Just for laughs

by Andrea Elizabeth

I heard a comedian* On the radio say today that self deprecating humor is more endearing in comedy than confidence. This is largely true, and many use it, especially women comics, but it seems backwards and calculating to use it for that reason. Wanting to be popular and for people to like you is the opposite of self-deprecation. Steven Wright is self-deprecating, but he is so creative with it, that he comes off sounding unconventionally superior, yet in pain so you really don’t want to go where he goes in reality. The conventional self deprecators are trying to relate to the common man, not come off as if they were from another planet like the comic geniuses do.

*I’m not saying who because it would seem too critical of him as a person. Comedy of this sort can effectively make people laugh at themselves, and displays linguistic talent, and is often the fruit of hard work and powers of observation, so it’s not nothing.

Pages

by Andrea Elizabeth

I’ve watched the last two episodes of Masterpiece Contemporary on PBS: Page Eight, and A Song of Lunch, this one sans kids. They are impressive, apathetic statements about modern morality. Intelligent, poetic, but resigned to emptiness, which I guess is the new state of virtue. Nothing lasts. All life is a shell of beauty, then decay. Once the latter happens, at least you have a memory, but better shed that too. Sigh.

Still, there is something to witnessing things done well. Hopefully it inspires one to do well too.

Cliff Lee and David B

by Andrea Elizabeth

My curiosity about what David B. Hart is up to and my subsequent curiosity on whether Cliff Lee is going to stay with the Rangers (probably not) met each other in the former’s First Things article, “A Perfect Game”. He is a delight to read. However, I’m glad he identifies his views as Platonic, and not Orthodox in the piece. My intuition lines up more with his Buddhist and Biblical comparisons with baseball, which seem more incarnational than his elusive Platonist forms.

In his later philosophy, Heidegger liked to indulge in eccentric etymologies because he was certain that there are truths deeply hidden in language. It is one of the more beguilingly magical aspects of his thought and therefore—to my mind—one of the more convincing. Consider, for instance, the wonderful ambiguity one finds in the word invention when one considers its derivation. The Latin invenire means principally “to find,” “to encounter,” or (literally) “to come upon.” Only secondarily does it mean “to create” or “to originate.” Even in English, where the secondary sense has now entirely displaced the primary, the word retained this dual connotation right through the seventeenth century. This pleases me for two reasons. The first is that, as an instinctive Platonist, I naturally believe that every genuine act of human creativity is simultaneously an innovation and a discovery, a marriage of poetic craft and contemplative vision that captures traces of eternity’s radiance in fugitive splendors here below by translating our tacit knowledge of the eternal forms into finite objects of reflection, at once strange and strangely familiar. The second is that the word’s ambiguity helps me to formulate my intuitions regarding the ultimate importance of baseball.

There are things I recognize in the above as pertaining to being made in the image of God, but the pathos and melancholy he describes throughout is about the elusiveness. One can tell he identifies with the batter in his descriptions and how low the odds are that he’ll hit a home run when he comes to bat. While I was watching the playoffs this year, I was identifying with the pitcher. Here is my psychological evaluation of Mr. Hart.

He has a very complicated relationship with his father and thus with God. The pitcher to him is the powerful almighty who is trying to trip him up, but if he’s good enough, he can anticipate and use the pitcher’s power for his own ends. He can’t win his approval, but he can beat him. This possibility sustains him even when most efforts fail. These failures inspire him to constantly outdo himself. Hence DBH’s over achievement in reading and writing. I think his writing can be classified as pretty consistent home runs though. Face to face, maybe not so much, which is what he’s upset about with his dad.

The pitcher to me has to be constantly aware of everyone and what they are doing. Pitching is like serving dinner on time while making sure the laundry’s done and the pool filter behind my back isn’t getting clogged up with leaves. One miscalculation or negligence will ruin everything and it’s “Good-bye baseball” as my favorite announcer, Dick Risenhoover, RIP, used to say.

It’s a Small World

by Andrea Elizabeth

If Disney really wanted to point out that there’s “so much that we share that it’s time we’re aware . . . . . .” they shouldn’t have made the ride’s dolls representing all the countries so (refraining from more heartfelt adjectives) robotically … monotonous. There, now that I’ve vented, I can tell about our trip more positively.

We went to Disney World for my son’s World Cheerleading finals. The event was held at the ESPN Wide World of Sports which is one of the parks in the complex. Therefore between his two performances (they finished fourth in the world! – in their division: large coed), my husband, two daughters and I were able to go to the other parks included in the Cheerleading packaged and discounted accomodations.

