Christmas, Christ Mass, and Incarnation

amen hesid

 

 

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Christmas, Christ Mass, and Incarnation

via flying.farther by d. w. horstkoetter on 12/18/08

This post was brought to you by the insanity that spews from radio stations. I hate Christmas songs. I detest Christmas specials (save for Colbert's Christmas Special). And quite frankly, this "war on Christmas" and "saving Christmas from all those atheists" is a bunch of crap. You're saving Christmas — the capitalist holiday — from any meaningful critique.

Now enter the Christian calendar and the season of Advent. Often in this time, we talk of the incarnation. On one hand, it is a perfectly legitimate time to do so. On the other hand, we misunderstand the incarnation as simply divine conception. With this problem, we disconnect the incarnation from the entire life of Jesus and therefore, misunderstand much to be seen in the incarnation.

We need to remember that the action of the incarnation made God's story – his mind and heart – known as never before. It showed God's acceptance and rejection; it was the embodiment of the divine yes and no within history, to a greater extent than ever before. While God at the beginning called creation good, God in the incarnation brought creation into herself. At the same time, Johann Metz argues, "God's divinity consists in the fact that he does not remove the difference between himself and what is other, but rather accepts the other precisely as different from himself." In other words, God accepted creation. In point of fact, "[i]n Jesus Christ, man and his world were accepted by the eternal Word, finally and irrevocably…. what is true of this nature that Christ accepted is also fundamentally true of the acceptance of man and his world by God." He did not ontologically destroy or divinize creation; he did not conflate the divine and human narratives, he accepted creation.

God's acceptance of the world and humanity was proclaimed from the beginning: when Gabriel told Mary of what was growing in her and she accepted it with praise, when Joseph accepted the Messiah growing within Mary and Mary's own obedience, when Jesus was born, when the Angels told the shepherds, and when the wise men brought their offerings. God's coming, God's acceptance, was heralded to all. In the proclamations, God did not only affirm creation, but upheld much more about the world. The incarnation was no vague or one-sided acceptance of humanity; the announcements were one of affirmation and salvation. Coming as an infant, from a miraculous birth, the creator of the world grew up; he was formed by the divine promises of the past and looked into the future. Thus "the process of history is 'accepted' in the Christian logos and remains so." However, as scandalous as the idea that the creator grew up, it is inextricably linked to an equally scandalous idea, one of salvation history – one of promise and interruptive action by the creator within history – that makes good on the proclamations from birth. Metz maintains that the otherness, or creation status, of the world is necessary for the world to be, and that "[t]he reality of the world as creation is always mediated through the historical saving reality of the world."

However, Colin Gunton reminds theology and the world, from another approach, that the whole of creation has a telos that speaks of salvation, while affirming the creator/created distinction:

If, then, to be created is to be in indissoluble relation to God through the Son and Spirit, it follows that that shape of being, the dynamic form that it takes in its various space-time configurations, derives from creation's relation to its creator. Incarnation, the involvement of God the Son, on the initiative of the Father and through the enabling of the Spirit, then, is a violation of the being neither of God nor of the world. On the contrary, there is a sense in which it realizes the true being of them both, for it perfects at once the Father's work of creation and creature's determination at the traditional doctrine of the incarnation and its teaching of the coming of the one through whom all things were made into direct and personal relation with the creation.

With the creation act bringing creator and creation into a distinct relationship, the incarnation takes center stage, where "Jesus Christ is the one through whom all things take their shape and to whom the Spirit directs them. The shape is unmistakably full of purpose and eschatological significance: "[w]hen the Spirit shapes him a body from the flesh of Mary, what we see is not just the working out of election—through we do see that—but the renewing of the whole of creation, the redirecting of the world to its end." The incarnation, quite simply, restores "creation's teleology."

It is from this incarnational realigning of creation with its telos that salvation history can be understood, and vice versa: the acceptance of creation-history also meant the salvation of creation-history. While the acceptance of God was extensive – in both time and space, it was not only acceptance. In short, the salvation of creation and history are interlinked. The creator incarnate, more than metaphorically elbow deep in creation and history, would not stand for a broken state – that is, creation-history deviated from its telos. The world, humanity, and history must be reconciled. But what method for reconciliation would God incarnate use? Grace and interruption was and is the method.

