Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Desperate Search: (dis)Concertingly Staid


Desperate Search: 
Disconcertingly Staid
Part Two
i  want to be well. 
I want to tell you about my thoughts.
i want my thoughts to have resonance.
i want to see the world around me. 
i want to remember the world I've seen.
i want to analyze exactly what I  remember.
i want to add my individuality to the analysis.
i want to be both a part and wholly other.
i want to engage and be engaged.

i want to tell you more about The Revengers.
i want to prove to you its merit.
i want to show how the machinations of story require grace.
i want to inform you on how the grace card is like the force of gravity.
i want to explain how this relates to the ragtag band of Revengers.
i want to say that "Vengeance is mine," says the Lord

i want to rattle on about actors.
i want to dissect what makes a truly good actor.

i want to distill the person of Richard McGraw.
i want to contemplate his albums in succeeding chronological order.
i want to order my perspective on his individuality.
i want to see his uniqueness clearly.
i want to share this with you.

i want you to join Me

i want to mention Exodus, chapter 4, verses 22 through 26.
i want to portray the story as strange.
i want the answers to come without ease.
i want the answers to be hidden.
i want the answers to be worth the fight. 

i want to make a Questioner's Bible.
i want it to have verse by verse questions correlating to the text.
i want to start with the book of Mark
i want you to love Mark's eye as I do.
i want you to taste the enigma.
i want you to know that the word for enigma in Slovene is uganka, which sounds like an onomatopoeia to me. 

i want to share my reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with you.
i want you to see it as I see it.
i want you to know that the story is spiritually vast.
i want you to see the limitlessness of the world created, the world imagined.
i want you to know that it is everything.
i want you to see the end of everything.
i want you to know that everything and nothing are mostly the same. 
i want you to still have hope. 

i want you to help me to understand Eyes Wide Shut
i want you to tell me if it's a reflection of 2 Thessalonians 2:7
i want you to tell me what 2 Thessalonians 2:7 is really referring to. 

i want you to know that Sufjan Stevens is a modern prophet.
i want you to feel how the baton was passed to Sufjan from C.S. Lewis.
i want you to see history's river.
i want you to paddle with me.

i want you to believe that The Crusades were really important.
i want you to agree with me that the past isn't as fixed as we like to see it as.
i want us to say that the past is not something to be tamed.
i want you to precisely know what I meant by that last sentence.

i want us to be fulfilling our purpose together.
i want us to be you and me. 
i and you and us: comrades.
i and you and us as comrades discovering the trillion pieces of the puzzle.
you and i knowing that the puzzle is the face of God.



In the last post, Dave Eggers and his 90's magazine Might was a topic of inquiry and approach. The idea was exciting and innovative, but in my perception I saw its fatal flaw from the first act. Perhaps Mr. Eggers knew this too. I learned this morning that Eggers has created another magazine since then, known as The Believer. Might, although it had great aspirations, buried itself in critique. It wallowed there. Perhaps additionally, and I believe this is the flaw (and our great pride) of the hipster aged intellectual, no destination. Things are looked at, adulated, adored even, and through this a great lens is put on the grocery carts of the world -- but what is missing is the collective -- the great sense of inclusion that can bind us together knowing that the grocery cart is everything because in it we can see and therefore chance to distill, dirty reflections of the God of the cosmos.  Might primarily seems like a failed concept because they labored hard in destroying the works of others. 

The Believer has this written about themselves on their website 
The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object.
There are book reviews that are not necessarily timely,
and that are very often very long.
There are interviews that are also very long.
We will focus on writers and books we like.
We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt.
The working title of this magazine was The Optimist.


There's much there to get excited about. Again I repeat, much. It is reminiscent of the speech Conan O'Brien made during his exit from The Tonight Show, in which he invoked the virtue of hope of cynicism, glee over sarcasm. The mag's wikipedia page opines that the creators of the magazine went forth in creation with the philosophical backbone of "the concept of the inherent Good." That's intriguing, no? 

I hereby propose that whoever would deem themselves as willing and able to participate, join me in the creation of our own magazine. Huzzah. 

Here's how I see it:


-We create a universe (the space of the magazine), in which we look at all the knowledge in the world. We have the freedom to look at everything that is or has been. We say that imagination too exists, in that ideas do indeed have a physical presence (neurons and brain signals and the like, you see). 
-We take the world entire as a vessel for coming to know God. Deeper and deeper. 


