lenten journal: what language shall I borrow?

Marco Werman, the anchor for The World, said, “texted” in a sentence as the past tense of the verb “to text.” Though I’ve come to terms with the transition “text” has made form noun to verb (notice I didn’t say, “transitioned”), I’ve struggled with how to speak of texting in the past tense. It rolls off the tongue like a grammatical mistake, an expression of miseducation, a triumph of convenience over thoughtful expression. I have worked hard not capitulate, choosing instead to say, “I sent you a text message,” hoping I could keep English from yet another assault of verbiating.
And there it was. On NPR, no less.

We Americans, the champions of expediency, have less and less need for verbs it seems. We find it easier to simply put nouns in their place. We friend each other on Facebook (“friended”?), where once we became friends with one another. Perhaps the one that gets me most is hearing people speaking of “gifting” something to another. What’s wrong with giving?

Catching up on other NPR stories I missed, I found this one on new books for language lovers a bit later and a review of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter.

John McWhorter, who specializes in linguistic change, takes us across dozens of tongues and thousands of years, even speculating about the first human speech. We learn the process that turned the Romans' femina (woman) into the modern French femme, shedding two syllables and even changing vowel sounds. But it's not all erosion and wearing down. McWhorter also shows how words can become more complicated over time, explaining, for example, where Italian verb endings came from. Seeing numerous languages laid out over history gives a valuable pause for those who mutter about decline. Languages don't decline; they change. Getting too attached to one moment in time is like getting too invested in the position of the goo in a lava lamp, McWhorter says. You can be bitter watching them shift, or you can be absorbed by the beauty in the process.

I’m sure he texted people who had friended all day, once he heard his book would be impacted by a review.

Reading the last couple of sentences caused me to smile at myself: “Getting too attached to one moment in time is like getting too invested in the position of the goo in a lava lamp.” The English I’m fighting for is a bastardized version to those a generation or two before me. As the speed of life accelerates, circumstances change faster than vocabulary. I’m blogging, after all – and even as I write, my spell checker doesn’t know what to do with that verb.

In semi-related semantic news, David Brooks had a great editorial in the New York Times this week on the quotidian role poetry plays in our lives.

To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it. 

Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses. 

Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”

Sometimes our language changes out of laziness, sometimes out of creativity, sometimes out of necessity. I saw a video clip of Ken Burns talking about the impact the Civil War had on one particular phrase. Before the war, he said, Americans said, “The United States are,” seeing themselves as loosely connected units. After the war, Americans began to say, “The United States is . . . .” The conflict that almost destroyed us made us realize we were inextricably connected.

“Languages don't decline; they change . . . . You can be bitter watching them shift, or you can be absorbed by the beauty in the process,” says John McWhorter. The way I best understand what he’s saying is to read his words about language as metaphor for faith. Our idea of who God is and what God can do in and through us changes as we learn more about the world around us. The world is not the same as it was during Lent last year, much less two thousand years ago when Jesus was walking around. Most of us wrestle with some of his metaphors and miracles because we don’t keep sheep or know much about leprosy first hand. Some of the issues we face in our world today were not even on the table when Jesus broke bread with his disciples. The world has changed. Our faith has changed. God has changed. Our choices are to fight the change as though it were a threat or to allow ourselves to be absorbed in the process of God’s continuing revelation and redemption.

Change is in the DNA of the universe, in the very core of our Creator.

And I still don’t want to say, “texted.”

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: mothers of metaphor

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet people die miserably every day...
...for lack
of what is found there


-- William Carlos Williams

Today I hit a wall I didn’t see coming.

I ran into people who couldn’t see the metaphor sitting right in front of us. They weren’t stupid or belligerent or intractable; they just didn’t see it. And I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was sitting in a coffee shop somewhere in Pakistan trying to carry on a conversation and I was the only one who didn’t speak Urdu. I knew what I wanted to say, but none of the words I had seemed to work.

