nevermind the bricolage

wiv a little bit a luk

 

I teach a class on creative concepting most terms. It covers a wide range of things, the class allows for a lot of room in terms of what we do, but essentially we explore things like where ideas come from, how to make connections, finding ones voice. There are a couple of principle versions, one related to ideas and imagery, the other much more closely tied to words. This term we are principally dealing with words--how they function, ways they function, putting words together based on rhythm and sound, how they work with images, poetry, word games, lots of different directions essentially.

One of the components is simply about discovery of interesting words-the english language is continually on the move, expanding even as I write, and yet we are reducing the number of words we employ on a regular basis-partly because of utility, laziness, lack of education perhaps. So this term, as part of an exploration of vocabulary, we are exploring two aspects of words: swearing, because it is an interesting intersection of cultural dynamics-the collapsing and combining of the holy and the profane; and words we use but maybe don't really grasp the full meaning of. Case in point, serendipity. A word attributed to Horace Walpole, man of letters, politician and reviver of the gothic style (The Castle of Otranto). The word is usually translated as describing a sort of 'happy accident.' It's a difficult word to define actually, and unfortunately, that means that it is often under utilized. The word itself provides a way of thinking about things that can be really helpful in a number of areas in life, but particularly when it comes to strategy, creativity and the process of working things out.

Walpole apparently took the word from an ancient Persian tale that had been turned into an Italian story and then translated into English in the mid-16th century!! The story involves the search for a camel, it is found by the three princes (something reminiscent of the 3 wisemen here?) who constantly made discoveries by 'accidents and sagacity.'

The 'silly fairy tale' as Walpole called it, produced a word that quickly slipped into use, and perhaps if not mis-use, missed-use. Serendipity means more than a happy accident , which tends to denote simple randomness, and actually points us toward a deeper understanding of how discoveries can be made. All the way back to Seneca, thinkers have pointed out that luck seldom stands alone. "preparation meeting opportunity,' is how he put it (now I do agree with Nasser Nicholas Taleb that far too often luck is mistaken for skill, but that is a slightly different matter more linked to accomplishment than discover, and one I'll deal with elsewhere), the point being that discovery seldom happens by luck or happenstance alone. Walpole's creation of this new word/idea from the fairy tale reminds us that serendipitous discoveries are not just 'luck' but involve sagacious, or skillful interpretations of chance events.

To me this means a couple of things: one a need for open-mindedness (a skill way too undervalued in almost every world I participate in) and second, a commitment to harnessing every possible tool for the given quest. Easily said, but very difficult to live out because most of us tend to build walls and fences around our ideas once we are comfortable with them and move toward conservationist tendencies which often preclude openness to the new and unexpected answer. In the religious world Richar Rohr has noted that the 'last experience of god is often the greatest obstacle to the next experience of god,' the same could be said of any field really. The combination of openness to the unexpected and the commitment to 'sagacity' is rare, but by it camels are found.

 

On another note, it is said that Serendip was the Persian word for Sri Lanka, and translates into 'golden island,' which may hold yet more clues to the rich meaning of what openness may bring to all who seek that path.

a sneak of weasels

I'm coming to the end of another term at the art school, where we have spent the term exploring how words work and how they intersect with images. We have spent time exploring the history of swearing among other things, tonight we are going to focus more specifically on how words and language develop and work.

In the middle ages Books of Courtesy emerged--they were books of manners essentially which focused on etiquette, morals and behaviour. The Boke (book) of St. Albans, written in the middle of the 15th century offers up lists of Venery terms. Venery were mass nouns, terms for grouping animals and were invented as a means by which a gentleman could separate himself from the peasants by basically having an 'insider' language, a posh version of the later cockney rhyming slang. Hence a  murmuration of starlings and a slew of other terms that are basically arbitrary and slightly mad; a knot of toads, surfeit of skunks, covert of coots, parliament of owls. Many of them remain in our language, not used by one and all regardless of class, if we have  knowledge of them.

James Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio fame is apparently a foremost expert these obscure venery terms and has a definitive book, called An Exaltation of Larks, worth a read--great insight into the nuances and license of the english language.

other

There are two people who I think who bring game-changing ideas and perspectives to the muddy waters of the emerging/alternative conversations about the church and its futures--Pete Rollins and Kester Brewin. I'm fortunate to count them both as friends and theological soul mates (if only I believed in the soul-haha!). Pete gets more attention this side of the pond because he is around a lot more and travels speaking etc. but Kester shouldn't be underestimated in terms of what he brings to the table. His latest book,  Other: Loving self, God and Neighbor in a world of fractures, has recently been released here in the U.S. and I want to encourage everyone to read it. It's a book about options--options to the status quo of mainstream thinking, but also a challenge to the conventional wisdom of much of the emerging conversations. Kester draws from a unique pool of resources and ideas and Other is the fruit of his thinking--thinking about pirate utopias and TAZ(temporary autonomous zones ala Burning Man and Greenbelt), about how and in what ways we might relate to each other, to God and to ourselves in the 21st century.