This morning I’m coming off of a four-day weekend of busy, high energy, enthusiasm-inducing events, which I either fully participated in or did tongue in cheek, so bear with my bouncing from subject to subject. I was enthusiastically engaged in my son’s team’s performance and whooped it up with the other Maverick parents. I was very motivated to see and do all the major venues in the four Disney Parks and pretty aggressive about making sure it all happened. The girls are worn out.

First, I am impressed with how Disney “spares no expense” to make sure that things look and act their best, including the crowds. They pay attention to the minutest details of scenery and movement, even in the waiting queues. I have never seen animatronics so lifelike, being used to Chuck E. Cheese types of stage productions. I’m still not sure what to think of it. There were several times when the characters seemed to look right at me and twinkle. Was I right to smile back? Walt Disney wanted people to feel like they were in the movies that he had created. Yet no matter how 3-D or realistic the characters were, you’re still just an observer being shuffled through in a boat or car. The later parks are more interactive with the Toy Story Ride at Hollywood Studios allowing you to compete with your seat mate in shooting 3-D images on the screen arcade style. Animal Kingdom had live performers at the two well-done shows we went to, Nemo with the performers holding fish puppets on a stick (hey, fish sticks) and The Lion King show where you’re encouraged to do motions, sing along, and cheer for your section’s character. But still your interaction is as a passive, though participating, audience member, not a player. At least you get better exercise walking all those miles and miles than you do playing games at home or watching movies. Crowd watching is interesting too.

I am a little torn between which I like better, beautifully naturalistic Animal Kingdom, or man-made achievement oriented Epcot Center. I’d have to say that in addition to the beautiful jungle created at Animal Kingdom, part of my attraction is for the gorgeous Asian temple ruins and detailed African village ambiance. Still these seem more “natural” than more “civilized” developments at Epcot.

The big golf-ball looking “Spaceship Earth” at Epcot Center animatronically detailed human progress from caveman times to the printing press to personal computers to space travel, and on the way back down they let you sort of plan what you think should be in mankind’s future. Epcot’s “World Showcase” reproduces many of the famous beautiful buildings around the world set like jewels in their own little city squares. I’m not sure what to think of all these marvels. According to the Hollywood Studios Walt Disney museum presentation, Disney had affection for the past, but also believed very strongly in progress. This is probably highlighted best in the “Carousel of Progress” which Disney originally created “as the prime feature of the General Electric Pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair” (from Wikipedia). The first stage is a 1900 home with its primitive but very decorative ice box, wringer washing basin, and kerosene (or was it gas) lighting. Then there are the awkward attempts of electrifying Victorian homes, then modern homes with hidden electric wiring and plumbing. The mother’s plight is the one with which we are supposed to sympathize. How she had to spend two days breaking her back over the laundry, only having it ruin if it rained, etc. and how she didn’t have time for anything but the most arduous of tasks. Walt was born at the turn of the century and spent his childhood in poverty first at a failed farm in Missouri, then in Chicago where his father couldn’t make ends meet either. A young boy must be very conflicted by loving the rugged, strenuous outdoor life of a farm while watching his frailer mother wear herself out taking care of everyone. Dostoevsky also wrote sympathetically about the toll so much hard labor takes on women.

More primitive societies such as are found in Africa and Native America don’t seem to be as hard on women though. If you don’t have all that Victorian finery to keep perfect, then you don’t worry so much. Perhaps the problem is with civilized standards which seem to require slave labor to keep up. Which brings me to Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and then European sophistication showcased at Epcot. They all had slave labor to tote those barges and lift those bails. Human life was cheap to them and many died erecting those fine monuments. Now we have technological machines that do it for us. This way we don’t have to feel guilty about the blood and sweat of others, and still get to do massive things. We have stress and anxiety though. Perhaps this is because our bodies are meant to move, maybe just enough to grow or hunt for our own family’s or small community’s food?

But what about Disney’s dreaming? We have a great capacity to dream, plan, and build on a very large scale. Surely there is a proper way to do this too. I don’t know. I’m torn.

The girls and I had a lot of fun with the Carousel of Progress’s theme song, “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow”, and I still perk up when I sing it,

The creative power of words (3)

by Andrea Elizabeth

God created the universe through words. As was pointed out in the last post, He did not need to do this based on any existential lack on His part. I also talked about not using words to advance onesself or gain a better position. But if one is to use words, besides in praise, then one is probably engaging in creativity. Even if one is quoting someone else, one is bringing a certain reality to the context in which one finds onesself. This is why we have to be careful what we say.

