BarryTaylorBlog

Fallen Angels Radical Reincarnation: music is my church

Music has always been my church. I might go to buildings and participate in rituals and even make a living by involvement and engagement with more traditionally understood examples of church/religion, but in my heart music is my religion, my church, my heart. it was in music that I found a space to voice and hear voiced my desire, my melancholy, my sexuality, everything. I remember with a fondness not reserved for many other things in my heart, when I bought my first record player, a Dansette, very similar, if not identical to the one in the image. It wasn't the machine itself, it was what it represented--liberation from the family 'sound system', the radio choices of my parents, the tyranny of a world shaped by ideas, values and aesthetics that meant very little to me as I tried to give voice to my own. That record player became a shrine upon which I sacrificed faithfully the artifacts of my faith--the blues, gospel, r+b, soul, reggae--with a fervour and zeal that was a visceral response to the thing that offered me freedom and a path to knowing and finding myself.

I've just started reading a book about Nick Cave called The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays--its edited by John H. Baker. Its a collection of essays about Nick Cave, his music, his writing, his persona etc., divided into five sections: songwriter, murder ballads, film and theatre, influences and sacred vs. profane. It might just be that those five categorizations of Cave's life and work sum up in some way the way music functions as church or religion for me--if nothing else they highlight the issues and challenges which inform and affirm aspects of my life as I journey through it.

I haven't got too far into the book yet, but so far, it is rich with things about Cave, but perhaps more importantly, about music and about life, which I am finding helpful and hinting at things I might want to revisit, redress and rethink in terms of my own life vis-a-vis, what I do, why I do it, and how I broker some obvious disconnects which I am finding very troubling and difficult at the moment.

I think it is fair to say that I am in something of a vocational, if not life, crisis at the moment. Crisis seems a harsh word when I write it, there might be other words that could capture my present state, but I'll let it stand. 

Radical Reincarnation

In his introduction to the book, John Baker explores the role that Cave, as actor and musician, plays in Wim Wenders film, Wings of Desire. He also links Cave's dichotomy of desire and the emotional, psychological and existential cost to human existence to the central characters in that film. In naming Cave a version of Damiel, the central angel in Wender's story, Baker likens Cave's songwriting to a fallen angel, whose fall if you like, allows him to explore empathy and catharsis and invite insight and release to himself and the listener to his work. There is a line the author writes that grabbed me,

'He (Damiel) recognizes that the only way in which this desire can be fulfilled is through a kind of radical reinacarnation: his transformation from angel into human. In that sense he risks, like Lucifer, a form of fall from the spiritual into the material world.' This is beautiful imagery, I am sure to some who hold a different view of things religious, where the idea of 'fall' is endowed with ideas of disconnection with the sacred, the act might seem disastrous, but to me the fall is the only way Damiel can realize his desire, the only way he can discover love. The path to 'salvation' to reincarnation-re-birth-lies in this kind of provocative and dangerous act of counter-move. Richard Rohr's book of last year, Falling Upwards puts a safer spin on it, but that sheen of positivism is the essential thing I am trying to overcome in terms of my own relation to the sacred.. I keep having these images of falling to the ground, they have been inhabiting my dream world for a while. At first I was a bit worried, it seemed somewhat final, destructive, but lately I am beginning to see it in a different light, as pathway to my own radical reincarnation--I have been falling dramatically into the material world over the past few years, it often seems to be viewed as the 'wrong direction' by peers and by religion in general, but for me, this 'form of fall' heralds a way to realize a certain desired transformation.

Unspoken Unsatisfied

Having spoken of coming to terms with a certain redirection, at least internally, I must also speak of my continuing belief that satisfaction will remain elusive for me, and again, perhaps I am coming to terms with some things about myself, but perhaps also about life in general. In a chapter of Cave's music, not just the lyrical preoccupation through which most address him, there is a quote from Giorgio Agamben that meant something to me the moment I read it. The author of the chapter, Carl Lavery makes a distinction in his offering between Cave the person and Cave the singer,

"To use Giorgio Agambens' vocabulary, the name, 'Cave,' in this chapter, is posited as an authorial 'gesture,' a proper noun that 'marks the point at which a life is offered up and played out in the work. Offered up and played out, not expressed or fulfilled. For this reason the author can only remain unsatisfied and unsaid in the work.'