-We observe scientific phenomena, literary genius, exceptional sporting feats, and we search within those things for that which uniquely reflects a vision of God. 


-Because Man has been made in God's image, foremost among the efforts we make, would be to look at the individual, and to love them for how they have been made. 


-We create pieces of art along the way ourselves. These should not be free forming pieces of art --- we are not a journal of unattached artistic renderings --- but rather, pieces that enhance the experience of the magazine. For instance, one issue may have a soundtrack, an audible companion to the words on the page. This area of course, should be left vague, so as to leave room for later formation and evolution.


-We will charge a substantial fee to be a member of the magazine. It should not be cheap. Our pretentious magazine will not ever have an extensive fan base, but we'll force the play of the consumers passion by making them invest in order to partake. 


-This is a big one (and already foreshadowed): there will be no room for negative reviews and hollow criticism. We have not the time for such things. If we are interested acutely on the worship of God by the compartmentalization of pieces of matter and mind, then the best way to deal with dirt and crap is to ignore it. There are, inevitably, certain nuances and distinctions that can be made and will be, but as a general principle, the destruction of concept is not what we'll be in the business of doing. Let the others toil away in such self-deducting ventures. We will avoid the pitfalls of jealousy, envy, and strife by loving the lovely, not concerning ourselves with burying the already dead. 




-So, anyone got a title?

-Now, if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, -- each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. 1 corinthians 3:12-15

Shall we not build, so as to see our work endure, not because of our greatness, but because we fixed our eyes on the character and form of God? Shall we not do that in this way? With our hearts? With our minds? With our work?

that's it.
that's all i want. 
Goodbye.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

In Haste: Stand By Me


As I lay down to sleep tonight, I ponder on my Fiancee, and the life I'll get to live with her -- the magic in it all. I also think about how it's already getting hard to imagine a world where I don't see her or at least hear her every day. It's such a strange thought to realize that a day is coming, and quickly, where the life I led before marriage will be a mirage, something I can't quite ever remember sufficiently. How strange that will be. The person I've so long identified myself as, Dante Stack, Christian, from California, renown breaker of printers, single; that self will no longer be myself.

What dreams may come? Yes, indeed quite so. But I'll add also, what dreams, both poisonous and worthy of remembrance, I once was, and now slowly fail to comprehend.

Yes, what dreams did come. 

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Desperate Search: (dis)Concertingly Fickle

Desperate Search: 
Disconcertingly Fickle
Part One

Below the surface lies the grocery cart. Always.
Sometimes it's a pond, a lake, a river, a neighborhood litter corner, a forgotten hill, or, in my most recent sighting, the Adriatic. Bedraggled and alone, the grocery cart is an ever present reality. It asks many questions. Who are these people that steal grocery carts, anyway? Why do they then, after going to the hassle of stealing them, leave them to be devoured by rust and algae in the nearest local waterhole? Who does these things?

Who murdered those people in cabin 28 in Keddie, California?


The grocery cart is everything. It's nothing at all. It's the world entire.


Often I skate from one philosophical obsession to the next. I've been a self-labeled Objectivist, Post-Neitzcheian, Christian Spiritualist, Modern Pelagian, Hopeless Romantic, Fiscal Conservative, Social Libertarian, Wannabe Franciscan (minus the monk part), Post-Tribulationist, Artist, International Man of Mystery, Zealot, Vague Wanderer, Desperate Believer, Doubter, Doubter with Faith, Believer with Doubt, Believer in Fear, Late-Night Radio Listener, Non-Conformist, Peer-Pressured Non-Conformist, Redactor, Bohemian, Naturalist, Carnivore, Anti-Abortionist, Anti-Death Penaltyer.... of Paul, of Apollos.

What does it matter? -The grocery cart is everything. It's nothing in and of itself, but it can be everything. It can be infinite in dimension.

I move from one topic to the next, concerned immensely with the present thought, secretly believing and caressing the hope that this one, newly seen perspective/topic/theme/reality will be the key to unlocking God.


This, my friends, is the everything.

I've been outspoken in my contempt for The Avengers, I saw in it the great nothingness of pulp without unleashed imagination's eye. I saw no grocery cart to steal.

Currently I am reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a super self-aware semi-autobiography by Dave Eggers, friend of David Foster Wallace (the one I wish deeply to extract genius in tangible form from) and screenwriter of the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, a film I adore. In the book, Dave is a founding member of a magazine entitled Might. You know it's real because it has a wikipedia page> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_magazine

From what I gathered from the memoir was that the magazine's aspiration was to be the magazine that stood for everything -- was the fulfillment of everything the age is meant to be. From what I discerned, Might was everything the world had, was the embodiment of nineties' truth.

