Saturday Serious Reads: What is Happening Here?

I’ve published this blog for more than four years now, and the one subject I’ve largely (if not completely) avoided is politics. Opportunities to talk about politics abound, but I prefer to let others seize them. An argument can be made that the state of American politics has almost always been abysmal, even if today we seem to be searching for new depths. And I’ve generally avoided the subject.

It will be no surprise that I lean to the conservative side. I used to lean a lot more to the conservative side, until the inept response of government at all levels to Hurricane Katrina. People died because of that inept response. And then to learn that the ineptness had been a disaster waiting decades to happen – poor construction of so many of the levees – well, it was more than I could stomach.

I didn’t think the ineptness of Katrina could be surpassed.

Then came Syria.

What my government was preparing to do in Syria – after so badly mismanaging what had come before, not only in Syria but also in Libya and Egypt – compelled me to write letters to my two senators and my congresswoman, urging them all to vote against military action. We’ve demonstrated we don’t understand what’s happening in Syria, and why we believed military action would solve the problem we didn’t understand in the first place was beyond me.

And we still don’t understand the problem. What is happening in Syria is not the good guys versus the evil government, but some good guys (we’re not sure who they are, though) and some bad guys (remember al-Qaida?) sometimes fighting the government, and sometimes each other. And caught in the crossfire are both innocent Muslim civilians and innocent Christian civilians as well. (And here's an interesting note: Christians are being killed and churches destroyed, and not by the Assad government.)

Of all the things I’ve seen and read, what’s made the most sense to me are some comments by Christian speaker and apologist Ravi Zacharias. And it makes the most sense because all we have right now are questions and uncertainties, and no real understanding of what's happening in Syria, or why.

Top photograph: Wounded civilians arrive at a hospital in Aleppo, Syria, October 2012; photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

In the afternoons

In the afternoons, when

the children are playing

at a neighbor’s, she sits

in the screened-in porch,

seeking what little breeze

there is without the flies

and mosquitoes, and stares

at the smooth cement

floor. The tears form

at the interior of her eyes,

but no one is there

to notice.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Most Influential Poem of the 20th Century

(This is another is a series of articles I wrote for The Master’s Artist.)

In Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris, writer Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson) desperately wants to live in Paris of the 1920s, the city and time of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Cole Porter and Josephine Baker. And he gets his wish, if only for a few hours each night at midnight. In one scene, he climbs into a taxi and finds T.S. Eliot, and he says that “Prufrock” is like his mantra, but where he comes from in Hollywood, people measure out their lives in coke spoons, not coffee spoons.

If you don’t know the poem, you miss the reference. In the poem, Eliot wrote, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry Magazine in 1915, when Eliot was all of 27, and it is still considered by many critics and scholars to be the most influential poem of the 20^th century. It’s difficult to imagine any poem today having the kind of impact that “Prufrock” did. Published by Poetry with the urging of Ezra Pound, the poem played a major role in shaping and defining Modernism in poetry and literature generally.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table…

The poem is longish, unfolding a series of scenes that seem unrelated. Scholars still argue about the subject and meaning of the poem, but it is clearly a poem about the disconnectedness of modern society and man’s disconnected place within that society. In that sense, it is as contemporary today as it was in 1915.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains…

Eliot uses a combination of rhyme, free verse and repetition. The reader happens upon the rhyme but is soon swept away from it, only to return suddenly to it. There’s nothing predictable here, no planet in its orbit or star in its galaxy. But there are delightful lines, including some of the most famous in 20^th century poetry:

   In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

When I was in high school, Eliot’s poetry always posed a problem – should it be taught in American literature (junior year) or English literature (senior year)? My school solved the problem by teaching Eliot in both years. In American literature, we learned “The Hollow Men” – This is the way the world ends, / Not with a bang but a whimper. In senior year, it was “Prufrock” and the poems published as Four Quartets. (I still have the paperback edition of Four Quartets published for 95 cents in 1968; underlined in many places with margin notes in my own handwriting.)

“Prufrock” was written more than two decades before Eliot embraced the Christian faith. And yet the sense of a broken world and broken people permeate it. In an odd way, to read it now is to see the poem anticipating the intellectual and spiritual frame of mind of the poet that would eventually lead the poet to faith.

Eliot might smile at that. Despite all of the scholarly hubbub about the themes and meanings of his poems, all he himself said was that he simply wanted people to read his poetry.

There are various recordings of Eliot reading the poem, and you can find these at YouTube, but one of the best I’ve come across is the reading by Spoken Verse, which allows you to follow the words as they are read.

Photograph by Vince Mig via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ministers and Fire

Who experiences the refining fire of affliction?

Ministers, says Bob Sorge in The Fire of Delayed Answers. Ministers. And he defines a minister as “someone who waits on, who serves, who ministers, who attends.”

In the church, that definition covers a broad swatch of people. Like all of us.