Thus, Christ's Mass should never be understood within the context of a jolly, vapid song, or the fight for a Christmas tree in a shopping mall or airport, but within hesed, promise-making, promise-fulfilling, solidarity, divine love, justice, peace, and reconciliation. This is why I detest so much the false Christmas and those who seek to wage, in their estimates, a holy war to save Christmas. We must remember that it is for their bourgeois Christmas, not Christ's Mass of acceptance and reconciliation.

Posted in Colin Gunton, incarnation, Johann Metz, reconcile      

 

 

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Advent...the Conspiracy

This is the truth with a capital T and is Beauty in that we as Christians should do everything in our power to destry cute. Especially christmas cute and the light and sweet pornography associated with the holi-daze instead of holy day(ze(.

 

 

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Advent...the Conspiracy

via Out of Ur by UrL Scaramanga on 12/18/08

Our friends at Advent Conspiracy have produced a truly thought provoking video for this season. Is your church participating in this campaign? I'd love to hear about your experiences. If not, how would people react in your church if you showed this video?

 

 

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Lost Souls

this soul and belief in the soul still is in tension for me.

 

 

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Lost Souls

via From the Catacombs by Caryl on 12/11/08

[Note: This is a re-post from November, 2006]

Vox clamato in deserto . . .

The writings of the Christian ascetics of the Orthodox tradition comprise the collection of texts known as the Philokalia, and span the 4th to the 15th centuries. The first compilation of these writings was completed in the 18th century. In our time a four-volume set was compiled, translated and edited by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, and published in 1979 in Great Britain under the auspices of the Eling Trust.

It is a shock to encounter the Desert Fathers. Almost everything that comes to mind when we hear of them is wrong, and there are vast layers of assumption and prejudice that have to be peeled away before we can understand what they mean about the different energy levels in human nature - intellect, image, emotion, wishing, perception, thinking, voluntary and involuntary. Compared to their acuity of discernment, Western philosophy seems a dry husk, and the massive accumulations of psychology and social science following the post-philosophical age - that is, the harvest of modernity - seem like mere dust.

The shock of Christian ascesis consists in realizing how much the activity of thought depends upon or presupposes the existence of the soul. But it is precisely the existence of the soul that is at issue. As Jacob Needleman writes in Lost Christianity, referencing a modern practitioner of Christian ascesis, "... the soul is not a fixed entity. According to Father Sylvan, it is a movement that begins whenever man experiences the psychological pain of contradiction." [1]

It was a disaster for Christianity, according to Father Sylvan, when it accepted the existence of the soul already "in finished form" in human nature.

This "given-ness" of the soul in the Christian view of human nature passed out of active use several centuries ago - what modern discipline concerns itself with the soul in any meaningful way? -- and has been succeeded by the "given-ness" of reason or intellect -- the a priori assumption of reason. John McMurtry writes that the first rule of the "Group-Mind" is that it cannot adopt itself as an object of critical reflection:

"When the most self-evident line of thought has been blinkered out across a people, only an a priori thought system can account for it. As with other great problems of our era, the group-mind disconnects by stopping thought before it arises."

Christian ascesis is the practice of giving attention to thoughts as they first appear, thus it is a practice wholly at odds with a priorism and with all forms of mechanical, psychic or associative activity which masquerades as "thought." According to Father Sylvan, a hundred, a thousand times a day, thoughts that challenge or contradict assumptions and beliefs, thoughts that might provoke self-questioning or discomfort about some fact or emotion or received wisdom, thoughts that might force one to confront one's own laziness, anger, lack of love, lack of integrity -- such thoughts are continually circling the perimeter of the mind and sometimes even penetrate its arena. And yet they come to nothing, they are quickly repelled, conveniently forgotten, dispersed, and covered over by compulsive action, rationalization, explanation, or emotional reaction. Father Sylvan calls this incessant activity of covering over the Question the "First Dispersal of the Soul." It means that the force of attention is wasted, degraded by absorption into one part or another of the psycho-physical organism, and rendered useless for the growth of the soul. Man becomes trapped in an "automatism of non-redemptive experience," which he likens to St. Paul's "body of death."

