April 2014 – TeacherLore

Noah: a tawdry bit of pretention

Posted onApril 15, 2014April 15, 2014Authorumphrey

The film is an unimportant and uninteresting little story–a sort of anti-Jehovah propaganda piece blown up to pretentious scale by its grandiose budget.

One needn’t be particularly sensitive to notice that Aronofsky’s Noah is a dark story involving unlovely people in a desolate world. Russell Crowe plays Noah as a somewhat dull action hero, ready to brawl and knock heads–and for quite a while intent on murdering his own grandchildren. It’s not much of a story–neither interesting or ennobling.

No benevolent deity intent on bringing to pass an orderly world founded on love presides over this mess. Instead, the only deity in the story is a vengeful and sulking “Creator”–somewhat in the image of the hateful and lusty humans–who performs no miracles but offers instead magic tricks–such as encasing fallen angels in grotesque bodies of misshapen volcanic stone.

It’s a tawdry tale made of money and angst, but lacking in spiritual insight–or even much in the way of worldly wisdom. Brian Mattson gives a likely explanation for this unlikely disaster.

This is an age drawn toward apocalyptic stories, but for my money Walking Dead has a more interesting plot, deeper exploration of the human condition, more spiritual longing, and nicer people.

The journey to here

Posted onApril 15, 2014April 21, 2014Authorumphrey

Calliope Mikulecky uses spring break to dig razor clams on Puget Sound–far from the fluorescent hallways and endless tasks of school. Photo by Shannon McGinnis.

A week in spring free from the job means, for me, catching up with garden tasks before the explosive growth of May and June overwhelms me. I work among prosperous people, some of them, so I hear of their travel plans. I admit that time on a tropical beach sounds alluring. But I also know that what we yearn to encounter by traveling everywhere, by indulging in restless thousand-mile weekends, may be more elusive than a plane ticket to Maui–and more accessible than a million distractions streaming to a million devices.

One of the more liberating things I’ve learned from travel came clear to me one morning at the twin lakes atop Mollman Pass in the Mission Mountains. It was only a few miles from home, and we’d hiked up to the pass in the Mission Range the day before–the ridge from which we could see the Swan Range to the east, and pitched our tents. When dawn arrived I got up, somewhat ecstatic with the sense of ease and freedom one easily finds in the back country. It’s a form of being rich–having time to lavish on life’s gorgeous details.

Here were no tasks or unfinished projects–no repairs to be made or messes to organize or messages to answer. A red-tailed hawk circled the sky between peaks and feeding trout dimpled the lake. The fast-changing light cascaded over glaciers and canyons . Fresh tracks of goats, rabbits, and a grizzly in the mud around a small spring hinted at how little I could see of where I was and what was happening. I spent an hour before breakfast standing on a cliff, climbing to little perches for a better view, sitting beside the rippling water, watching, savoring the breezes on my skin amid the soft rustle of Creation.

It occurred to me that most of what I was observing could be experienced in my own yard along Mission Creek down in the valley. What I was enjoying most about my little excursion was not the earth and sky, which were never far away, but my attention, which is to say my consciousness, devoted to sensing the moment.

I know by long experience now that what I’m seeking has more to do with waking up a little more than with any exotic quality of the location where I find myself. Yesterday morning I spent removing peony cages from crinkly brown remnants of last summer’s peonies, removing starts of quack grass and bindweed with a single-tined finger hoe, then replacing the cages. As I worked, I paused to watch juncos, house finches, goldfinches, robins and chickadees, drawn by the millet I’d spread on the ground.

Gardening when one isn’t anxious about hunger can be mainly a contemplative act, involving, as Virgil knew, keen attention to heaven’s indulgence:

Nor would the stress
Of life be bearable for tender things
Did not so long a respite come between
The cold and heat, and heaven’s indulgence grant
This comfort to the world.