Some years back, at a time when a lot of companies were laying people off in St. Louis, I was at church one Sunday, talking with a friend who worked at the same large organization I did. He noted one of our fellow church members, a man who had held a very senior executive position when he had been laid off some time before.

“You have to wonder,” my friend said. “He’s been out of work for a year. What could be the problem?”

I don’t recall my response exactly, but it was something like “the market is hard right now, especially if you want to stay in St. Louis.”

Some months after this conversation, the friend who had made the observation lost his job. He had just been told of his downsizing, and he called me, devastated. I told him to meet me in the cafeteria for lunch.

When we met, his first question was, “You’re willing to be seen with me?” What had happened was that the departmental colleagues did what was a normal thing back then – they stopped talking with him. He had become a non-person. It was as devastating as the layoff itself.

It would be more than two years before my friend found employment. Too many people with his skills and background were looking for work.  His search for work would take him all over the United States.

And this was man who had been highly regarded, and officially classified as a “high potential” employee.

He went through the fire. One of the people who counseled and helped him was that laid-off executive he had talked about.

Six years later, I was laid off by my then-employer. The circumstances were different; a boss who was in a position far beyond the individual’s capabilities was threatened by anyone who knew what they were doing. The boss, interestingly enough, was laid off at the same time I was. I ultimately benefitted from the layoff; the boss did not.

It’s difficult to understand a refining fire when you’re the one being refined.  Some days, it’s all you can do to hang on to your faith.

But each of us faces that refining. Some of us have to hold on longer than others, often for no discernible reason. The refining can become a flame, and a light.

“We become the light of the world,” writes Sorge, “when our passion for Jesus burns as a flame before others.”

And the refining fire comes to the ministers.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see others’ comments, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact and Sarah at Living Between the Lines. This week’s discussion concludes chapter 1, “Refiner’s Fire.”

Photograph by David Wagner via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

David Kirby’s “Talking About Movies with Jesus: Poems”

David Kirby’s Talking About the Movies with Jesus: Poems was published in 2011 by LSU Press. I have to admit, it was the publisher who pulled me into buying the book, staying true to the alma mater and all. (Actually, LSU Press publishes a lot of good poetry, and other kinds of works, too; it and the Southern Review have a rather long and distinguished history at LSU.)

But this book of poems is unusual. Kind of wild, in fact. The poems range all over the place. And I was impressed enough to write a review that imitated the poetic style Kirby uses.

So please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. You’ve heard of performance art? Think of this as performance review.

Life without Beauty

For a long time, longer than I really care to admit, I was a cretin when it came to modern and contemporary art. I had this tongue-in-cheek attitude that summed up my thinking on the subject in general: if I could do it, it wasn’t art.

Gradually, that attitude began to break down. I read more. I looked more carefully. I stopped rejecting exhibits or installations out of hand (although, I have to say that the installation of several television monitors talking to each other at the St. Louis Art Museum may still fit my tongue-in-cheek attitude).

But there was a moment, some years ago, when something happened that changed my attitude about contemporary and modern art. It was a series of three paintings at the St. Louis Art Museum by Gerhard Richter, titled individually November, December and January. (That’s December at the top of the page).

I still can’t explain why, but the day came when I looked at those three paintings closely, and realized they represented something far more, far larger, than various shades of gray paint on canvas. I looked at those three paintings, and I felt physically cold, as if I was in the very real presence of a representation of weather.

Richter was the doorway through which I walked into contemporary and modern art. The St. Louis museum has other Richter works, like Gray Mirror (1991), four mounted panels of gray glass, and Betty, a portrait of the back of Richter’s daughter at about age 12. And then I began to read about his work. And moved on from there. Twenty years ago, if someone had asked me who my favorite artist was, I would have likely Cezanne, pr perhaps Andrew Wyeth. Today, I would answer the question by saying Makoto Fujimura.

And I surprise myself even more by finding significant contemporary and modern elements in a painter like El Greco.

The art itself didn’t change; I changed. I understood what I didn’t understand before. The biggest change came in my understanding of creativity.

In Life After Art, Matt Appling says that “human survival never demanded that a poem be written or a song be sung or a play be performed or a story be told or any number of other beautiful, emotional, moving things be created. Beauty is never essential to survival. Yet humanity has spent millions of hours on unnecessary, nonessential creation.

“God’s life is not just about existing. It is about beauty.”

And I found beauty in what I previously didn’t understand, expressions of the creative self that we carry with us because we are made in God’s image.

Over at The High Calling, we’re reading Appling’s Life After Art. To see the discussion today on “Life without beauty,” pleasevisit the site.

Related:

My review of Life After Art.

Broken Hallelujahs, a poem inspired by Gerhard Richter’s December.

Painting: December, oil on canvas by Gerhard Richter (1989).

Piano player

She couldn’t read a note

of music but learned to play

the old upright by ear,

memorizing what she needed

to know, songs and mostly hymns,

and knew them so well that

she played for the church for years,

and no one ever guessed

she couldn’t read a note,

a single note.

Photograph by Sabine Sauermaul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.