. She is certainly looking straight at me: the girl I’ve been staring at. I shift uncomfortably.

The believability of drama operates on the audiences’ acceptance of ‘the 4th wall’, the transparent line of demarcation between the dramatic world and the viewer. We are invited to view the stage as though it were a room within another world. A room in which the 4th Wall has been rendered transparent for the viewers/audience, but not for the characters in the drama. We sit behind this wall, in a ‘no-space’ outside their world. We are The Watchers, disembodied spirits of judgement.

With the advent of television, this transparent line solidified and became glass: hard. It was always morally dubious to speak of watching as a form of recreation: those who seriously considered it, didn’t. With television, however, watching became an obsession. In 2007 (the most recent year for which we have data) Australian watched an average of 21:46hrs per week. Americans are clocking over 35hrs p/w in 2010. Other than formal employment (which is generally performed under some form of necessity), our dominant form of engagement with the world is watching. We are watchers.

Sometimes we forget that the solidification of the 4th Wall in TV watching also came at the expense of vision. The ‘vision’ of television is one way, the 4th Wall of TV is not as transparent as that of the theatre. It is mono-vision. We watch without the possibility of being watched.

The suspension of disbelief required by the 4th Wall, the essential consent that an audience must give in order to appreciate dramatic art, also has a hidden correlative. It’s a suspension of belief, the belief that we can be seen, the suspension of belief that we are present in any form other than as watcher, judge. The difficulty and beauty of theatre is partially generated by the fact that the audience is constantly working with the actors to generate these twin suspensions. Beyond the suspense of plot is the essential suspense of acting and submitting to being acted upon. Television is a more forgiving medium, acting can be edited and the suspension of belief is relaxed because our presence is mediated through a hard screen. The watchers are genuinely hidden. But this hiddenness makes us more voyeuristic, we push up against the glass: seeking to come closer, to grasp the insides of the actors, to see them uncovered. Our hiddenness, our safety behind the glass, makes us lustful and cruel. All television tends toward pornography.

In our lazy viewing we forget that we are engaged in a suspension of belief. We watch so often that this fiction becomes part of our normal framework for engaging the world. We become so used to operating purely as watchers, as those whose presence is hidden, who cannot be acted upon, that we forget who we were before the theatre. We are not ‘not there’. We are not hidden, we are only watchers for a short time because we have convinced/paid some actors to let us be their gods.

But the actors can see you. Even behind your one-way, glassy screens, in your dark and private room. The 4th Wall is a fiction. The drama will come to you.

After this I looked, and there in heaven was an open door. The first voice that I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” (Revelation 4:1 HCSB)

image by dhammza

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Allegorical Interpretation

Themes: Art and Imagination, Selections

[For my mum, because I was thinking of her on Mother's Day]

I don’t know how many times my mother read the Pilgrim’s Progress to me when I was young. It was certainly enough that the story has become part of how I process my experience of the Christian life. And that is precisely what it is meant to do! Because of Bunyan, I think of the Christian life as a particular kind of journey, I have fallen into sloughs, been ensnared by Flattery, imprisoned by Despair.

The ‘normal’ fiction that we regularly read engages our interest by opening a window through which we can indwell another person’s world. That experience is often powerfully transformative: we learn to see our shared world from angles that weren’t previously available. Fiction is our ethical workshop. Between the pages of books (or between advertising breaks) we develop shared views of ‘the good life’, we construct characters who embody our ideas of virtue, and then we watch them try to solve our ethical dilemmas. Without this kind of imagining, we would not have society. People who refuse to read novels or watch TV are free-loaders in the world of communal deliberation.
[Fortunately, they are often good at fixing stuff and paying taxes, otherwise the Philosophers of the Future would be forced to enslave them for their own good]

But an allegory isn’t fiction. At least, not in the ‘normal’ sense. Rather than being a window onto someone else’s world, it is a mirror, a looking-glass, through which we indwell our own experience in a new way. John Bunyan doesn’t tell us someone else’s story and invite us to watch and learn, he tells us our own story with a form and completeness which had previously been hidden. The character ‘Christian’ isn’t a figure who is more or less like myself, engaged in activities that are more or less like my own. If I am a christian, he is me. Actually, he is a ‘hyper-me’. He is more real than I am. Christian is me, viewed from a God’s-eye perspective, viewed with the truthful gaze of an ultimate knower. The narrator knows Christian in a way that I wish I knew myself. As I read, Bunyan expects me to interrogate my own experiences rather than Christian’s, and to consider how I am more or less like Christian, and whether my own activities are more or less like his. In reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, I am learning the narrator’s knowledge of myself.