I think I was so flummoxed because talking about faith means talking about poetry: it’s all metaphor. Let me say here that I learned something from my conversation, so I want to clarify: to say it’s metaphor is not saying it’s something other than true. Poetry, for me, is our best chance at truth telling. For the sake of definition: metaphor is comparison – using one thing to talk about something else.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” (Matthew 23:37)

OK, so technically it’s a simile because Jesus used “as,” but he wasn’t claiming to be a hen as much as using the metaphor to talk about the ache in his heart. The word metaphor can be traced back to the sixteenth century:

lit. "a carrying over," from metapherein "transfer, carry over," from meta- "over, across" (see meta- ) + pherein "to carry, bear"

A word bridge, if you will: to carry over, to bear across. This is the way truth travels. When I was looking up the word origin, I came across a philosopher who was new to me: R. G. Collingwood. His introduction was this quote:

It is a commonplace that all religion expresses itself in mythological or metaphorical terms; it says one thing and means another; it uses imagery to convey truth. But the crucial fact about religion is not that it is metaphor, but that it is unconscious metaphor. No one can express any thought without using metaphors, but this does not reduce all philosophy and science to religion, because the scientist knows that his metaphors are merely metaphors and that the truth is something other than the imagery by which it is expressed, whereas in religion the truth and the imagery are identified. To repeat the Creed as a religious act it is necessary not to add "All this I believe in a symbolical or figurative sense": to make that addition is to convert religion into philosophy.

I don’t know much at all about Mr. Collingwood’s faith perspective, but he’s on to something when it comes to realizing that the language of faith is one where “the truth and the imagery are identified.”

And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. (Luke 22:19-20)

Jesus’ words are crammed full of metaphor, still when I take the Bread and the Cup in worship there is more going on than figurative language when Ginger looks me in the eye and says, “The Body of Christ.” And it is with the same sense of full contact poetry that I hear one of my favorite Advent quotes (and the one at the center of the conversation that started this post):

What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God fourteen hundred years ago and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be Mothers of God. -- Meister Eckhart

When we come back to the story that birthed our faith, we usually see ourselves among the shepherds working our way to the manger and staring up into the starlit night to hear the angels sing. Sometimes, we journey with the Magi, or perhaps come to terms with our inner Innkeeper. Still it seems to me the heart of the story is in the young peasant girl who carried the baby to term and then gave birth to the Incarnation. Eckhart calls us to engage the story as viscerally as it is possible for truth and imagery to collide: hurt and push and scream and struggle and labor to do what it takes to let our lives give birth to Love in the middle of our world. We are all meant to be mothers of God, being created in the image of God who is Mother to us.

A neighbor sent an email on our listserv asking if anyone had a copy of the movie Ishtar. It has never made it to DVD and she said she was one of the few who liked the movie and really wanted to see it again. I was happy to let her know there were at least two of us in the neighborhood and I was glad to let her borrow my copy. The song at the heart of the movie begins,

telling the truth can be dangerous business . . .

As goofy as the song is, truth is dangerous business – dangerous and wonderful business. I don’t mean the kind of truth that becomes a weapon or a measuring stick, but the truth that gives birth in us to a sense of what God can do if we, like Mary, are willing to say, “Let it be.”

Peace,
Milton

life is a lyric

Part of my morning ritual right now is chipping away at Jimmy Webb’s book, Tunesmith, which is about the art and process of song writing. Webb is one of my favorites. In the chapter, “It’s Only Words,” he talks about the songwriter’s task, different than most any other written art form is “technological haiku,” being governed by forms and rhymes and music and time such that “Every word, every note must count”

What it means is that we have been challenged with accomplishing an almost impossible task exquisitely. We are the Swiss watchmakers of music and literature. (38)

A bit later in the chapter, as he cautions against easy rhymes and clichéd connections, he goes on to say,

By varying our word choices and being biased slightly in favor of the unusual, by giving our listener the benefit of the doubt in our assumptions of his or her intelligence we grant ourselves the potential to create original and significant works. (57)

That sentence written by a man who rhymed adios with morose in a song that will bring you to tears. He knows of what he speaks, and, I think, he speaks of more than songwriting.