Generally, my passions dip and fade with as much zeal as they arrive, stamping their sudden 'game-changing' truths to the inner parts of my retinas, where my brain touches the backs of my eyeballs. In writing this (I won't rewrite or reread this, so it's only my local memory that informs me and catalogs the essence and theme of this post written thus far), I've attempted to insinuate a certain negative association with my predisposition to stumbling hopelessly romantically in love with whatever new truth theme becomes in vogue for me. Now, I can say truly to you, now I can say it; that's not how I perceive my stumblings at all. Not whatsover. Rather, I think I'm right. I'm right and I'll write about it because the grocery cart is everything.



Points of Hypothesis:
1) All truth points to God.
              a) All truth is an outpouring of God's (i) design, (ii) character,  (iii) imagination, or (iv) declaration, as no truth exists apart from God Himself.
2) God is infinite. 
3) Truth is beauty. 
4) We are finite beings given insight that the infinite is real and abounds around us (within us as well?). In this being finite, we find that we can be, in every single moment of existence, fully endowed with a perpetual state of wonder at the mystery of infinitude. 
5) This mystery, while ever being present, ever presents itself in wholly new and wholly other ways, thereby making the mystery around us appearing to ever change, wherein reality we are only ever being forced to reckon with a different aspect of the same great enigma.
6) An inherent attribute within mankind is that we are led to explore. This is exemplified in a myriad of ways by man, not many of which are redeemed. Perhaps we can call the basic idea behind it as: curiosity and wonder. 
7) Our primary function on Earth is to glorify God. 
8) Worship of the almighty God is the most exacting, radical, and profitable form of glorifying God for man. 
9) Exploring the world around us can be, and should be, a form of deep, physical, mental, and spiritual worship. 

Points of Conclusion:
Therefore 10) is:
Everything is illuminated. Everything is cloaked in mystery.


The grocery cart is everything. The grocery cart is therefore illuminated. It is illuminated as a device which we can use, compartmentalize, scrutinize forever, and see the very eye of God. The grocery cart is nothing because we will never reach our destination merely observing (even with an eye towards God worship) the thing itself. The grocery cart therefore forever remains at the bottom of that riverbed/lake/stream/Adriatic as everything and nothing all at once. And everything acts/serves precisely the same purpose as the grocery cart.

All is everything. All is nothing.


In Part Two, I will try to distill 'Next Steps' out of all this. I will try to shift the focus from the merely philosophical to the outlandishly pompous naivite of physical movement. We'll see if (and how) it works.

Until then, I conclude with this quote from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, wherein a contributor of Might Magazine focuses in on the scope life with his application to MTV's Real World

It reads as follows (strange grammar and syntax his):

Dear Producers,
Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV's "Real World." Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche's, due. 

I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!

Oscar Wilde wrote, "Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write." As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.
Sincerely,
David Milton

TO BE CONTINUED.



Thursday, May 10, 2012

Sunday Inquiries #6


Appoint a wicked man against him; 
let an accuser stand at his right hand.
When he is tried, let him come forth guilty;
let his prayer be counted as sin!
May his days be few;
may another take his office!
May his children be fatherless
and his wife a widow!


May his children wander about and beg,
seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit!
May the creditor seize all that he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil!
Let there be none to extend kindness to him,
nor any to pity his fatherless children!


May his posterity by cut off;
may his name be blotted out in the second generation!
May the iniquity of his fathers be
remembered before the Lord,
and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out!


Let them be before the Lord continually, 
that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth!
Psalm 109:6-15

King David goes on and on from there.

So gentle audience, I beseech you:
How do solve a problem like King David?
How do you catch God and pin Him down?
How do you find a word that means justice?

The most basic and primal answer is to run on about how the Bible is a wide and open place, full of various forms of writing; one must comprehend the genre of literature one is reading in order to give a sound exegesis. Right, I get that. But that all seems like its an evasion tactic. David is, in this passage and others, pleading with God to bring recompense upon his enemies. So how do I read his words? This is Holy Spirit inspired stuff, yes? Why did God let him write it? Why did He allow it to make it into canon?

How do I reconcile the words of a desperate and angry man with the words of my King and my Lord who tells me to forgive seventy times seven? 