Two things, one is that I think this is why my favourite songs/artists and those whose work expresses dichotomy, tension, paradox and melancholy--whether it is the plaintive joy of blues and gospel or the apocalyptic musings of Radiohead, it is more often not, the ache in popular music that most speaks to me when it all comes right down to it. It is not that I need to be continually reminded of what is missing or lost (I love 'happy music' too, but there is always that 'thing' lurking beneath the surface) but that inherent tension and release mechanism in some music is what drives my love for it-- I just don't always need sheen and veneer to make everything pretty and ok. 

That melancholy, rooted at the heart of music that emerges from dislocation, disorientation, despair, desire, is what keeps music church for me and it might just be why I struggle with the institutional expressions of church/religion. It lacks melancholy and therefore, for me, it lacks the one ingredient that makes it vital, necessary. As Richard Kearney has written, melancholy brings us to the limits of reason--which for me is ultimately the place where communion with the sacred truly begins. Guardini declares that melancholy issues from 'the very ruptured depths of human nature whose disquietude is a sign of the eternal.' So there's that.

The other thing with regard to this statement is that I too have a name (much lesser of course), a voice, a role, that is public, that is performance--in academia and establishment--and both are difficult. I have spent a long time attempting to merge both public and private voice, and that hasn't proven easy--there are some serious obstacles in both environments that have to do with assumptions, perceptions etc. and I think I have spent way too much time trying to be 'heard' rather than judged or analyzed or critiqued--and I don't mean that in a 'victimy' way, I just mean that the liberation of a musical voice is that it is 'otherness,' the melancholic preoccupation, is almost a given,whereas in the church/theological worlds I inhabit it tends to be viewed as something peripheral, again, at least in my own experience which is the only perspective I can hold with deep conviction. Part of this is the need to find one's audience--not something that I have been too good at, I seem to have been capable of putting myself in environments, that, for want of a better word, are more conservative in both perspective and practice than I, which then heralds tensions and troubles, both great and small.  The 'gesture' voice, the public voice for the performance of theology and religion, is one that I have spent many years working on. I came across a quote from John Wesley that every (man) should strive to be a voice and not an echo, which is lifework and maturity, but once the process of discovery has begun that voice then has to find it's hearing and that I'm still working on--not that people don't listen, or that I even need them to, I need to hear my voice in its right place in both inside and outside.

System to the Sacred

"Cave's sacred is part prophetic Jesus, part Father in the Christian tradition, part Old testament force of retribution, part metonym for human love and sexual energy, part violent power with unknown capabilities, part absence, part extension of the Cave ego. Is there a system to Cave's sacred?" Lyn McCredden.

Does my 'system of the sacred' fit? Fit in the containers I attempt to put it in? Fit in the worlds I seek to express it in? Yes and no, that's probably true of all systems I imagine, but before that perhaps I have to ask if I even have a system? Or if I even know what it is. Increasingly I do--it is not the same as Cave's but there are crossovers for sure. What I cherish particularly about Cave's work is that it is both church in and of itself and it often addresses the other church in my existence--the institutional religion of Christianity--and I sense affinity between he and I on many things not least of which is his conviction that institutional religion is more often than not an unhelpful container. But he is out of it, and I am in it. Am I better or worse for that positioning? Lately, I have been feeling that I am completely fucked by it--it has been my working life--which raises complex issues of material need versus vocational practice-desire, sublimation, games without frontiers in some ways--but it is a continual source of concern, worry, a beast that refuses to be tamed and wants to eat my heart out at times, or at least that's how it feels. And of course, it could just be that it is not a suitable container for me, for my system of the sacred, as I realize that it is still viable for many people--and I don't mean this to be a broadside moan about church etc. I am speaking purely of myself. I am not sure it is necessary to state fully, or as fully as I able, my system, but I can say that after many years I find that much of it is not the system others around me are working from, and that's fine, but ...

"how can inspiration or for that matter God be moral?" Cave's question resonates deeply. I am sick of moralizing religioisity, sorry just am, I find it completely unhelpful, unimaginative, constricting, inadequate, shallow, easy--do I believe in morality? Of course, but morality that has been rooted essentially in reason doesn't work for me and that is what I encounter much of the time.

I remember musical moments perhaps more than any other, they are inscribed on my heart in a way that other encounters are not, it has always been that way for me--they are the ritual experiences personal and public that have shaped me in deep and abiding ways--I find myself in music, I find others, I sometimes find god-although 'finding god' has never been my primary preoccupation, maybe when it comes down to it, as Jack Caputo says, God doesn't exist, God insists, and music might just be the principal insistence conveyor for me.