Corrective words are based on fixing contextual unrightness, which fixing is a kind of creativity – one is helping bring about order out of chaos, provided one has correctly diagnosed chaos and correctly prescribed order.  There is also non-necessity based creativity. Childbirth comes to mind, as does art. Yet many have children and create artwork out of necessity. They want someone to always be with them and love them, or they want to work out their problems through a character or through manipulating a medium to express their own anxiety, unrightness or passions – catharsis. As we said in the last post, God does not create children or the cosmos for these reasons.

If Liturgical prayer is a creative act in the worshiper, on one hand it can be in the context of problem solving – it informs us and shows a contrast between holiness and sinfulness – our current problem. On the other hand it is inviting God’s kingdom to come into our lives – creating deified reality, which would be more beautiful, true, and good than fallen reality. When I say one must humbly accept where one is at, that does not preclude God placing someone somewhere else, or increasing His kingdom in them. In humbly yielding to God’s will, one places onesself in His hands and creatively says, ‘wherever thou placest me’ and stays put. The stability of monastics.

Another View of Allegory

by Andrea Elizabeth

This post by Sister Macrina on Andrew Louth’s chapter called The Return to Allegory provides another perspective on Allegory. Most of it is a criticism of historical criticism, but this passage points to how to read the Scriptures,

Christianity is not, properly speaking, a ‘religion of the Book’: it is a religion of the word (Parole) – but not uniquely nor principally of the word in written form. It is a religion of the Word (Verbe) – ‘not of a word, written and mute, but of a Word living and incarnate’ (to quote St. Bernard). The Word of God is here and now, amongst us, ‘which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled’: the Word ‘living and active’, unique and personal, uniting and crystallizing all the words which bear it witness. Christianity is not ‘the biblical religion’: it is the religion of Jesus Christ. [Exégèse Médiévale, II/1 (Paris, 1961), pp. 196-9.]

And in those words de Lubac echoes the cry of St. Ignatius of Antioch: ‘For me the archives are Jesus Christ, and the inviolable archives his cross and death and his resurrection and faith in Him.’ [Ep. Philad. VIII. 2.] The heart of Christianity is the mystery of Christ, and the Scriptures are important as they unfold to us that mystery, and not in and for themselves.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). 101-102.

Christ unites the words in us. That is a mystery indeed. Not that our minds are passive, we constantly pray for His will to be done as we attend to the Scriptures and other words and messages, even pictorial. I don’t see this as allegory in that characters in Scripture personify a particular passion or thing, they are more complicated than that. But meaning must be revealed to us as we read. Meaning is subjective in that it is personal and imparted with relationship. Yet it will not contradict what has been revealed to others, namely what the Church says is true. So if the Scriptures teach that “Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.” Numbers 12:3, they point to a person who demonstrates meekness. But do we learn meekness by rationally studying Moses in the Bible? Perhaps, in that we believe our rational minds are commonly grace endowed. We can come to a certain understanding, but will this impart to us salvific meekness? No, we have to have a similar relationship with God as Moses had, which lead to his glowing face. So our faces wont glow if we rationally understand meekness, but if we develop the same relationship with God through desire, prayer and obedience. So I don’t see the Scriptures as Allegory in the same way as “My love is like a red, red rose.” Yes meekness is like Moses, and both point to something invisible, but there is more of a literal Incarnation of Presence – the love of God is actually in a rose. It is not just a utilitarian means of speaking about something else where it’s hypostasis of being a rose is irrelevant. The rose is love enough in itself. Light, color, beautiful scents and softness are gifts from God. But I can say, thank you God for roses and Moses (Singing in the Rain, anyone?) and meekness and beauty, please make me meek and beautiful unto your glory. Then there’s the lillies of the field. God gives them their beauty while they remain still – yes that ties in with the above quote. Christ arranges the words that we hear while we look with open faces at Him. So we come into communion with flowers when we acquire similar attributes to them, who are alive and prospering by His grace. Perhaps my distinctions are right and the above mentioned poem should be corrected by saying,

[By not resisting Me (Christ), she] is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
[And] like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.

So fair art thou, my bonny [Church],
So deep in love am I;
And I will love thee still my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only love!
And fare thee weel awhile!
For I [am with thee always even unto the end of the age]

Borrowed from Robert Burns

I do not know how roses that fade and sparrows that fall and seas and sand and rocks will fare in the new world and the final resurrection. I believe somehow they will be made new and that their decomposition does not mean annihilation.

Elder Barsanuphius on Artists

by Andrea Elizabeth

The majority of our best artists and writers can be compared with people who have come to church when the service has already begun and the church is full of people. Such people stand at the entrance – it’s difficult to go in, and they don’t even make an effort to do so. Something or other carries over to them from the Divine services: the Cherubic Hymn, or We Praise Thee… Thus they have stood and stood, without having been in the church itself. So also are artists and poets at the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven – they have stood there, but have not entered; and meanwhile, so many means have been given to them for their entrance therein. Their souls, like dynamite, have flared up at the slightest spark, but unfortunately they did not fan this spark, and it went out.