Kester rattles cages, he is not content to make small adjustments at this point in the game, he is asking hard questions of himself, of us, and is offering up game-changing responses to the current situations that the church finds itself in. I think he is an important theologian for our time and I think Other is a must-read for anyone trying to get their head around the contours and shapes of religion at the turn of the 21st century, so if you haven't read it yet...

f*&k,b@#$ocKs ar$2h))les!!!! Tripp Fuller!

I am doing an event with Tripp Fuller on the 30th of September. It's a live Homebrewed Christianity get-together with all kinds of goodies planned--it should be fun, so if you are in the neighborhood come and join us for some profano-thelogy!! Sign up here.

on smugness

I have noticed quite a few people, in the blogo/facebook/twitter-sphere, linking to an article that appeared in the Huffington Post a few days ago, entitled, Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me. It's not a bad article and it does address that somewhat overwrought perspective on contemporary faith that sometimes accompanies people who opt for the spiritual side of the religious/spiritual equation. However, I was struck by a similar smugness from the other side in all of this.

There have been two significant developments in late 20th, early 21st century faith dynamics in the West. One is the rise is forms of spirituality that are characterized by hyper-indivudialism. I think it was George Barna in an article in USA Today who noted that there are 310 million people in the US and the danger is that we will wind up with 310 milllion versions of faith.  So I understand the resistance in the article--I live in LA, all that is here in spades. What's missed on the spirtitual side of the equation is the debt owed to the institutional religions so easily dismissed--afterall, their spirtituality is often funded and fueled by ideas and practices held preciously throughout the ages by the very religions they dismiss. That said, the other dynamic in the world of faith is the rise and return of religion. I wouldn't want to tie its return completely to 9/11, but it was definitely a turning point and religion is back in the public space. It is undoubtedly a contested issue and new interrogations of religion by mainstream culture are underway--and it is often marked by a negativity and critique that can be withering and at times stupidly naive--but nonetheless, there is a resurgence of both interest in and practice of religion(on this issue I cannot recommend Roland Boer's book, Rescuing the Bible, enough).

But those who are ' bored' by spirituality, should beware of placing too much stock in their own camp. Religion has it's own share of issues and problems which help to fuel the continuing interest in spirituality. The declarations about 'working things out in community' assumes, naively I say that one can't practice personal piety and still be in community--and let's face it, all too often in my experience, what is promoted, and often idealized, as 'community' is as lacking and problematic as it is fulfilling and enriching.

There are benifits and blessings, losses and gains, in both sides of the equation if you ask me, and things to be learned from both. But that is not what prompted me to address this.

What I have found a bit strange is that some who view themselves as somewhat 'radical' would pass this article around. The radical move is not to reject spirituality in favour of religion--it is to reject both. Both are compartmentalized forms of believing, of faith. Robert Capon said this, somewhere, sometime,

“Christianity is not a religion. Christianity is the proclamation of the end of religion, not of a new religion, or even of the best of all religions. If the cross is the sign of anything, it’s the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all of the world’s problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing. What the cross is actually a sign of is the fact that religion can’t do a thing about the world’s problems – that it never did work and it never will.”

This needs a little tweaking because Christianity is a religion, but I get his point. There is something else that needs to be addressed that transcends the spiritual/religious equation. Now I am sure that some will immediately connect my thought with strands of secualr theology that emerged in the 40s and 50s, but I don't make that connection--because I think our framwork for understanding what secular means, and how religion/spirituality/faith/belief/divine/sacred/theistic/atheistic/pagan/anentheist et-fucking etc intersects with it, needs to change, and anything that emerged before the latter part of the 20th century is addressing a decidedly different context.

I am not spiritual or religious--they both bore the fuck out of me right now.

book reversal

 
It is often the case that books get made into movies--seldom that the reverse happens. But with The Fantastic Flying Book of Mr Morris Lessmore, now available as a iPad app, it is true. The story began life as an animted short film, but through the marvel of modern technology has been turned into a lovely little interactive app for the iPad. It is whimsical and sweet, and a celebration of books and reading. I am not sure if it is meant to be a kids book or what, it doesn't really matter, it's a lovely, moving little tale and wonderfully executed. If you have an iPad you should get it.