My partial answer is that the marrow of the Psalms is not a list of God's ordinances and reasoning towards the world, but rather, examples of impassioned pleas to the God who listens. It does, most assuredly, give credence to Christ's words, cast all your cares upon me. Indeed. Nevertheless, if the principle is simply just 'take all your thoughts to the Lord', what keeps us from interpreting other parts of scripture likewise? Furthermore, if we say that David's words here are not meant to be taken as something to emulate, than we are certainly betraying David's intent, correct? David wanted his enemies to perish and he thought it a good and noble thing to ask the Lord to punish them. Surely that's why he went to the point of writing this Psalm down and having it remain as a song to be song in the nation of Israel. 

If David's intent is not the Spirit's intent -- than by what criteria can we trust any writer in Biblical texts? This reminds me vaguely of the literary style of the untrustworthy narrative... something akin to the likes of Holden Caulfield or Alex DeLarge. You just can't trust those fellas.

What I see in Psalm 109 is a philosophical worldview that is richly distinct from that of Christianity. Love thy neighbor is no where to be sniffed. 

...What to do, what to do?

I ask once more:
How do solve a problem like King David?

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Avenging the Avengers


And so I have fallen into elitist obscurity. HELP ME!!!! AAAAAHHAHHHH!H!!HHH!!!HAA!!!!AAaaaaaa....

I loathed my nearly three hour intake of The Avengers.

Comrades of mine both great and small -- the world entire, it would seem -- have ceremoniously trumpeted the superhero conglomerate as the entrance of the age of divine cinematic perfection. The world speaks with one voice: "We love the Avengers."

And so I have become a man against himself. I have become the bane of my own intent, the leftover vomit of tongueless leper, the fallout of severe gamma radiation exposure, the type of mold that kills cheese rather than making it tasty, the pimple upon the low self-worthed teenager, the cur of society, the locust upon the field, the jellyfish to the eye of the common man. Sigh. With what burden of hate, I bear. With such burden, such burden, such burden...

I have, for a day's measure of hours already, pensively reasoned with panted breath how it is that I should respond to the film.

I thought about ranting and ranting here until there was no ranting left to give. But in this scenario, I fear my fingers would cripple, my voice break, my body decompose before I could vanquish entire my fill of justice ridden rant-mania. Additionally, I don't want to be that guy. I read on facebook and myriad other venues the ease to which folks complain. I don't want to be a hater. I don't want to burn my time in exasperated pleas for people to disregard and disdain something they already prize. I don't want to be that guy.

So then, what then should I do?

What is just?
All that I can figure is that I myself must fight The Avengers.
Of course, I am a mere mortal, I can't fight the demigod Thor.
I have not the resources that Iron Man has. 

I must assemble my own ragtag band of outsiders!

REVENGERS ASSEMBLE!!!*

*I've started a new page on this here blog entitled "Revengers: Trading Card Exclusive!" I'll add to the page over time. Enjoy!

Sunday, May 6, 2012

In Haste: The Dark Knight Rises Trailer

In light of the titanic opening weekend of The Avengers, it is a curious thing to sit back and take in the newest Batman trailer. It's unrelentingly bleak.

I love Nolan's Batman flicks for the very reason of their bleakness. Batman never faces off against fun shaped aliens from outer space. By no means! He faces off against ideologies. He's the philosophical savant of the superhero genre.

Happy to notch up my excitement for the newest embodiment of the Silent Guardian in action, I took a listen to a podcast (here), in which a handful of geeks gasm out over the trailer and various theories they have pertaining to the masterstrokes of the upcoming film.


What shook me as quite insightful, was the bittersweet pill that this group of geeks were already preparing to swallow. Director Christopher Nolan has not stymied his words when broaching the topic of this film being his last Batman epic. Nolan and Batman are to be no more after this last adventure. The Bat boys sighed knowing that in two months time their long expectation would come to a climax, and from then on they'd only have their memory of the first time.

Long have I known of such emotion. As a child, every Christmas sat in me as the same inevitable dose of reality. The day after Christmas always felt hollow. The thing I'd long waited for had come and gone. Sure, I received cool gifts, and more often than not my expectations were met or exceeded (thanks to my loving parents), but nevertheless I had to face the inevitable near-future made present, which consisted entirely of non-present-opening events. This was sad. The thrill was gone.