(musical accompaniment to this post: trouble will find me, the national-on repeat--gorgeous)

the next day or bowie's ascension

 

There was a brilliant response to David Bowie's latest music video, The Next Day, from the Catholic league. Bill Donohue, president of said organization declared it the work of a "switch-hitting, bisexual senior citizen from London" that "is strewn with characteristic excess." A little dose of the pot calling the kettle black in terms of excess I think, but whenever religious or catholic images and ideas are addressed in these ways we shouldn't be surprised. On one level this video is predictable and trite--transfer sacred imagery into profane space and you have enough controversy to generate comments like those from the Catholic League.

Mieke Bal, the Dutch cultural theorist makes some key insights about Western society. She declares that there are three important considerations that must be taken into account when examining what is happening within western society. Christianity is there, meaning that it is impossible to begin to think about cultural analysis without acknowledging the theological underpinning of the western world. Secondly, Christianity is a cultural structure that informs the cultural imaginary whether one believes it or not, and finally, that Christianity is just one of the structures, it is not the only cultural structure, nor the only religious structure that underpins who we are or have come to be.

I think her theory helps to explain the ongoing appropriation of Christian imagery in contemporary culture, be it via the work of Damien Hirst or Bowie, Christianity was one of the interlocking structures that formed our world and it remains, even as a ghost in the machine if you will.

So Bowie creates a critique of religion and presents himself as a sort of 'prophet,' which is echoed by Gary Oldman in the video, and eventually 'ascends'--technically disappearing from their midst, but if we take the imagery to logical extensions that's what we are seeing realized. There are the usual madonnas, stigmatas, bishops and clergy, all of them inhabiting, perhaps running a brothel of sorts. On the one hand it is a classic and almost tired stereotypical critique of religion's hypocrisy, unfortunately it remains a prescient critique because of on-going scandals and revelations about sexual activities amongst relgious communities that claim the moral high ground with regard to sexuality and other issues in life. The video enacts a sort of battle between the sacred and the profane and perhaps raising questions as to whether or not the truly sacred is the profane.

The treatment for the video apparently came from Bowie himself but was realized with the help of photogrpaher and director Floria Sigismondi, who has worked with a lot of edgy musicians--Marilyn Manson, Bjork, The Cure, as well as more mainstream artists like Justin Timberlake and Katy Perry. She has a signature style, developed out of her art and sculptural interests which she defines as "entropic underworlds inhabited by tortured souls and omnipotent beings," much of which could be seen in this video. The collapse of sacred and prfoane boundaries can be provocative stuff by itself, when it gets charged erotically, as in the case of this video, you can see why people might get incensed.

I think Bowie raises issues about the sacred in this video, issues that I myself am asking in a world where ideas of sacredness are dramatically shifting and seldom tied exclusively to religious environments anymore, as Gordon Lynch writes in his book, On The Sacred, "the sacred in our contemporary Western world is neither synonymous with "religion", nor has it completely shifted beyond it. It forms the symbolic and moral terrian within which religious and secular lives are lived out."

crooked trees and twisted theology

I've been travelling a bit and busy when I havent been and the blogging has suffered because of it. ots to write about, but I need to carve out a bit of time to catch up on some thoughts and ideas. But I thought i'd share this little piece of Tom Waits. I've spent a bit of time with Mr. Waits lately as I am thinking of using some of his ideas for a conference talk or two. I am particiapting in Subverting the Norm II in a couple of weeks and my main talk is taken from a Waits quote-his quote: 'there ain't no devil, just god when he's drunk.,' mine is an inversion, 'there ain't no god just the devil when he's drunk.' We'll have to see how close I stay with Waitisms, but for now I'm enjoying exploring his thinking.

“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”

Sometimes being straight gets you into trouble:)

melt the guns

I have been watching and listening, like most people it seems, with a heavy heart, as 26 people, 20 of them children are wiped off the face off the earth by a man with a gun. There is lots to say, but actually, I have nothing of value to add, I can't even begin--it's huge and there is probably no simple remedy, although we would all love one right now.

I am sickened by the repsonse of some high profile religious people, who have an amazing ability to either defend god or make him look like a complete arsehole, or both at the same time. So I offer Andy patridge and his compatriots in the always provocative XTC. It's simplistic, idealistic, and decidedly, not where the conversation is going but...MELT THE FUCKING GUNS!!!

The song is a critique of violence as entertainment and entertaining violence--surely a contributor somewhere along the grid of human incomprehensibility...

Programmes of violence,
As entertainment,
Brings the disease into your room.
We know the germ,
Which is man-made in metal,
Is really a key to your own tomb.

Prevention is better than cure,
Bad apples affecting the pure,
You'll gather your senses I'm sure
Then agree to,

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more to fire them.