The same story

Over at Ads of the World is a series of ads by Y&R Agency in Bogota, Columbia, for a highlighter. The caption is "Everybody reads the same story differently" and has ramifications way behind a highlighter if you ask me. The whole idea of text and how we read has been a hot topic for some time now, particularly in some of the religious streams I swim in. The ad underscores the old idea that "where you stand determines what you see" essentially the idea that we all see/read through a particular lens beased on a whole host of issues that come together to influence how we read and interpret what we read. I am a big fan of David Shield's book, Reality Hunger, which strings together hundreds of written sources into new permutations in order to highlight the way in which we search, or in his view, hunger for reality. Of that book, Luc Santes wrote,

"But we continue to crave reality, because we live in a time dominated by innumerable forms of extraliterary fiction: politics, advertising, the lives of celebrities, the apparatus surrounding professional sports — you could say without exaggeration that everything on TV is fiction whether it is packaged as such or not. So what constitutes reality, then, as it affects culture? It can be as simple as a glitch, an interruption, a dropped beat, a foreign object that suddenly intrudes. Hence the potency of sampling in popular music, which forces open the space between the vocal and instrumental components. It is also a form of collage, which edits, alters and reapportions cultural commodities according to need or desire. Reality is a landscape that includes unreal features; being true to reality involves a certain amount of wavering between real and unreal. Likewise originality, if there can ever be any such thing, will inevitably entail a quantity of borrowing, conscious and otherwise. The paradoxes pile up as thick as the debris of history — unsurprisingly, since that debris is our reality."

The construction of reality through text and reading is a bit too much to handle for some, particularly the literalists. There was an interesting section in The Guardian recently, some writers were aksed to name words or phrases that they felt had become cliches and lost their meaning. One of them was 'literally' and James Geary had this to say about it,

"One of the great testaments to the power of metaphor, and the malleability of language, is the metaphorical use of the word "literally". My kids do this all the time: There were "literally" a million people there, or I "literally" died I was so scared. When people use literally in this way, they mean it metaphorically, of course. It's a worn-out word, though, because it prevents people from thinking up a fresh metaphor for whatever it is they want to describe. And that's a shame, because the word literal is actually a beautiful and evocative metaphor in itself. It is derived from the Latin verb linire, meaning "to smear", and was transferred to litera (letter) when authors began smearing words on parchment instead of carving them into wood or stone. The roots of linire are also visible in the word "liniment," a salve or ointment. Thus, the literal meaning of "literal" is to smear or spread, a fitting metaphor for the way metaphor oozes over rigid linguistic borders."

Aphorisms

Some thoughts from Lenoardo Boff for the start of a new year--happy new year to one and all--hope it's a good one. And here is a link to a site that offers up daily aphorisms if you fancy a thought a day.

It does not seem inappropriate at the beginning of the year to offer some aphorisms, the fruits of reflection and the day-to-day wisdom present in the cultural environment. Let's list a few that are easy to understand.

More important than knowing is to never lose the capacity for learning.

If everything in the universe is in genesis, then the longed-for paradise is not at the beginning, but at the end.

We are whole, but not complete. We begin to be born and slowly keep on being born until we complete our birth. That is when we die.

Only that which is can die. The possible, that which is not yet, remains to be realized beyond death.

We do not live to die. We die to be resurrected.

If you feel that you are a common person, rejoice. God must have loved dearly the common people to have created so many of them, among them you and I.

Do not take the paths already travelled. Otherwise you will never leave your footprints on the earth.

If you want to go a great distance, walk slowly. Never stop, or go back.

Give thanks to God that you only stumbled, otherwise you would have fallen.

Where there is no fear, neither will there be courage, which is necessary to live.

If you want to forget the many rocks that slow your progress, think of the foundation of the house that you can build with those rocks.

In the struggle between the stone and the drop of water, the drop will always win, not for its strength but for its perseverance.

If you hold firm to the perspective of the end, there will be no obstacle that you cannot overcome.

The new only appears on condition that something has been left behind.

For the one who seeks, there will always a Star, such as the Star of Bethlehem, to illuminate the path.

A ship is secure in port, but it was not built for that.

From a single candle thousands of others can be lit, without diminishing its light.

If you want to climb a tall ladder, do not look at it, instead, look at each rung.

For those who want to sing, there will always be a melody in the air.

Only he who puts himself in the other's place can truly understand the other.

Even a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day.

Be like the cicada, that to renew itself has to loose all its external appearance.

Only those will rejoice with the sunrise who knew how to wait through the darkest night.

No one will enter heaven who did not begin to build it here on earth.