The struggle of Christian ascesis is to contain the energy of the Question within oneself so that the Soul can come into being. Thus, the existence of the Soul is not a given, not an a priori assumption. It is an energy formed through the confrontation with question and contradiction, an energy that has to be sought, recognized, collected and accumulated - "pondered in the heart." This is why "God can only speak to the soul," according to Father Sylvan, "and only when the soul exists." How accurately this comment foreshadows the condition of modern man, exemplified in John Derbyshire's complaint concerning his loss of religious faith. When asked by an interviewer whether he had ever had a religious experience, Derbyshire replied, "No, and I'm miffed by this."

It is a relief to move from this world of the whining modern, who expects to be provided with spiritual experience in the full armory of modern comforts, to the writings of the Desert Fathers. St. Mark the Ascetic (5th century; sometimes known as Mark the Hermit) says "Never belittle the significance of your thoughts; for not one escapes God's notice."

Of course - for it is these very thoughts, no matter how seemingly insignificant, that must be attended to and carefully 'interrogated.' The process of interrogating the thoughts is likened in the New Testament to 'dividing the sheep from the goats.' It is an activity of continuous discernment and sifting of thoughts that can lead to the 'gathering' of what is vital in them, 'saving' them and 'saving in them' that which is possible for future development.

Then there is this astonishing passage from "No Righteousness by Works:"

"Involuntary thoughts arise from previous sin; voluntary ones from our free
will. Thus the latter are the cause of the former." [Italics mine.]

I emphasized this last sentence as underscoring the fact of 'Presence,' which is the aim of Christian ascesis - dwelling in the presence and present attention of the soul, which acts retroactively upon the 'past.' It is not the past that determines in the present, as in deterministic modern psychology; it is the present disposition of the soul that influences the kind of past that we even perceive. And again, emphasizing our responsibility for our thoughts, as for our experience, St. Mark the Hermit says: "Do not say, 'I don't want it, but it happens.' For even though you may not want the thing itself, yet you welcome what causes it."

And again, responsibility is presence: "It is the uneven quality of our thoughts that produces changes in our condition. For God assigns to our voluntary thoughts consequences which are appropriate but not necessarily of our choice."

The quality of attention: "When you find that some thought is disturbing you deeply in yourself and is breaking the stillness of your intellect with passion, you may sure it was your intellect which, taking the initiative, first activated the thought and placed it in your heart."

And finally: "He who does not choose to suffer for the sake of truth will be chastened more painfully by suffering he has not chosen."

There are many other sayings of this quality in St. Mark the Hermit's "On the Spiritual Law." And his comprise a small portion of this wonderful collection of texts. In reading these texts one can understand why the West underwent a tremendous historical development, and how the energy these Fathers discerned and elucidated in the soul later exploded into so many fields - fields seemingly quite diverse from their lucid gaze. And reading them today brings one into a renewed sense for the failures of modern Western intelligence, which now at the pinnacle of its power seems like a blind and destructive giant. The recovery of lucid intelligence in the West would be greatly assisted by a revival and study of these texts. Thinking and empathy can only arise in the soul, but if there is no basis in the soul for them to become active and conscious, these manifestations attest to the presence of energies, and these energies do not just cease to be or disappear. They must go somewhere. Instead of empathy and thinking, the energies fuel cancerous hatreds and controlling, rigidifying obsessions.

The Philokalia is our crying need -- in the twilight of our souls, it can be a lamp to hold up against our darkening minds.

[1] Simone Weil on contradiction: "God has entrusted all phenomena, without any exception, to the mechanism of this world... The contradictions which the mind is brought up against form the only realities, the only means of judging what is real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test on the part of necessity."

Compare also Richard Weaver, speaking of the liberalism in Western societies: "Its fundamental incapacity to think, arising from an inability to see contradictions, deprives it of the power to propagate." From his Ideas Have Consequences (1948).

 

 

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amen

As the great Chinese poet Yang Wan-li said, a thousand years ago, "A poem is made of words, yes, but take away the words and the poem remains."