Today I laugh at such event driven expectation. For perhaps the first time in my life (well, I looked forward to college an awful lot --- but this is exponentially a higher experience, I think you'll agree), I'm looking forward to a gamechanger in life. This gamechanger surely starts with a Christmas-esque event, but continues until I breathe in this life no more. Marriage. Marriage to a bodacious babe. Marriage to a woman who'll become one with me, as me... crazy stuff, eh. Marriage to my second self.

I think at its core, when we anticipate singular events like the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, we are deep down pining for an event that will remain with us. We want to experience that change.

I, in the form of my bride, have that change.

I long for this change.

And then -- in or outside of time, there will be but one more change for us; one more event horizon. Jesus Christ will reign as the once and future king. He will claim His sovereignty. And for his children, there will be no bitter pills to swallow.

I begin anew on July 3rd. Long may it reign.




Desperately Searched: Bobby Fischer


We are told that Bobby Fischer ("Where is he? I don't know! I don't know!" Such sentiments are all the more true now) died an insane, ravenously angry man that had traded his homeland citizenry for asylum on an island nation. We are told he was a hater of Jews, convinced that various schemes were in place putting an elite squad of international Jewry as harbingers of worldwide power and control. This delusion is made all the more head-scratching by the reality that Fischer himself was Jewish.

He died in 2008 in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Let us not concern ourselves with the darker seams of Mr. Fischer's character. The HBO documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World focuses our attention on the screws of his clock -- the bristles of his broom. Let us concern ourselves not with the 'whys', not with question of what made this one man tick and sweep in the manner he chose, for there lies no answers this side of heaven. Men and women will always be shrouded in the tomb of history. Motive (including subconscious motive) can never be determined with assurance.

What Fischer brought us was a genius mind -- an acute rationale for conquering a simple game of wit and wisdom.

Fischer almost always started with the same first move. Even from early on in his career he complained of the limits of the beginning moves of the mind sport. In chess, there are precisely twenty first moves that can be made. Twenty. That's mere pittance for the genius, you see. Pittance. Nevertheless, out of the twenty choices, Fischer was renown for relegating himself to the same choice.

1972: Bobby Fischer faced off against the best of the Soviet regime. Boris Spassky was the reigning Grandmaster of the Universe ("of the Universe" my addition), and the lone, rising star American, Bobby Fischer was to rival his dominance. Fischer, the finicky mental titan and consummation of American uber-independence, chose to not show up for the first match of gameplay. The second game, in which he nearly walked out on, also ended in a Fischer loss. He made a rather startlingly brazen error. He would claim that the noise from the television cameras squelched his ability to concentrate. As it goes, the competition ended when one player arrived at 12 wins against the other. In this score count, Fischer still had nine games he could not show up for before admitting defeat. That would not happen. 

After the second game, Fischer would not lose another game.

Spassky himself admitted later that the turning point of the match occurred in game six. That's the game in which Fischer broke tradition. He changed his first move. The ever constant one-in-twenty was challenged. Spassky had prepared for the tournament based on the foreknowledge that Fischer always chose the same first play. Chess, being a game of possibilities contingent upon previous decision points, became suddenly unexplorable for the communist nation's hero. From that move forward, Fischer's moves were shrouded in mystery for Spassky.

Fischer won handily. He was world champion. He was the grand master.

Three years later, in 1975, another, stronger, faster, meaner Commie had been born and was a means by which Fischer was to be threatened anew for empirical grand-leadership. The threat of extinction was too grand. Fischer never showed.

Another twenty years later, in 1992, Fischer and Spassky rematched. This was the first (and last) competition since the 72 championship that Fischer took on.

And this is where my interest is peaked. The two men fought. Fischer again won without much wonder. I suspect Bobby Fischer saw the event as just the thing that would swell his name back into the limelight of the big boys of chess. It didn't have this effect. 

The general consensus was that the two former grandmasters were dueling in the manner that a present day George Foreman would face off against a latter day Mohammad Ali. The show was, in a word: pathetic.


But why? Chess is not a game of carnal strength. These were not old-timers in the sense of mental ward scrubbers. Fischer and Spassky were surely still quick witted, what was the problem? Kasparov, the grandmaster of the nineties, replied, when asked about Fischer's game play, was a polite, "He did okay."


The problem was not their minds... at least, not in the traditional sense. The problem lay in evolution. General consensus agreed that the foremost problem of the duel was that the players built their artworked gameplans off of byzantine ideas. Chess for maniacs and historians is a game wedged in history; it never stops building upon itself. As a player, you always must build upon the shoulders of your forefathers. In this way, the turns that Spassky and Fischer took in 92 worked well and good for players in 72, but all their style and class had been observed and pondered over in the twenty years since, and henceforth had become inadequate and effectively mute in regards to productive game play strategery.

