Archive for October, 2008
any longer
Because of the eye the hand fell
apart into countless waves
which pushed the fingers of the sun back and forth
along the skin until the skin couldn’t
any longer
contain life or keep out the world
Articles of Faith
Altar, Divine Temple of God Spiritual Church, Chicago (by Dave Jordano)
Amidst all the discussions about religion spurred by the “new atheists” (see here for an example), what I’m not seeing are plausible alternatives being proposed. Religions play a number of important psychological roles, from rites of passage to community cohesion to providing a support for individual identity formation. Think about the importance of holy ground (from A Pattern Language):
In all cultures it seems that whatever it is that is holy will only be felt as holy, if it is hard to reach, if it requires layers of access, waiting, levels of approach, a gradual unpeeling, gradual revalation, passage through a series of gates…. This layering, or nesting of precincts, seems to correspond to a fundamental aspect of human psychology. We believe that every community, regardless of particular faith, regardless of whether it even has a faith in any organized sense, needs some place where this feeling of slow, progressive access through gates to a holy center may be experienced.
Arguments about the logical or moral incoherence of theism are fine, but atheism won’t take hold in our society without some physical, ceremonial acknowledgment of the sense of mystery that goes hand in hand with human development. As Matthew Yglesias points out, these new atheists seem to be trying to build a cohesive atheistic movement; something that will be very hard to do without a positive belief system. The kind of people who want to join a movement that simply declares other movements stupid are not very fun to hang out with.
Take a look at these photos by Dave Jordano, who has been documenting storefront churches in Chicago. Think about the care and love that goes into these spaces. Then consider whether something like Religulous could actually play a nourishing role in anyone’s life. These atheists would be better off espousing a form of Buddhism than trying to build a movement around negation.
Google Becomes a Bookseller
Google announced a couple days ago that they have reached an agreement with the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers on their controversial book scanning project. Ars Technica has a good summary of the agreement, but in a nutshell Google is entering the business of digital book distribution in a big way. They will (continue) scan(ning) out-of-print books stored in a number of partner libraries, and make them available via a subcription service. The publishers and authors will earn revenue from long-neglected works, and Google will position itself as a major book distributor specializing in items on the far end of the “long tail.” As part of the agreement, Google is ponying up $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, which will help track down the copyright owners of these esoteric texts — everyone gets paid.
A fire! But be quiet.
A couple of scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror:
The Three Ashleys
Portraits of political prowess:
The contrast from four years ago is striking. Four years ago, the emotional fulcrum of the race swung between Bush v. Not Bush. Bush won, in part because he could make an affirmative, emotional closing argument. This year, Obama v. Nobama is bringing out the worst, most base human instincts from the McCain campaign, and an emotional, Ashley-based closing argument that voters need to fear “that one.”
Sean Quinn isn’t being totally fair here; there’s no evidence that John McCain intended for Ashley Todd to become part of his campaign message. But it’s easy to see how his campaign fell into that trap, and it has a lot to do with tactics that were devised at the top levels of the campaign.
Although it is life, not art
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Scattered Work
Now I’ve got to shed this other work. It’s become too disconnected from the life that I find myself living, too intertwined with old battles, battles won and battles lost, even battles unresolved, hovering in the air perpetually awaiting a judgment that will never come. I say this knowing that breaks are never clean. That a skin never fully sheds its wine, and eventually becomes a map of escape and return.
This is the form of the new work. It is a scattered work. With luck, it will be a bit closer to breath than to ink. We have yet to see. It may become as calcified, as distant and burdened as what came before it. Scattering may be nothing more than a gimmick, an irrelevant gesture resting precariously on idealism, calling on the future to absolve us of the present.
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