You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 26th, 2008.
The IOC has banned Iraq from competing in the Beijing Olympics. That’s one thing I find unconsciable. Athletes train their entire lives for these games, only to have to plucked from their grasp over some ridiculous political maneuvering. What’s worse, at no point during Saddam’s regime, when sports were even more corrupt, was such action ever taken.
Now, if you’ve seen those Morgan Freeman Olympic commercials, you hear about how the point of the games is to help us remember how we’re the same, to foster international fraternity and cooperation, to ease rivalries, to have nations deal with one another in the spirit of amity. And what do we have? A country that could surely use a little bucking up is struck from competing.
Adhering to the letter of the law while missing its spirit. Amazing.
Let’s make this a regular feature.
What would all’a yous guys wanna read about today?
In the gold-leafed sanctuaries of the Eastern Church, walls bricked up with saints and angels peering out from their silver frames, the old theologians, thoughtfully considering all the evidence before them, spoke of the nous. They called it the “eye of the soul,” the unmediated self the perceives the world without interpretation. It’s an old, old concept, borrowed most directly from Plato and Aristotle, but ancient enough for Anaxagoras, who considered it the ordering force of chaos, the machine of the cosmos. But for the Eastern Christians, it was the very “capacity to receive the Spirit…the senses and sensory perceptions” of man, as St. Thalassios wrote. It’s the heart, man’s self-aspect, part of the internal human trinity along with word and spirit.
I don’t know if Thomas Merton ever thought too much about it; he tended to shift his eyes a little too far east to see what the Greeks were up to. He was, to a fault, a Westerner, and had the Westerner’s old longing gaze for India and the Orient that led men a hundred years earlier to dress like Turks for portraits. Always, Merton sought to incorporate any wisdom and insight he found into his life with the rushed enthusiasm of a twelve year-old, and that same enthusiasm is what drove him across the ocean to Bangkok where he died the humblest death. In a way, it was very appropriate.
I think Merton would have appreciated the notion of the nous had he stumbled across it. Greek Orthodox writer Frederica Mathewes-Green called it “the living link to the Creator,” but like any untamed animal, can make trouble. Citing St. Isaac of Syria, she describes the nous apart from God as a fish out of water, confused and dying, and that the task of the Christian is to tame it, and “bring the mind down into the heart.” The untamed nous is weak, like a pasta noodle, and will barely raise a hand against temptation. It spouts and pours over itself but, unless strengthened and trained, will only walk along any road you set before it. The nous needs discipline to be an honest contributor to the collective that is the individual human.
To me, it seems clear that Merton’s story is the story of a man and his nous. It’s been clear to me since The Seven Storey Mountain, which is the only work we read where he dealt explicitly and at length with his life and his life’s difficulties. The whole narrative is his wanderings back and forth, his mercurial spirit wending him along the road, in the churches of Rome and the Quaker houses, with women, with his brother. He danced around his attraction to Christianity for years before making any decisions, and his Christian life was then characterized by his ongoing struggle to extract some order from the chaos of his upbringing. Merton himself would later regret the book, but understood its place as a young, enthusiastic monk trying to place his life in some kind of coherent context. The context that makes the most sense to me, though, is some manner of noetic wandering. Merton’s struggles with his life’s chaos and his chaotic relationship both with himself and God speak to the difficulties of an unstraightened mind.
Later works hint at his spiritual restlessness and his fidgety heart. We discussed in class his tendency to rove from topic to topic, less than able to fully assimilate its contents and message before some new idea caught his eye. Merton tended to float about intellectually throughout much of his life, quick to seize on new ideas or books. But what strikes me most about his ongoing mental and spiritual drifting was the honest consistency of his life. Inasmuch as he couldn’t keep his head on straight when it came to what he was interested about on a weekly basis, he understood well his own limitations and unbalanced desires, and pursued faithfully the sort of discipline of life that would allow him to correct those problems, which were primarily problems of the nous.