There are two ways to react to this situation. The first and obvious route is to say that Fischer and Spassky, being the old dogs that they were, failed to adapt to the ever changing architecture of the sport. Fischer, however, saw a different path. It was not his lack of expertise, not his twenty years of virtual escape from the ungulating sport that was the culprit, nay, it was the sport itself. It was flawed.


Fischer's conviction was that chess was not in fact, the game of intellectual championship. He declared rather, that the game had descended into mere formulaic memorization. His standpoint was that chess had become a game of facing not an opponent, but a list of pre-memorized positions, flanks, and 6 or 7 move set-ups. Whoever could remember best was crowned king. For Fischer, this was a banal madness of conceit.

The solution was to change the game. Fischer yearned for a chess that was built off of facing individuals; that was a game of creativity and art. So, in 1996 he created a construct to the set-up of chess that would come to be called Chess960. The idea was to maximize the number of first possible moves, so that no formulas could be reasonably learned and spewed out as memorized regurgitation. Chess960 has a starting board where the back row of rooks, knights, bishops, king and queen, are assembled (to some degree) at random. The outpouring of this small change is that the number of potential first moves expands from the pre-noted 20 moves up to 960, hence the name.

I'm choosing to note Bobby Fischer here in this series because of some deep desire within him to keep imagination alive. His Chess960 tries, as best as he could fathom, to do away with route memory and expand the plane of possibility beyond human comprehension. Too many choices means that not all options can be analyzed. Fischer saw that a place that allowed for uncertainty was a place that breathed creativity.



Bobby Fischer's illustrious star is noted here for seeing beauty, art, and the essence of creativity itself being a spring whose existence is predicated by a lack of foreknowledge. 

To apply that statement to God is hazardous at best and automatically cause for blasphemous leaps of hypothesis. I shan't make such claims here. 

I only mean to marvel.




Thursday, May 3, 2012

Write


Write.
Write right now.
Write so that you'll live.
Write about the dinosaurs.
Write about scorned hearts.
Write about the age of the trees.
Write about the nature of purgatory.
Write about the creation of salvation.
Write about the reasonableness of Jesus.
Write about the diseases of the mind and body.
Write about those good times which nearly killed you.
Write whatever it is you do and whatever it is you think.

Write.
Write, damn you, write.
Write so that you can put it out there.
Write so that you can understand yourself.
Write so that the world will comprehend something true.
Write so that you may lay claim to an earnestness of perspective.
Write so that there is a tangible journey, laid out as words on a screen.
Write so that there will endure a chronicle of this moment ineffable and sublime.
Write so that years from now you'll wonder who you were in this moment of pensivity.


Write.
Write it long.
Write is down.
Write it as it is.
Write it as it appears to be.
Write it anew and as innovation.
Write it so that the beast inside may subside.
Write it to be the best that it could conceivably be.
Write it so that God will listen.

God.
God, write.
God, write it.
God, write it as history.
God, write it as memory.
God, write it so that you don't accidentally speak it.
(we know what happens when you speak)
God, write a million words or more, I'll read them all.
God, write it all so that I can feel the nearness of you here.
God, write so that we can know the very mind of the infinite. 
God, write it and be intimate with your loved ones, I last of all.
God, write and I will know that you haven't ever abandoned us here.
God, write it through and through and I'll see how you paint history with presence.
God, can I ask this of you? Write write write write write write write write write write.


Write.
Write and I'll understand.
Write and I'll see it your way.
Write and I'll be closer to you still.
Write and I'll know what I'm doing here.
Write and I'll clean that dark mirror bright.
Write and I'll know your heart and your mind.
Write and I'll feel those thoughts of yours -- I'll feel it all.
Write and I may explode with the fullness of it all -- and I'll be happy.
Write and we'll see what the payoff will be for this story -- and I'll be happy.


Are all your stories written?
Is there no more?
Are there no more prophets to summon?
Is there no man left to inspire?
Are the acts all already splashed out in front of us?
Is there no more time for revelation?
Are the facts of the past enough to carry us through to the end?
Is there an end, or are we caught in the gaps forever?
Are we here to sit and reflect only, or will you unfold more of yet yourself?

Perhaps you reply in kind:
Be good, Dante, be good.

Okay, Papa. Okay.