Change of Address

Hey everybody,

Good news. I need you to change your address books again. Sorry about that. New cell phone. New email. Damn spam.

I’ve attached the details.

Au Revoir~

Hey! Wait!

What?

I said, wait a second.

But…

I just wondered what made you think that you could just decide to change?

Look this is an email message. Or a posting. You can’t really ask questions.

Or I could say: this is a relationship or a name. You can’t really just decide to change the terms. The contract. The expectations.

Contract?

Names are contracts. When I was a kid everybody always knew me by the short form of my name. I was cute. That version of the name was cute, but I was starting to tire of it or aspire toward the REAL name, the longer version long before I graduated high school.

Riiight….?

So I decided to change it when I went to college.

See? People do change their names.

Wrong. People still knew me from home. They undermined me. They got to all the key people first somehow. I don’t know how they managed it, but somehow it didn’t matter how many times I corrected them, reframed, introduced myself. Always the boyhood name.

But we don’t call you that now. We call you the “real” name.

You do, but its only a matter of time. You’ll meet someone. Hear a few stories. Slip up in front of me. Start to merge my identity with someone else who has the same name, only kept the boyhood version.

Look. I was just sending out a notice that I changed my email address and my cell number.

And I’m just saying that don’t you think we should have some say in that?

Changing my email or cell?

Well who beckons you with these magical incantations?

Hunh?

Telephone numbers and email addresses are ways of summoning you by way of a magic code. If we know the magical combination of numbers and letters – PRESTO! You can appear to us. No matter where you were, what you were doing. SUDDENLY you’re here with us.

Okay. So shouldn’t I get to decide HOW you beckon me? Since this magic…code (?) has so much power…?

Since when has anyone ever chosen their own name?






Since when do we get to choose how people refer to us?

Ummm. I guess since email? I don’t know, though. It seems like we get to choose what clothes we wear. What houses we live in. What schools we go to.

Really?!
Maybe cell phones are the beginning of real agency then. True freedom. Where we know our own true name, we decide who should have access to it and we re-create ourselves and our worlds accordingly. We can be islands who build bridges only to the other islands that we like…

That’s my point…these technologies are covering their tracks as they carry us into a desert. We’ll wake up in the middle of desolation and have no idea how we got there. And I just didn’t want you to send out an email and post a cell phone number that made it look like you had CHOSEN – all of your own accord – to go to some new theoretical place. When these choices are really making us over. All of us.

Yeah.

So anyway. I’ll call you sometime after my free minutes at nine.

Or text me. No cost…

Au Revoir.

where he came from

Thomas Eugene Patterson Knowles announced over Easter dinner that he had decided to give up his faith for lent.

His sister Karen didn't even bother to roll her eyes, but reached in front of him for the creamy mashed potatoes.

His mother used real cream in the potatoes and beat them til they were heavenly (which is not to say that she beat the hell out of them, though, if she had not been a nazarene like her mother and father and her husband had always been, and if she had been more of the sort of sottish pagan that her maternal grandfather had been, in that case, she may have said, "beat the hell out." But what was the difference? she would ask if you brought up this point to her, why *not* say it the nice way? Can't we use a bit of Heaven in this hot kitchen?

Thomas' father had heard him. He stared at his roast beef as if it were a leprous cadaver.

Karen, once she recognized this silence, and all that would come with it...paused in shaping the countours of her potatoes so that the rivulets of butter could run down just exactly right...rolled her eyes at her brother.

Nancy Ann (Patterson) Knowles corrected her son: We don't celebrate lent, honey. We're still nazarene.

Thomas looked around the table. He looked at the pile of green beans pushing against the mashed potatoes.

I don't celebrate lent anymore either, mom.

Now she looked up at him. You're not going to be a catholic anymore, son?

She looked at Eugene. Had he heard this?

I gave up my FAITH for lent.

OH! Now she rolled her eyes and joined her daughter in shaping their potatoes. May as well craft an enjoyable plate to weather the oncoming storm.

You can't just give up your faith for lent! Roared Eugene. Lent is just a made up thing anyway!