40 Years Later

I am reading (re-reading) Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

I am still learning

 

 

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40 Years Later

via Granny Miller by noreply@blogger.com (Granny Miller) on 12/10/08

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton.

Brother Louis, or Thomas Merton as he was known to the world, died suddenly in Bangkok,Thailand on December 10, 1968 by accidental electrocution.
He was 53 years old.

Thomas Merton lived most of his life in silence and in poverty as a Trappist monk in rural Kentucky.

He farmed with horses, knew sheep, cows, pigs, rabbits and goats.

He lived at times without indoor plumbing or electricity, and chopped more than his share of wood.
He liked beer, jazz and had trouble with his teeth and back.

Thomas Merton was a worldly, literate and sophisticated man who left the world to find himself.

He was a great sinner and I think also a saint.

Even though I'm not Roman Catholic, I have a tremendous devotion to Thomas Merton.

I'll tell you why.

In my mid 40's I experienced a crisis of faith and completely abandoned Christianity and turned to the Eastern religions looking for answers.

I questioned everything in my life and could no longer pray or hear God.
I lived every day in a spiritual desert.

And without going into personal details, I will tell you, Thomas Merton bought me back to Christianity and showed me a place where I could once again pray.
Brother Louis returned me to God.

Thomas Merton's life was filled with intense struggle, doubt, rebellion and questioning.
In Thomas Merton I recognized and found myself.

But more importantly, I also found in him a loving spiritual guide and source of reassurance.

The best maps are sometimes drawn by people who have been the most lost.
Thomas Merton gave me a map I could read.

And I think it is nothing shy of a miracle, that today 40 years after his death, so many still hear his voice and listen to what he has to say.

"We have what we seek. We don't have to rush after it. It was there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us."

"To hope is to risk frustration. Therefore, make up your mind to risk frustration."

"Take more time, cover less ground."

" The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them of the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which 'God is satisfied', and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men."

" Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love."

"For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purpose of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not."

Technorati tags: Thomas Merton, Brother Louis, Trappist, Monk

 

 

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Happy New Liturgical Year!

 

 

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Happy New Liturgical Year!

via FIRST THINGS: On the Square by Michael Linton on 12/3/08

Happy New Year. Yes, I'm pushing it, but not as much as you think. I'm not talking about those woozie performances of "Auld Lang Syne" and the Rose Bowl, but instead the first Sunday of Advent that started off this week. Once a year I have the pleasure of introducing our students here at MTSU to [...]

 

 

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JOURNAL: Privatopia

pay attention to the NOTE at the bottom, i.e. "Primary loyalties" and having nation-state flags in churches, families and clans selling out for xmas instead of Advent and ChristMass to Epiphany.

Time for Christian resiliance and justice work with anabaptist, separatist, non-constantinianism models and I explicitly reject so-called xtian RECONSTRUCTIONISM (*ssholes!) but then again I am a royalist at heart when someone asks me exactly which king I am waiting advent for. Thanks Matisyahu. King without a crown rocks it.

 

 

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JOURNAL: Privatopia

via Global Guerrillas by John Robb on 12/5/08

The recent announcement of Chicago's sale of its parking meter franchise in order to cover current expenses (part of the growing tsunami of fire sales of public assets in the works by nearly bankrupt state and local governments), reminded me of a paper I published over the Christmas holiday of 2007. The paper (click to read) was in anticipation of the global financial meltdown. I wrote it to help readers get their heads around the implications of rapidly occurring events. Unfortunately, it is playing out to script. It's a good backgrounder for people interested in the future of warfare and resilient communities.

NOTE: Recent efforts to use economic stimulus to reignite the economy are likely to fail badly (Keynesian economics isn't likely to work). Why? Simply, you can't artificially stimulate an economy undergoing a solvency crisis (unlike the situation we faced during the first depression where we were a creditor nation with strongly positive balance of payments, we are now a debtor nation with deeply negative flows).