Not long into his Catholic life, he seemed increasingly frustrated with his spiritual unfitness even as he thought more and more about the priesthood. His spiritual malaise could not abate what he understood to be a strong vocation, and with lupine tenacity he approached the Franciscans to join their order, only to be the cause of his own refusal when he disclosed certain unspecified issues. Eventually coming to Gethsemani, Merton initially rejoiced at the opportunity to place his life in a good context. His writing “Fire Watch” indicates he took some amount of pleasure with the chances to quiet his mind with good work, devoting much of the time to prayer and reflection instead of the mindless planning from which monastic life liberated him.
This regimen of work and prayer is exactly the thing prescribed to begin taming the nous and developing spiritually. Frederica Mathewes-Green, citing Paul, uses the image of the athlete, comparing physical exercise for the development of muscles and dexterity to spiritual exercise to strengthen and fortify the nous, reminding us that the very image of the athlete is the principal image in Paul’s epistles for growth, rather than a swooning mystic. Merton’s dedication to the prayer of the Hours and the normal work of Gethsemani fits in to the basics of such exercise; his prayer was regular, his eating regular, his work regular, his fasting regular, all within the confines of the ordered liturgical year. His spiritual life was well-ordered by his community, and so he didn’t fall into the excesses of heart in which many of us more independently-minded Christians will often wind up. In the writings of the Desert Fathers, the first-millennium Christians who invented the sort of monasticism in which Merton lived, there is the story of a young novice who went to see an older monk about fasting, saying “Should I eat one loaf of bread every other day?” The older monk replied “It is better to eat one half-loaf every day.” The concern here is to avoid the overzealousness that can lead to spiritual pride and the valuing of the practice itself over the virtues fostered. In all of this, Merton seems fairly well-disposed, noetically speaking.
So why did he go to the hermitage? Merton wrote increasingly of solitude, by which he meant less actual physical isolation as much as he did being spiritually alone and abject before God, and over time, he grew less comfortable with the structures and strictures of monasticism. It has been said of Gethsemani that after the community decides you’re a good fit and accepts you, it works you over. Gethsemani changes you, and often, you’re no longer right for it. I’d say that it’s God that does the changing, but the principle remains the same: something of the experience is transformative, and the difficulty is in remaining in your place when you’ve been cut to a new shape. For Thomas Merton, the key, the solution, was to disengage from the community while remaining a part of it by physically separating himself from the main body, and taking new work. While still going, at least most of the time, to his daily prayers, he took new work, and a new life. He did not dress like a monk. He did not do the normal work of the monks. He tended the trees. Merton delved into spiritual solitude by embracing physical isolation, and in doing so began, perhaps, the work for which he had been training his spiritual muscles, disciplining his nous. Here, he began his thinking on civil rights and the nature of monasticism, on spiritual activism and pacifism, on Buddhism and the need to integrate it into his Christianity, and his role, his vocation, as a monk and as a writer.
Merton struggled with his nous his entire life, and never fully mastered it. As I wrote, he never could settle his attention in one area, and I’m inclined to think he overacted in isolating himself from his community. There, while capable, perhaps, of better prayer, he was more able to let his mind wander around his many books, and in a short period flirted with dozens of ideologies and ideas. In withdrawing from the monastery, he may have assumed a strength he didn’t yet possess. Merton’s writing has always had, to me, a tinge of arrogance. I don’t say this in contempt, as I confess that I’m a pretty arrogant guy myself, and he grew increasingly insular and incomprehensible and disconnected in his work in that hermitage. He began writing, in a sense, only to himself. It’s like the philosophy of art for art’s sake, which early 20th century literary and art critic Malcolm Cowley derides as useless and without referent to real life. In this, his nous ran wild, unable to contain the passions. It seems, in the end, he wasn’t able to rope it down as much as he would have liked. What I question is whether there, in Bangkok, it was really even on his mind.
I’m going to see The Happening tonight at Richmond’s classic movie palace, the Byrd Theatre. I know it’s gotten awful reviews, but so did Lady in the Water, and I loved that movie. Same with The Village. Maybe I’m just on board with what Shyamalan is trying to do. Maybe we just think alike or have similar sensibilities. Who knows?