Giving all one’s attention to a place on earth one knows well–paying attention with ears, nose, skin, and soul–is a fine way to spend an April morning. Life courses in fresh torrents around and through us, and inexhaustible energy flows in our veins as we turn to all the rows of our lives, at home.

Is justice present, or forever becoming?

Posted onApril 14, 2014Authorumphrey

Justice is not something that is simply present. It is not calculable as being here, now, to precisely this degree. If we think of something that exists as something that is present, and present to a calculable degree, then I’m afraid the bad news, at least from Derrida, is that justice does not exist. -Peter Blum

Peter Blum’s view of deconstruction makes of it something like the move I make with my “anti-ideological” arguments: reality is more complex than any of our theories of it, and people who cannot escape their own theories when faced with actual events make mistakes. Sometimes horrendous mistakes. He quotes Terry Eagleton, discussing the way reality always partially escapes our renditions of it:

Deconstruction holds that nothing is ever entirely itself. There is a certain otherness lurking within every assured identity. It seizes on the out-of-place element in a system, and uses it to show how the system is never quite as stable as it imagines. There is something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic.

Judging, of the sort Christ chastised the authorities for neglecting, is not simply applying a universal law. Our universals oversimplify. Loving attention to the particulars is part of finding the right way.

By the dim and flaring lamps

Posted onApril 13, 2014April 13, 2014Authorumphrey

The fiercely free individual is nothing against the vast forces of modernity. Nostalgia is weak against what is here and what is coming.

Savannah depicts a nostalgic and weak reaction against the principalities and powers that mostly rule the world. Ward Allen leaves the position and status he inherited to make a free life as a market hunter, but he doesn’t succeed. He achieves a sort of eccentricity and notoriety, but freedom eludes him.

The film has a beauty. I agree with Stephen Klugewicz that we “rightly revel in its broad and beautiful cinematic brushstrokes: its scene painting of the joys of the bucolic way of life, its depiction of the formative power of the past, its idealization of the thoroughly non-modern man. ‘Maybe we are here to remake everything, reshape everything, create our own new idea of perfection and leave God’s idea to the dim shades of history,’ Allen declares during one courtroom appearance. ‘And maybe I, having fought against that new idea, rejected that idea, found that idea abhorrent, maybe I was wrong. But I do not think so.'” It does, as Klugewicz suggests, warm the heart.

The film brought to my mind the Southern Agrarians and their reactionary manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. It was a book brought to my attention by John Baden when I met him in his home near Gallatin Gateway, on one of my forays through Montana in search of a better conversation. The book is a collection of essays by something of a literary tribe, who understood their plight in terms of the loss of their Southern identity amid the displacements of “northern industrialism.” The Lost Cause was a conversation about being somebody in some place. Dixie was a place, unlike the trampling out the vintage, which was an abstraction. They sided with Thetis and against her son Achilles, that his shield should have borne the images of “White flower-garlanded heifers” and “athletes at their games” rather than nameless, faceless players acting their assigned roles. We should be thoughtful about what we fight for. Theirs was an ambiguous movement jousting ineffectually at the thousand tentacles of modernity. That book, too, has an air of nostalgia about it.

In Savannah, Ward Allen resists game laws and developments that drain the wild out of his river, leaving individuals amid places dying into nameless processes. “This is real,” he says to his wife, when he finally takes her to one of his sacred places, though by then it is too late. Many will sympathize with him. We see the soulless machinery of international financial conspiracy subject us all to corrupt law, we know something of the flattening education the Capitol favors, where young people “engage” in literacy tasks organized around reading passages nearly void of meaning, practicing the bland skills that might provide a paycheck in the institutional hallways and cubicles that await them out there. We sense that in the world they are making, there really is no place for us, and if we are not young, we know that the simulacrum offers no satisfying alternative.

Ward Allen does not know what to do, and his action at the end of the story has more to do with giving up than with finding a way. It is a film filled with beauty, evoking what is being lost. I would have liked him to say more about what he understood about God’s idea. Lesser topics may serve no good.