Nancy Ann wished he wouldn't respond this way. She wasn't sure but that her husband could end up with an annurism like Ted Johnson the deacon who had passed the offering plate to them for years. And now, this week, out of the blue, ended up at Mercy Hospital in the prayer request section in the bulletin.

SHe had stopped taking their son seriously when he was fifteen. Why change when he was still just twenty eight? Twenty eight year olds were practically toddlers. If they must lose their faith...oh well.

Karen ate each bite enjoying it. She allowed the warmth and the gentle interpenetration of the potatoes and cream and butter and salt fill her mouth and her body so full that she couldn't hear a thing. Not a thing.

Thomas ate his dinner fiercely. His father ate nothing.

When they had easter dinner together twenty years later, it was as if this dinner had determined everything for the two of them. Thomas was fiercely obese at forty eight and his father looked as any fat had been transpanted from his bones to his son. The blades of his shoulders by that time looked skeletal when he removed his sport jacket on Sunday, clad only then, in a practical cotton dress shirt from JC Pennys.

The long and short of the argument ended this way.

EUGENE: You shouldn't change your mind about everything until you study up on what you come from. Maybe you need a bit of serious bible study son.

THOMAS: That's an unarguable argument, dad.

EUGENE: Well then...?

THOMAS: What? Didn't you take any leaps of faith from where you were brought up?

(knowing full well the answer.)

And the great irony was, that after the mashed potatoes were gone, the dishes were cleared, and Thomas and Eugene had both disappeared into bitte silences, Thomas decided that he'd show his father up.

When they had dinner on easter in the year of Thomas' 48th year, Thomas had returned to the land.

He had traced the lineage of the family only as far back as the family homestead in Indiana. No records went back any farther. For six years he worked as hard as he could to earn back the family homestead. He grew organic food, didn't use the phone or ride in cars.

When his father poked fun at him. Thomas took the most joy of all in admonishing him:

You shouldn't change your mind about everything until you study up on what you come from. Maybe you need a bit of serious bible study dad.

He couldn't have pointed to a bible verse to back up his luddite resistance, having abandon his faith twenty years hence, but he couldn't resist the completeness of the phrase. His father was pained by it, would not respond, and to Thomas it seemed a glorious repudiating refrain to cling to.

Since he had set all the other lifeboats adrift already.

I surfed into this article by Wendell Barry today -- and there are some things about it that really resonated with me...

He writes:

People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical enough.

to me, he articulates many of the problems that i associate with participating in institutions (as well as social movements). In some ways "movements" are, i'm sure, more dangerous, because identity is more precarious for any given individual, and the sanctions of the group may be less anticipated -- and therefore more harsh -- than when within the protectively rigid structure of an organization.

Mandy and I are talking about these issues in our independent study -- and in my Mass Media class we were talking about how the emergence of the autonomous self was one of the precursors for celebrity culture -- that we had to be alone in order to need celebrities...

but the questions and issues seem to me to be so deeply intertwined with my, with anyone's quest for legitimacy, our need for importance, our desire for meaning, our direction for work...

are there institutions or movements with which we want to align our life force?

but if we don't, we're just nothing. we can't exist in the world...

one more reason that being a prophet is a dangerous profession...

btw~

school does suck (literally and figuratively), but i do love my job. and that's something impressive to be able to write at 5:05 p.m.

peace~

do you ever have the feeling that *so* many people are thinking and writing that the public sphere is more like a cacauphonous din of competing voices. Kind of like it sounds if you're at a HUGE dinner party and you stop having a little conversation of your own and just listen to the hum of a hundred conversations.

That's what blog-surfing feels like to me sometimes...

tired people should not be allowed to:

1. drive.
2. write papers.
3. blog.

you wouldn't believe some of the things that the late night demons whisper in my ears to include on this blog...

(skeptical republican readers of this blog should not read this post as one more evidence that liberal ideology is all wrapped up in more intervention on behalf of Big Goverment. Maybe tired people could be given tax breaks if they agree *not to* drive or blah,blah,blah...)

school sucks. people should avoid school at all costs.

top five bad things that have happened to me in the last week.

(not in order of importance)

1. i sliced open my thumb on the severed edge of the top of a cream of celery soup can. lots of blood.

2. i haven't had time to schedule a haircut.

3. i didn't finish reading two papers by my friday class last week.