In a ‘normal’ work of fiction, I observe and judge the characters, that’s how I engage in the ethical workshop. But in an allegory, the characters judge me. They teach me the form in which I am to interpret my story, and the norms by which I am to engage in it.

It’s interesting to note that Bunyan’s allegory only works if there is some sense in which every christian’s story, is Christian’s story. It’s an idea that challenges us right at the heart of our ethical and ontological pluralism. For Bunyan, as for the early Church Fathers who engaged in allegorical interpretation of the Bible, we don’t live fundamentally individual existences, given a superficial commonality by the pressures of convenience or environmental and cultural necessity. We are not solitary knowers, we are the unified known.
There is one basic story, the true truth about each one of us, which is refracted and tinted according to our personal, natural, and social topography. That story is the gospel, its character is Christ.

One of my favourite scenes in The Pilgrim’s Progress is the final stage of the journey. Christian and his companion Hopeful are heading up to the Celestial city and are confronted by a final obstacle: a deep and fast flowing river which they must pass through to reach their destination. The image conjures up the Israelites passing through the Red Sea in the Exodus, overlaid with the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land. It is the river where Jesus commenced his ministry, walking at the head of his people into the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the river where the Negro slaves in America’s deep South stood and prayed that Elijah’s chariot would swing low and carry them home. It is the river of death that leads to life. For them, and probably for us, there is no chariot. We must pass through it.
What I love about this scene, however, is the support which Hopeful gives to Christian as his faith threatens to give way. How many times I have needed a friend like Hopeful! Someone to say to me when I can’t believe, “Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good.” How little did Christian realise that with the hand of a friend, his Father held him tight.

Lord, give us grace to follow.
God, give us the grace to walk home with our friends, rather than ride home with Elijah.

They then addressed themselves to the water and, entering, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said, I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all his waves go over me! Selah.

Then said the other, Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good.

Then said Christian, Ah! my friend, the sorrows of death hath compassed me about; I shall not see the land that flows with milk and honey; and with that a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian, so that he could not see before him. Also here he in great measure lost his senses, so that he could neither remember nor orderly talk of any of those sweet refreshments that he had met with in the way of his pilgrimage. But all the words that he spake still tended to discover that he had horror of mind, and heart fears that he should die in that river, and never obtain entrance in at the gate. Here also, as they that stood by perceived, he was much in the troublesome thoughts of the sins that he had committed, both since and before he began to be a pilgrim. It was also observed that he was troubled with apparitions of hobgoblins and evil spirits, for ever and anon he would intimate so much by words.

Hopeful, therefore, here had much ado to keep his brother’s head above water; yea, sometimes he would be quite gone down, and then, ere a while, he would rise up again half dead. Hopeful also would endeavour to comfort him, saying, Brother, I see the gate, and men standing by to receive us: but Christian would answer, It is you, it is you they wait for; you have been Hopeful ever since I knew you.

And so have you, said he to Christian.

Ah! brother! said he, surely if I was right he would now arise to help me; but for my sins he hath brought me into the snare, and hath left me.

Then said Hopeful, My brother, you have quite forgot the text, where it is said of the wicked, “There are no bands in their death, but their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men. [Ps. 73:4,5] These troubles and distresses that you go through in these waters are no sign that God hath forsaken you; but are sent to try you, whether you will call to mind that which heretofore you have received of his goodness, and live upon him in your distresses.