Every little boy wants to be a man. Every man wants to be king. Every king wants to be God. Only God wanted to be a little boy.

Since Christians announced a God without the world, there came to be a world without God.

Human like Jesus, only God himself.

At the beginning of everything there is not the solitude of One but the communion of The Three: of the Origin without beginning, of the supreme Word, and of the sacred Union of all with all. They are so entwined in love that they unite, this is to say, they become One.

Joseph A.

I like Joseph Arthur--his Notes from the Road section on his blog often throws up some interesting wordplay:

It’s either all divine
or none of it is
It’s either all consciousness
swooping
into and
out of the
genius of itself or
it’s just time
rotting slowly
against a broken back
(horses in a fading light gallop like the ocean
across our minds turned inside out by a word)
We are
euphoric centers
Of a light
Sometimes
which is overwhelmed
into despair
The problem with god
With belief
versus non belief
Is down
to a word
It’s down
to how we choose
to define
what is here and
apparent to all
We are
swooping
consciousness
We are
blooming
divinity
But there is a word,
which is like
a line in the sand
Divinity
It’s putting a value
on all of this
But everything is
the light
of consciousness
There is obvious
intelligence and beauty
in all that exists
I sometimes feel that the atheists
are the true believers
It takes more faith
to be an atheist
than it does a devout Baptist
To say you are sure
there is nothing
beyond what is seen
When what is seen
is already beyond
what can be understood
is a cry of
faith
A faith that to my mind
is more extreme
than a faith in a man
who can walk on water
or make others believe he did
It’s crazy
how much blood
is spilled
over questions
of religion
When every breath
you take is the universe
breathing into itself
Every breath you take
is god breathing
It’s either all divine
or none of it is
Look at the ocean
lit up by the moon
crashing into sand and dancing on your feet,
as the shadows play
with forms in the sand
greater than any work of art,
which hangs in museums
And watch
as the forms are changed
And watch
how they are always changing
Across all the shorelines
of all the beaches
In all this world
and the doubtless
countless others
Creation.
Manifest
Divinity speaking to the silence
In us all
The impossible witness
Yer consciousness
is mine is his is their’s
It’s one
(she smiles and lifts the glass up to your lips)
Call it what you want
But how can you not believe
in what you are?
Beyond the mind
Or the ego, which identifies with only the tiniest part
We are free
And bigger
than all of life
We are all of life
and reaching into
and through out death
Our beings
flying into darkness
asking ourselves to be forgiven
When life finally ends

Sweet Dreams

So Advent is winding down and Christmas is fast approaching. In the Lectionary, John the Baptist tales has been replaced by pre-birth narratives. This week Mary and Joseph are up. Now Christmas, quite like Easter is both a rich and a difficult time for people of faith. The birth story, the 'cradle' of Christian faith is both sweet and challenging. I mean come on, the virgin birth, it is up there in terms of impossible possibilities, let's be real!

But what has struck me in recent years as I have come back around to these over-familiar stories, is the dependence of it all upon dreams. This week for instance (Matthew 1: 18-25) revolves around this strange encounter between Mary and the Holy Spirit that results in pregnancy? Well alrighty then--(of course Matthew sets up the moment by inviting us into this slightly peculiar genealogy of Jesus that includes four other women, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba---two prostitutes, a seductress and an adulteress--so Mary, the unmarried girl fits right in) but the story is about Joseph and his intention to quietly dump the girl. This intention is interrupted by a dream, and the rest of the story unfolds because of this dream essentially. Other dreams will follow until you realize that virtually the entire beginning of the christian faith story is predicated upon dreams and the responses of people to them.

I find that interesting, I'm not sure we place the same importance upon dreams as the ancients did, rationality, for better or worse, seems to hold a much larger sway in our affairs. Dreams seem to offer us up a world that is different from the one we have to live with and manage very day.  Dreams in the bible are disruptive, they invade the course of public history and the powers that govern by showing a hidden truth or idea that is designed to create new possibilities. Freud, not a fan of religion, but a believer in the power of dreams, called them the 'royal road to the unconscious' and felt that acted as 'urgent dissenters' from the rational world we have deemd as absolute. In the Gospel story, Joseph's rationale is solid--keep the law, with regard to how to act toward a 'wayward girlfriend,' but he wants to 'do it quietly.' His dream invites him to a different course of action--to elevate compassion above the law-something 'his son' will do with broader ramifications later.

Dreams, it seems, can be an intrusion into our settled worlds that generate a sort of unease with the way things are. Sometimes, like Joseph's dream, instructions seem to come with it, more often than not, we have to let the unease and discomfort drive us to discover new ways of acting, new ways of being.