One of the significant works, as far as movies go, for Ginger’s and me is Serendipity, the John Cusack-Kate Beckinsdale love story that came out seven or eight years ago and now shows up, it seems, at least once a week on a cable channel somewhere. And we watch at least for awhile most any time we come across it in our channel surfing. (The same goes for French Kiss.) Tonight I found it as I was looking for something to watch between innings of the Red Sox-Orioles game, and I came in just where Jeremy Pivens’ character, an obituary writer for the New York Times, is challenging Cusack to follow his heart, though the search for his soul mate feels futile, by quoting the Greek philosopher Epictetus:

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

Once the game and the movie ended, I came in to check my blog roll before writing and to see what poetry was posted by the folks from the Dodge Poetry Festival, which is one of my Friday traditions. Tonight, they introduced me to Simon Armitage, an accomplished poet who was new to me. As you can hear for yourself in the clip below, his first poem recalled a science experiment he did in middle school when challenged by his teacher to go out and measure the size of the human voice without instruments. He stood still in the school yard and had his friend start walking away, shouting, both of them having decided when he could no longer hear the shouts they would know the size of the human voice. They lived in a small village, Armitage notes, and they ran out of village before they ran out of voice. They never found its limits that day. Here is the poem, written in reflection:

The Shout

We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face

I don't remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park - I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm -
I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

Much of my life these days doesn’t feel much bigger geographically than the little village Armitage describes. I can walk to the Durham restaurant; I drive three miles to Duke. Our church is hardly a mile beyond that. I buy one tank of gas a month. My work schedule from Sunday to Thursday keeps me in the kitchen for so many hours that Ginger and I joke about it being as though I have an out of town job and I come home on Friday and Saturday. There is much about what I do for a living that I love and I’m aware how easy it is to fall into a routine that makes me sort of put my head down on Sunday afternoon to get through till Thursday so I can “come home” and have a couple of days off. It feels like the existential equivalent of settling for tired rhymes. I want to do more with my days than rhyme moon and June over and over again.

I realize my situation is neither unique nor overly difficult in comparison to most of the people on the planet. The majority of the guys I work with have second jobs that keep them in kitchens even on the days I get to come home to Ginger. Still, the voices I heard today challenged me to remember I am called to do more with my life than settle into a routine, and I am called to be more than someone who allowed himself to forget he is called to make a significant and exquisite offering of the days he has been given. The routine is, as it were, the song form – the melody that calls for my lyric, for my contribution, for my foolishness. I wonder if that isn’t what got lost in the life of the one in the poem who was once filled with enough wonder to wander out of town trying to see how big a voice was, only to end up in suicidal despair.

Webb says a good song is one that opens with an invitation and knows where it is going. He then quotes a Gibb brothers’ song to prove his point. It begins

There’s a light, a certain kind of light
That’s never shone on me . . .

and ends

You don’t know what it’s like
To love somebody
To love somebody
The way I love you

To know where a song is going means doing the work, the research to figure out what story you are trying to tell: listening, watching, taking notes till you have the raw materials to craft the song – and keeping a good rhyming dictionary close by.

If my life is a lyric, what then, can I learn by listening to what I feel inside and to what is going on around me even in the midst of the routine? As far as where my life is going, what comes to mind first is John’s description of Jesus as he prepared to wash the disciples’ feet (a verse I know I have mentioned before): “Knowing he had come from God and was going to God . . . .” Or, as Andrew Peterson sings so beautifully,

And in the end,
The end will be oceans and oceans of love
And love again

Each day, then, becomes a line in the lyric of my life, a chance to say something exquisitely about what it means to find that love in ordinary things; a chance to rhyme and resonate with my collaborators, if you will; achance to improve, to live full of joyful foolishness.

Now – what rhymes with colander?