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

Children will want them,
Mothers supply them,
As long as your killers are heroes.
And all the media
Will fiddle while Rome burns,
Acting like modern-time Neros.

Prevention is better than cure,
Bad apples affecting the pure,
You'll gather your senses I'm sure
Then agree to,

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more to fire them.

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

I'm speaking to the Justice League of America.
The U S of A,
Hey you,
Yes you in particular!
When it comes to the judgement day and you're standing at the gates with your weaponry,
You dead go down on one knee,
Clasp your hands in prayer and start quoting me,
'Cos we say...
Our father we've managed to contain the epidemic in one place, now,
Let's hope they shoot themselves instead of others,
Help to civilize the race now.
We've trapped the cause of the plague,
In the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If we listen quietly we can hear them shooting from grave to grave.
You ought to,

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more to fire them.

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

changing names

As you can see I have changed the name of my blog--prompted by some nagging friends:) Change is always good they say.

knowing everything turns out to be slightly boring

Douglas Coupland has an exhibit at the Daniel Faria gallery of some slogans he has been working on for the 'early 21st century.' They are brillliantly conceived and totally on the money, or at least the ones I've managed to see are. Coupland has bee trying to "isolate what is already different in the twenty-first century mind as opposed to the twentieth," a very worthwhile enterprise I think. This has particular resonance at the moment as I am teaching a class on theology and media culture, and today, was essentially a class-length conversation about the ways in which media culture, and digital media in particular, are re-mapping us, providing us with new brainframes. it could be argued that the digital shift is key in the difference between 20th and 21st century minds--this seems to be the area of struggle for some of the students to come to terms with--different minds might require different questions/answers/proposition/ideologies etc.

I think that Coupland is one of the more interesting thinkers out there and his life of books, art, photogrpahy and cultural critique/observation is an enviable mix of things I like to play with.

the future in 1962

It was fifty years ago today that The Jetsons first aired on American tv. It was the first show to air in colour on ABC-TV. presented as a sort of space-age answer to the Flintstones, it was everything you might expect from a country, and a world, excited about the potential of the future. It was a glimpse into American self-identity--carried into a new age--carried into a new age, but very much of its own time--no people of colour, no alternate life-style families--just George Jetson, his long-suffering wife, kids, pets, and the future, all offering up a look at the future that was ideologically the same as its present, just with more space-age gadgets. In keeping with the views of the times, George moaned about work--his three-hour work week was getting to him all the time--well, why not consider the future as an age of less work, it had been the trajectory since the introduction of Labour laws and a host of other societal shifts brought about by the industrial revolution etc. No-one envisioned a future with more work, or with the lines between work and leisure blurred by technology as it is today--you can work on the way to work...and on your way home from it, today.

The family unit was intact, there were no derivations, no alternate lifestyles--and gender roles were still clearly laid out--men did men stuff, women--well, their place was in the home, even if it was a ranch-style futuristic abode with a parking spot for your own flying saucer. Jeffrey Tucker, said of it,

"The whole scene — which anticipated so much of the technology we have today but, strangely, not e-mail or texting— reflected the ethos of time: a love of progress and a vision of a future that stayed on course ... The Jetsons' world is our world: explosive technological advances, entrenched bourgeois culture, a culture of enterprise that is the very fond of the good life."

What the Jetsons reminds us is that we are not very good at predicting the future--it's why I love the site paleo-future so much--its a lesson on our presumptive follies. "a future that stayed on course" Tucker writes--yeah, not so much, that future disappeared really quickly, a future we can predict is really no future at all, it is an assumption that we have arrived rather than an observation that we still have places to go---We certainly can't predict the future based on what we assume is concrete. Not long after The Jetsons aired, a new future did arrive in America, and much of the rest of the world, it wasn't the same world just with shinier gadgets--it was a whole new way of being human--it's still playing out before our eyes, it will not take trajectories we assume it will--it will be different, it will be the future, it will feel much like now--and I doubt we will be piloting personal space-craft, but what do I know? The future holds its own secrets, its the present that holds my interest.

wait without idols: gabriel vahanian

The Church and theological worlds lost a giant last week, although I would imagine that most have barely heard of him, although I could be wrong.

Gabriel Vahanian was on the founding board of the American Academy of Religion, a Reformed theologian who translated Karl Barth early in his career, and a man with a lifelong interest in culture and religion. But it was a work published in 1961 that really set him apart. That book, The Death of God: The Culture of our Post-Christian Era, was a shot across the bows of theological thinking and set the framework for a movement of great significance. JJ Altizer went on to become the public face of the 'death of god' movement, but arguably it was Vahanian who named it and began, or at least published, the initial work (it's never a single person anyway).