To show you what I’m talking about, here’s a review of Lady in the Water I wrote in early 2007.
I loved it. I cannot express how much I loved it. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it deals with a lot of the same themes I deal with in my own work — purpose, identity, vocation. Either way.
I think a lot of people have difficulty understanding the movie because it was one great unspoken assumption: it’s fiction. This is not me being a sarcastic jerk pointing out the obvious, but rather, the truth that the film is entirely fictive is essential to a proper comprehension of what’s going on.
Most movies present you with a world and want you to accept it on the terms that it is intended to be a simulacrum of the world in which we live. Through the suspension of disbelief, we are supposed to accept that. Lady in the Water does not ask you to do this.
The movie is fiction, and the movie is about fiction, and the movie cannot be understood apart from its self-identification as a work of artifice. This is implicit in everything that happens from the moment Story first appears. Her arrival signals to the audience that the film is itself a story, and from then on, characters are treated, not as people, but as characters, with functions and roles within the story that they fill because that is the whole reason they exist.
Why, a friend asked, were so many people willing to go along with Mr. Heep’s ridiculous tale? Because that, as we are told in the film itself, is their function. The Guild does what the Guild is supposed to do precisely because the Guild is supposed to do it; that’s their function. If they didn’t do it, the story wouldn’t proceed, and thus, Story wouldn’t proceed. See?
The film is thus openly and self-consciously reconstructivist — it subverts the elements of filmmaking to tell a story, not deconstruct one. That, my friends, is the great genius of the movie. Imagine! Shyamalan decided to make a movie about the very elements of storytelling, and present them as they are: structures designed to bring about an emotional reaction.
Cleveland Heep goes to the film critic to discover what his and everyone else’s role in the story is. That’s the signature. That’s the clue. The moment he does that, the moment he takes those responses seriously, responses that are little more than rehashing story cliches, and adopts those ideas to what is, for him, apparently a real-life situation, we are reminded that this is a story — and it’s a story for him, too.
Shyamalan told all of us this from the moment, when he began advertising it as a bedtime story. Storytelling is the principal image and theme, and ultimately, the underlying key to unlock it.
Richie Pope has new designs up for our in-development comic miniseries Radio Girl.
Ben Barca, Radio Girl's Dad
I’m pretty excited about this comic. It’s been in development for probably two years now, but I only got an artist on board in February. Richie is pulling off some great work. He has the aesthetic I wanted for the story down pat, and he’s just as invested in it as I am. That’s a rare gift for a writer, to have a freelance artist who isn’t just in it for the money but loves the story and wants to see it because it’s beautiful.
Radio Girl’s basic premise is that, in 1994, the world’s most famous teen superhero vanishes without a trace. She reappears in 2006 without having aged a day. Reconnecting with her parents and with her old allies, she must uncover the mystery of her disappearance, her purpose, and the meaning of her dreams, which are full of dreadful imagery culled straight from the plague years of Europe. During my research for the book, one character in particular caught my eye: Doctor Beak.
Doctor Beak is the colloquial name for the plague doctor, a name of obvious provenance. Look at that mask! The streets of a plague city were filled with them, physicians walking around in these beak masks with their empty eyes. They were designed, after a fashion, to protect doctors from the disease. The beak was filled with strong-smelling salts and herbs to keep the bad airs out, the plagues cause was not known for certain.
But it’s an evocative image, and I was struck with the purpose: the ward off death. These men tried to be signs of life in a time of death, and only succeeded in being strange, terrifying portents of the plague-stricken cities. With that in mind, they seemed the perfect template for, well…these guys. 
This is what Richie came up with when I sent him the image. This proves the man is either absolutely insane, or a certified genius. That cliche aside, I’m very happy with this design and with the overall direction of Richie’s work.
For a series meant also to deal with the confrontation of childhood and maturity, and the popular culture for kids of the early 1990’s, he’s successfuly given the entire project a very animation-y texture.
I hope to continue cataloging our progress as we march towards our first finished issue, which will hopefully be done by early September.