The rest of the article, including the Elder’s familiarity with Literature, is at Ora Et Labora.

From what I gather, like with philosophy, Orthodox teachers recontextualize the works of great thinkers and artists to communicate spiritual truth. It reminds me of this Star Trek Next Generation episode where they encounter a people who speak exclusively in story references. Unless you knew the common stories, you would not understand them.

I think this moves stories from objects of criticism to tools for communication, like language itself. C.S. Lewis uses Greek Mythology in this way. There is a common human struggle elegantly portrayed in stories that can keep one from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, when relating. So instead of being antagonistic to the incompleteness of these stories, Orthodoxy can help fill in the gaps.

The Rest of the Story

by Andrea Elizabeth

I grew up watching Little House on the Prairie and have somewhat idealized that life, but apparently things were pretty hard before Laura and Almanso were truly settled. And then only after their one surviving child, Rose had left home. As much as they desired and worked hard for an independent, self-sustainable life, Almanso’s family, and then Rose, who was already a writer before the collaborative book series, gave them the jump starts they needed.

Rose eventually became very influential in the libertarian, anti-socialist movement. But when their farm failed, if Almanso’s parents hadn’t been relatively wealthy, Laura and he probably would have needed government assistance to survive.

Out of the Silent Planet

by Andrea Elizabeth

While reading, I cannot switch off my analysis, especially nowadays. I told Jared yesterday that I have 35 pages to go, and he said, “You keep track of the page numbers?” I said, yes, I can’t get lost in a book as I used to. But it was not all work finishing this one.

I feel confident that Lewis had glimpses of heaven in his life and I love how he discounts it as fiction in a way that is not dismissive of what he is telling. The prologue to The Great Divorce was similarly disclaimerish. He seems to know how heavenly beings view earth beings and competently describes how their ways are higher than ours. But he does not set up a dialectical relationship with earthlings. We are still hnau and in the image of Maleldil.

I was first a little offput by the topography and the flaura and fauna of Malacondra, as probably was Ransom, but as he began to identify with the creatures, also hnau, they of course became relatable. Which brings me to one of my overriding thoughts regarding one of the main themes. Encounters with peoples who are not like us. The best thing Lewis did was to discredit our fears of the unknown. He cast out the bogeyman and showed him as a substanceless, baseless fear. The real bogeyman exists in our hearts, but he is not our heart. This is shown in how Oyarsa and then Ransom dealt with Weston and Devine. Even though their cruelty and misconceptions and shallowness was revealed for what it was, we are not incited against them to wish their deaths. Some of their accomplishments are even acknowledged, but are not aggrandized as they themselves viewed them. But there is a certain amount of respect for them.

I think Lewis very admirably sought to appreciate distinctions, but to see the basic organic unity underneath, and that this understanding would stop a lot of destructive behaviors and unhappiness. But though I loved his understanding of the fullness, instead of emptiness of space, and his descriptions of light, and also how, when Ransom’s fear was gone, he described nature, especially Meldilorn (though his descriptions of the three species always felt a little grotesque, even though they were portrayed as superior), I felt this contradicted his descriptions of death. He goes into so much detail about how beautiful it all is and then death, and thus higher existence, is to become “unbodied”. The Malacandrians’ bodies disappear and do not even undergo decay. The afterlife seems like it is to be swallowed up into a higher consciousness only. Which is a bit gnostic and similar to Absolute Divine Simplicity by my current lights. It seems Lewis feels we retain individuality in this higher consciousness, or at least self-awareness, but still. Why go into the glories of creation if it is all going to be annihilated in the end? This shows Lewis’ Protestantism, imo. But I also believe the very educated and intelligent Lewis listens more to his innate, natural, like-God intuition and heart and thus he gets closer to the true nature of things than about any other westerner I’ve ever heard of. And like Ransom, I am more homesick to be among my fellow westerners, despite their errors, than to totally shed my identity as one and to assume another, which is why I don’t want to move to Russia, but I’ll take all the enlightenment I can get from them and try to put it into my own western words and context.