Then I saw in my dream, that Christian was as in a muse a while. To whom also Hopeful added this word, Be of good cheer, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole; and with that Christian brake out with a loud voice, Oh, I see him again! and he tells me, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.” [Isa. 43:2] Then they both took courage, and the enemy was after that as still as a stone, until they were gone over. Christian therefore presently found ground to stand upon, and so it followed that the rest of the river was but shallow.

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Murray Bail – The Pages

Themes: Art and Imagination, Reading

Murray Bail makes me fall in love with reading again. I picked up his newest novel, The Pages, yesterday – bought it on the basis of his name and the blurb on the back.
No one writes Australia like Bail, his description of driving along Parramatta road in the first chapter alone is enough reason to read the book. The second chapter is a discussion about why Sydney has produced no great philosophers and has instead become a city of self-obsession, of psychoanalysts. It finishes like this:

It has become the age of the self; confessions in public all over the place, the spillage of the ‘I’, and in private, in a quietly structured structured manner (the therapist has replaced the priest). And who is doing this talk? Not ill, at least not seriously, the self-obsessed personalities have a concentrated, almost technical interested in the self, as if they were specimens. Interest in others tends to be perfunctory, impatient, showy. It is they who have a natural attraction to analysis, where again they can dwell solely on themselves, the problematical ‘I’, and , since this is the very source of their difficulties in the first place, there is a real danger of psychoanalysis not uncovering, but giving shape to, and confirming, a person’s self-obsession. Eight, ten years in analysis is not uncommon. In Sydney parents have been sending their own children, not yet in their teens, into psychoanalysis – ironing out the unformed mind before the unevenness of everyday life could give proportion of self-correction.
Years spent murmuring the endless circling sentence, while the analyst remains almost, though not quite, hidden.
A philosopher would not allow this; but when needed there were none.

There are allusions to Foucault’s History of Sexuality here, and indeed, the second chapter of the novel is a mini-archaeology of the Sydney-self. But Bail’s concern with Sydney, and with the long trip out to the Western Plains, alerts us to the fact that geography rather than history is the more dominant concern: the ways in which our mental geography is moulded to the contours of our physical space. As always, Bail’s dense, brushstroke-like prose is relentlessly external to his characters: we know what his people think, but only in the same way that we know what the dust smells like and how the trees stand. The confessing self is almost totally excluded.

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Back on the Street

Themes: Art and Imagination

I was talking with Emma and my brother on the weekend (we were in Brisbane visiting my family) about the way in which Cookie Monster is a wildly inappropriate role-model for young people. After all, he is a binge-eater and he smokes (he always has a pipe at the start of Monsterpiece Theatre). Despite that, I love him. Cookie Monster comes from a time when Sesame Street wasn’t some gentrified neighbourhood ruled by a politburo of indie-pop-loving, designer-cardigan-wearing, liberal elites. The downhill slide started with Elmo – that little red ferret took over the block and changed everything…
Now, as soon as Cookie tries to do his thing, Hootchie the Owl appears and sings Cookies are a Sometimes Food.
Admittedly, it’s a kind of cool song, but OH! THE SHAME! It’s like watching a caged bear forced to do tricks. At least at the end of the song Cookie scores one back by announcing “But now is SOMETIME!” and eating the cookie anyway. Nice one, Blue Man.

Anyway, I was feeling bitter about Elmo so I did a bit of research and discovered that Cookie Monster has always been an ambassador for responsible nutrition. His 1987 hit, Healthy Food conveys a far more positive message with a much funkier tune. Why did Elmo have to send his Owlish minion to mess with my Monster?
Because he is pure evil wrapped in faux cuteness, that’s why…

P.S. I’m currently in love with Monsterpiece Theatre – check out Chariots of Fur. It’s a timeless morality tale that speaks right into the heart of modern life. And it’s got all my favourite Blue Monsters.

And while you’re there – what about the flannel-wearing grunge of Fur Jam, Don’t waste the Water (the fish will remind you).
And a new favourite of mine: Norah Jones singing, Don’t know Y (basically, the saddest song about a letter of the alphabet that’s ever been written, “Don’t know why, Y didn’t come”. Don’t worry though, because he was just a bit late…)

I think I could spend all day on sesamestreet.org

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