I have read little of Vahanian, but what I have leads me to think that his work is a bit more closely aligned to Bonhoeffer's idea of religionless christianity than the other more prominent death of god theologians. Of course, he extends Bonhoeffer's ideas, given the lack of opportunity Bonhoeffer had to more fully develop his thinking. Vahanian declares both god and religion dead, not as Bonhoeffer does, which is because god no longer seems relevant,

"Taken as nothing less if nothing more than a cultural phenomenon, the death of God signifies the transition from radical monotheism to radical immanentism and marks the birth of secularism as the vector of the new religiosity. It announces the advent of a new, culturally Christian paganism, even while theology is busy overlooking its indigence or covering it up with a glorified but amnesic vocabulary. Indeed accustomed to thinking of theology as an ecclesiastical task, as the self-critical task of the Church itself, we failed to realize that it had stopped speaking to the outside world and, ipso facto, to the Church itself, for the Church cannot understand itself unless the language of its self-understanding speaks to the world and unless the world itself can use the same language."

The root of Vahanian's work was linked to a concern about God being objectified and turned into an artifact.

He was critical of efforts to modernise christianity in his first book, particularly singling out those who were attempting to turn it into a tool for success (unfortunately that didn't work, because that trend seems to have become the dominant thread in mainstream global christianity in the 21st century). He argued that christianity has a higher purpose than success, it was for plumbing th econscience, dealing with suffering and for confronting doubts about god. In Wait Without Idols, he wrote that,

"god is not necessary, but inevitable, He is wholly other and wholly present. Faith in him, the conversion of our human reality, both culturally and existentially, is the demand he still makes upon us."

In the same book he also declared that,

"The Christian era has bequeathed us the 'death of God,' but not without teaching us a lesson. God is not necessary; that is to say, he cannot be taken for granted. He cannot be used merely as a hypothesis, whether epistemological, scientific, or existential, unless we should draw the degrading conclusion that 'God is reasons.' On the other hand, if we can no longer assume that God is, we may once again realize that he must be. God is not necessary, but he is inevitable. He is wholly other and wholly present. Faith in him, the conversion of our human reality, both culturally and existentially, is the demand he still makes upon us."

ikonoclast: get dirty

Many years ago, a friend said to me that he thought that the biggest problem with Christians and churches in general was that they were afraid of dirt. The drive to be 'pure' led to decisions and postures that attempted to put some distance between anything that smacked of dirt or grime. "We send our broken away to get fixed, afraid that we will be tainted by their dirt, rather than standing alongside each other no matter what--but that's what you get when the institution is more important than its people or purposes." Those were his words, or as close as I can remember them after all these years. And over the years I have come to recognize how right he was. It's a generalization to be sure, and as such, is easily deflected, but I have to say that in my experience churches are not great places to bring one's dirt, in spite of all the rhetoric to the contrary. 

That is what I find appealing about Pete's soon to be realized project. Having been in my own fair share of ventures that read back so much better than they seemed in the moment, I appreciate the honesty and openness of his comments about the upcoming venture. I find myself in a work environment at the moment that seems to think that 'programme' is the answer to everything (which in case you were wondering, it is not)--programmes do not re-invent, they maintain--or at least that has been my experience of most of them--I like the idea of an environment where it is understood that the harsh realities might also herald the possibilities of transformative elements.

I realize that there is a difference between the 'dirt' created by an experiment and the 'dirt' we carry in our everyday lives--but it seems to me that the pathway to transformation in either case is predicated on the willingness to 'get down in the muck and get dirty.' When I was growing up our next door neighbour grew award-winning roses. Occasionally a horrible odour would find its way into our house, when he covered his whole garden in manure--it was the shit that made his roses grow so well--we would do well to remember that in life.

post-materialist magazine?

This coming September, the UK-based Future Publishing is releasing a new magazine focused on post-materialist life, life in the recession pressured times we seem to find ourselves in right now. what looks interesting is that the magazine is attempting to reflect a shift in ethics and values that corresponds to these times. It's going to be called The Simple Things and there is a sample issue to look at here. It is not anti-consumerist, far from it in fact, but it does seem to reflect the ready-made/homemade/organic/local streams that more and more people seem to be exploring. I have been spending a bit of the summer thinking about the relationship between values and commodification and how those seemingly colliding things are intertwined and perhaps even inter-dependent in our time. Give it a look and let me kow what you think.