Peace,
Milton

life is an independent film

A week or so ago we did some catching up on our movies and finally saw The Visitor, an amazing and well-told story captured and the intersection of privilege and despair. I would tell you to stop and go watch it now, but I want you to read. So, finish reading and then go watch it.

The film is of the small, independent variety – Sundancey, if you will – which also means it is full of space. There is not a soundtrack that fills up every second, there are not any noticeable special effects or computer generated beings. There’s a lot of walking around and talking and just getting through life. Which led me, hot on the heels of my last post on metaphor, to this conclusion:

Life is like an independent film: low budget (at least in our case); character driven; no big stars to speak of, but a lot of people you look at and think, “I’ve seen them in something else”; and; for the most part, nothing happens. You just see their lives from Point A to Point B and then everyone goes their separate ways.

Life is a movie where nothing happens for the most part, where all the action is in the details, where we share the experience of being human at some of the most surprising intersections, where our laptops suffice for what computer generated aid we get, and where there are few special effects and even fewer stunt doubles. Somewhere in the stack of stuff that belongs to me is a greeting card with a quote by Ashleigh Brilliant (her real name) that says,

My life has a superb cast, but I just can’t figure out the plot.

Life is that kind of movie.

One of the things I love about indie films is the lack of focus on one person, usually. If we’re talking Sundance flicks, we’re talking ensemble casting: it takes a village to tell a good story. Regardless of how much the star making machinery tries to tell us who matters in the world, the great stuff doesn’t really happen on a grand scale. What matters most happens everyday, over and over: people find ways to dream dreams and love one another and build things and tear them down and hope and fail and lose and find, all in that layer of the universe where it matters if you can find a parking place, or when pay day is, or what you are having for dinner. In this movie, we are all small players with a few scenes, all of which matter because they are the story.

What does it mean to the story that I have peeled and diced more pounds of onions and carrots than I could even begin to count for soups that lasted only a day or two and then were forgotten? There’s a question underneath that one, though, that might begin to offer an answer: how did I dice and chop?

How have I grown and changed in the middle of the mirepoix? Who have I become? Have I let the details of life become drudgery that have soured me into cynicism? Do I think more about what I am doing without than who it is I am working with? Can I, as I wrote once in a song, hear the music through the circumstance, or am I simply going through the motions?

The answers are as daily as the details. It may depend on which day we’re shooting the scene, if you catch my drift. Some day the movie metaphor may fall from independent project to boring instructional video or, perhaps, absurdist foreign film. A great deal depends on how well I’m listening because that’s the first act in paying attention and responding well.

Last night at the Durham restaurant, I walked out into the dining room to get a cup of coffee. We were about twenty minutes from the end of service on what turned out to be a very busy night, and I was tired. A man and woman were being shown to their table just as I got to the coffee pot.

“How are you?” I asked.
“Ready to be impressed,” he said with a big grin.
“Cool,” I answered. “Thanks for being ready. That makes things so much easier for us.”

I already knew he was going to have a great meal because he was ready for one. And I don’t mean that simply as some sort of positive thinking projection technique to imagine my way into a new reality. What I mean is he came in expecting we were going to play the scene well. Knowing he was already pulling for us made the scene a lot easier to play. I was working on the nightly order sheets by the time they left the restaurant.

“How did we do?” I asked him.
“It was everything I expected,” he said, and we both went on to our next scenes and, not too long after, I let the credits roll on my evening.

Today at work, my phone rang about 4:30, as it does most afternoons I’m at work, because Ginger calls right before service just so we can have a chance to talk. It is one of the details that demonstrates her love for me. I know the scene by heart and I never get tired of playing it. Life is the kind of movie that gets told in those kinds of details – in calls and touches. Redemption rides on small gestures and simple acts; forgiveness has fingerprints.

Just watch this closing scene from Big Night. If you haven’t seen the movie, all you need to know is the two brothers who end up in the closing shot had both hurt each other deeply the night before. Do notice the whole five minutes is done without an edit. About as real life as it gets.



Peace,
Milton