a polite suggestion

I used to think that I loved jazz for the same reason Donald Miller named his book after it; because it doesn't resolve.

But I think that isn't true at all, or at least not entirely true. Last night I really listened to classical music {because someone I knew was playing, annnnd he was amazing. sidenote.} and I started to understand why different people relate to different styles of music.

Classical music is like an inspirational underdog movie. It's melodramatic, fits a structured pattern and engages the mind. It's the Slumdog Millionaire of music; emotional, but conclusive. The experience is cathartic and demands mental action.

Jazz is not inspirational because it makes us think about something, or even feel something. Jazz does not come from the head or even the heart. It does not demand action or logic, but the gut or the soul. Aristotle describes the constitution of the polis as a positive direction which the members of the community choose to engage in; the soul of the community. Jazz reminds me of a constitution like that. It's a suggested direction, rather than a british accent on a GPS.

Some people like melodrama. Some people like suggestions.

Then again, maybe the altitude is making me lightheaded. I probably just like jazz because it has a saxophone.

this sort of talk makes me sick

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. “That sort of talk makes them sick,” they say. And half of you already want to ask me, “I wonder how’d you feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?”

So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture, 1 wonder very much what 1 should do when it came to the point. I am not trying to tell you … what I could do–I can do precious little–I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sill against us.” There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?

-Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

When I read this the first time, I felt warm and tingly and judgmental. The second time I read it, I felt terrible. The third time I read it, I made a mental list of all of the people in my life that I haven't forgiven.

Now I don't feel judgmental at all. I think maybe some of us struggle to forgive people like the Gestapo and the terrorists and maybe the Jews, but I think maybe lots more of us struggle to forgive the people closest to us who have hurt us the most, and maybe even ourselves.

Just something to think about.

Hollow of Darkness

Every time someone mentions TS Eliot I get this burning desire to read this poem. I picked up a complete collection of Eliot plays and poem and read almost all of the poems following our history class today which made reference to Eliot, and I can't help sharing.

The reason I love The Hollow Men is that it recalls the themes from one of my favorite books, Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, mentioned in the second epigraph, is, in my very humble opinion, the best representation of darkness in all symbolic literature. Kurtz is a "Paper mache Mephistopheles" (best description of any character ever. just sayin.), a hollow man. C.S. Lewis describes such men as "Men Without Chests" (sort of. there is nuance between the arguments, but they are fundamentally the same.)

Don't get impatient and stop reading halfway through--the end is the most dramatic line of doom and it will send shivers down your spine and haunt you for at least a few days.

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

    A penny for the Old Guy

    I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

    II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

    III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

    IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

    V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                              For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                              Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                              For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Writer's Cramp

There is nothing more frustrating than lacking inspiration for pent up creative genius. History and English papers have reduced my writing abilities to faltering metaphors like: "the room was as dark as America during Jacksonian nationalism" and "his words made as little sense as Bacon's obsession with chickens."

So much for my plans of being a starving, talented artist on the streets of Portland. Thank you, fate, for foiling my elaborate plans once again.