4. i forgot to bring some stuff into school for my wife earlier today.

5. something's wrong with my telephone at home.

What!? Is it my fault that I've got a good life? Did you *read* this blog last semester? Last semester it sucked to be me. I refuse to feel guilty for feeling ok about the world.

(i'm sure i just jinxed everything though.)

peace~

poor and oppressed

i have a bumper sticker on my office door that says "Jesus is a liberal."

An irate math student stopped at my door the other day and demanded an accounting for such a claim. Was I saying that Jesus was like Bill Clinton? I tried to be generous and provocative in my response to him, but I was forced to remember how totalizing the world I grew up in was toward the term. The word "liberal" itself was justification for alientation and ridicule.

(I understand that many liberals live in the same sort of totalizing world -- where "conservative" is just a devil a term...)

since i've moved so far left, sometimes I have to try to remember how, in general, the right came to hold such widespread, unquestioning cache' with the evangelicals...?

i *do* understand some of the historical antecedents and the political bedfellows that made for this union between the american religious mainstream and the political right wing....but i also feel passionate about making arguments for why / how a more liberal political agenda is more consonant with historical christianity.

****

Harry preached this sunday focusing upon this text --

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Not from Isaiah, but from Luke 4 -- the passage where Jesus talks about how a prophet is -- in his own city -- reviled.

that latter idea really resonated with me. For lots of reasons....

i joke that i'm a "black sheep" in my family -- and Lynn often feels keenly the weight of being the child that left her farming community -- being a "black sheep" does not (i'm aware) constitute being a prophet, but the experience does resonate with me as having some shared territory.

Isn't it a bedrock American Axiom that once you leave -- you can never go home?

Isn't that, on some level, the experience that most people face when they're honest about the intergenerational clash of values, directions, and dreams that they face with their parents?

I've just ordered Limbo after hearing a great interview of the author on NPR.



I'm not really a straddler in Lubrano's sense, but having left fundamentalism and evangelicalism, both very dense & total cultural groups...and having married a "straddler" (as he calls them) who moved from rural agrarian roots into a white collar world -- his ideas resonated deeply with me.

Harry's point (or one of them at least) was that Jesus was intentionally enraging the comfortable, powerful locals in order to be invitational to the outsiders, the strangers, the Samaritans and the disenfranchised.

Obviously, this is the connection that I feel between (contemporary) liberal ideology and Christian thought. That the ultimate tear in the fabric of the universe is: devotion to intentional poverty, intentional death, intentional weakness in order to PARTICIPATE in the incarnation of God.

So how’s that connected to the black sheep in all of us?

Lynn and I watched Lost in Translation this weekend. I loved it – she was so-so.



One thing that I loved was that – while the obvious meaning: that much important meaning gets “lost in translation” was great and true and particularly salient in this story – it was the third layer of that metaphor (lostness) that seemed most important and profound to me.

The second layer – that these particular characters were uniquely “lost” in a foreign culture – provided a great explanation of some of the freedom and happiness that they’re able to find in unexpected experiences.

But the third layer – that these particular characters were, at least on some level, powerful privileged people in the Great Economy of Being: A movie star, a jet-setting Yale Graduate. Yet the experience of being lost in another culture had clarified for them both POWERFULLY how LOST they were in their own worlds, in their own lives, in between their hopes and their dreams.

And what I like about Jesus’ appropriation of Isaiah’s message is that he affirms the truth that:

in order to proclaim freedom and hope for the poor and oppressed – you have to be ready and willing to participate in the one-down position of being an ex-pat prophet. You have to embrace the alienation that comes from returning to your hometown – and you have to announce and renounce the power structures and struggles that prop your home town up.

For me, I realized that I’m too often looking at the power structures wherever I am with the eye of a radical revolutionary looking to upend things – instead of recognizing and embracing the reality that the people inside of those power structures are just as poor and oppressed as anybody…only they don’t recognize those traits as definitive of themselves, because to do so would be (not only) counterintuitive and (also) counterproductive.

If I didn’t have a front burner I’d go on to make the next important leap which is …

And that’s why art is better than preaching (of any kind: religious, educational, political or scientific)…

peace (or a sword, whichever you need today)~