Another observation. Lewis showed his nationality and generation quite clearly to me. I felt on one hand that I was reading a field journal of an Imperial expedition to scope out the natives. He nobly demonstrated the wrongs that have occurred in past expeditions and how the natives have been demeaned by the Europeans delusions of grandeur. Yet, I felt that he came just a tad short in that as I already mentioned, they were still sort of grotesque. I haven’t come to terms exactly with that yet. We will probably always be homesick for our own kind, and view others as less than in that they don’t meet that basic urge of familiarity with our first impressions in this world that we make as infants which form us in a very deep, permanent way. But Ransom did loose sight of the differences as he lived with them. If he separated himself from their essence and paid attention to just their looks he would have felt more distance. It was their common hnau-ness that he ended up paying more attention to.

But the other thing is something I talked about in one of my education posts about how I think people can be too compartmentalized. “I’m a math person”, etc. The three different species lived in different areas from each other, though they got along when they happened to be together at a common place, like the marketplace or gathering close to Oyarsa. But they were a little too much like this species is good at that, this one at this, etc. btw, the females were hardly discussed at all. Everyone lived with their own kind and never the twain shall meet. *more obvious spoiler warning* Ransom was invited to stay, but I get the feeling if he had he would have lived at Meldilorn, talking with Oyarsa, but would have continued expeditions to the three other species’ dwellings as a visitor. This is characteristic of thought in the 30′s and 40′s. Even the previous abolitionists believed in segregation. They thought like belonged with like, and that the distinctions were what defined “like”, not the commonness of creature-hood. btw, His description of why we have pets and the Malacandrians don’t was very interesting. He also had a more defined sense of the hierarchy of functions, though he seemed to try to even it out somewhat. All to say I haven’t exactly decided what to make of distinctions or how much to work at maintaining them when some want to assimilate. I tend to want people to choose for themselves and to tolerate when others choose differently, but then what if the other choice makes my choice less viable, etc.

Besides the above, one of the things that touched me the most was when the hross was describing why they don’t have to keep repeating things, even those things as good as childbearing. That the memory of it is not different than or separate from the experience.

Reconciliation with the Other by removing opposition

by Andrea Elizabeth

cont. from pgs.11 and 12,

Thus the notion of an Idea or “interior design” as simply anterior to a work which would supposedly be the expression of it, is a prejudice: a prejudice of the traditional criticism called idealist. It is not by chance that this theory-or, one could now say, this theology – flowered during the Renaissance. Rousset, like so many others past or present, certainly speaks out against this “Platonism” or “Neo-Platonism.” But he does not forget that if creation by means of “the form rich in ideas” (Valery) is not the purely transparent expression of this form, it is nevertheless simultaneously revelation. If creation were not revelation, what would happen to the finitude of the writer and to the solitude of his hand abandoned by God? Divine creativity, in this case, would be reappropriated by hypocritical humanism. If writing is inaugural, it is not so because it creates, but because of a certain absolute freedom of speech, because of the freedom to bring forth the already there as a sign of the freedom to augur. A freedom of response which acknowledges as its only horizon the world as history and the speech which can only say: Being has always already begun. To create is to reveal, says Rousset, who does not turn his back on classical criticism. He comprehends rather, and enters into dialogue with it: “Prerequisite secret and unmasking of the secret by the work: a reconciliation of ancient and modern aesthetics can be observed, in a certain way, in the possible correspondence of the preexisting secret to the Idea of the Renaissance thinkers stripped of all Neo-Platonism.”

I’ve been trying to understand Neo-Platonism since the Orthodox are sometimes accused of it, but the OC actually accuses the west of it. I find it interesting that Derrida (so far) doesn’t want to reconcile or demarginalize Neo-Platonism. In fact it’s consistent with his stance against western dialectical, hyper-dogmatic thinking. Plato introduced definition by opposition, and that creation/matter is a shadow of a higher form, if I’m understanding correctly. I think P and Neo-P are also about Absolute Divine Simplicity, where things return to and are absorbed by Divinity, thus loosing their distinctiveness. It is this idea about God that Derrida is rejecting, but he does not reject Renaissance “creativity”, just it’s definition of what that is. The Renaissance west said that their representations where transparent and full explanations of the Other. Derrida says this was a prejudicial, and erroneous view. It leads to humanism where a person, through the destruction of his difference, becomes absorbed in the full essence of the creating God. Yet manipulated matter is revelation of the Other, but it is not the Other. In the Platonic view, this would mean that revelation through matter or energy suffers diminishment and distance from the Other, which must eventually be overcome through annihilation. I think Derrida is saying that manipulation of matter and energy, creativity, serve as introduction, inauguration to the Other.

The Orthodox stress that when/if we become one with Christ, we become one with His divinized humanity, which suffers no diminishment, but remains distinct from the Other, God’s Essence, which Christ, not us though we can introduce others to Him, in His unique dual-natured, but unconfused hypostasis, shares.