NOTE: The current crisis is global in scale (too big for any nation-state to handle) and far too complex to model. Worse, it morphs faster than governments can respond. This failure to return conditions to stability will cause a widespread and catastrophic loss in legitimacy for nation-states. As a result, a psychological shift is in motion, spreading at epidemic rates on a global scale, that will put loyalties to family, gang, community, church, etc. (in toto: primary loyalties) far above loyalty to nation-states. The end result will be that global guerrillas and resilient communities will become the two poles of the social spectrum in the future. Don't be caught in between.

 

 

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library Pr0n link

Beautiful linkage

http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/hot_library_smut/

stirling prentice

Wow

 

 

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stirling prentice

via Other Cl/utter by Jenny on 12/2/08

I'm a big fan of stirling prentice's artwork and so I asked him to design a bunch of BookThug swag and odds n' ends. He did the launch poster and now, this cover for our 2009 catalogue, riffing off of Meredith Quartermain's Matter from last season. You can see more of his work at wingedbeastoutfitters.com

      

 

 

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Slow Poetry Feature at Big Bridge

This is truth as we are beginning to read the signs as revealed.

smc

 

 

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Slow Poetry Feature at Big Bridge

via Possum Ego by Dale on 11/19/08

BIG BRIDGE (HTTP://BIGBRIDGE.ORG)
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Contributing editor Dale Smith seeks work that explores definitions, theories, and practices of Slow Poetry. Deadline: December 31.

The online poetry journal Big Bridge seeks essays, poems, visual art, performance documentation, eco-criticism, creative writing pedagogy, and other material that addresses or explores issues generated by conversations initiated last summer over Slow Poetry. Arguments, moreover, that offer critical perspectives on Slow Poetry are welcome.

Since Slow Poetry is strictly a descriptive platform, feel free to contribute new ideas, arguments, and issues that may be useful for the ongoing development of a slow poetics. Here are some critical perspectives to consider that form the basis of Slow Poetry theory and practice:

The current global contraction is going to change the way poets understand the social and physical production of their work. Over the summer I began borrowing ideas from the Slow Food movement and from systems strategist John Robb to introduce ways of thinking about poetry in our current geo-political context.(1) These new approaches, with others, are important for a number of reasons. Since World War II the world has experienced unprecedented growth as access to cheap energy and resources created an era of market expansion and, in the process, the deterioration of the nation-state. Now, with markets contracting, energy and resources becoming inconsistently dispersed, and social networks disrupted by the end of the growth model,(2) poets will increasingly face a number of difficult decisions in their work and in their daily lives—like everyone else.

With market capitalists supporting unfettered growth as a model of social good during the last several decades, it's no surprise that post-World War II poetry experienced a similar expansion. The proliferation of movements and schools of poetry after the war introduced practices of poetry and community that in many ways have been reduced by the homogenizing structure of the creative writing department in more recent years. The Spicer Circle, The Bolinas poets (centered around Joanne Kyger, Robert Creeley, and others), the Coyote poets, (who published work in the 1970s journal, Coyote, edited by Jim Koller), Gary Snyder's circle in the Sierras, the Black Arts Movement and Umbra Workshop (attended by Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson), and many others,(3) helped reinforce practices of poetry that were socially engaged, aesthetically inspired, and pragmatically organized to promote work that significantly opened new directions of thought and social realization.

As models of growth recede in industry and finance, however, we can expect poetry and other art forms to face extraordinary pressures too. Such new problems might include the failure of conventional, petroleum-based food production, new limitations on long-distance travel and communications, inadequate oil and natural gas supply, outdated electricity grids, and increasingly bankrupt municipalities. Approaching such an awesome spectacle of contraction, Slow Poetry might be able to provide dialogue on the contribution of poetry to the new communities that are bound to form as the current economic crisis intensifies and the nation-state further deteriorates along with its legitimizing forms.

With this in mind, we might discuss ways to produce fewer books while developing multiple poetic practices more locally—through readings, performance, public art, and more ephemeral newsletter-like publications. Those of us in academic positions might, moreover, develop pedagogies that direct students toward a world and away from the competitive models of publication, and the set-up for failure that often involves. How, for instance, might poetry be used to introduce argumentation to students—helping them prepare for other decision-making situations wherein agonistic discourse is stressed over obedience to a single perspective? Creative writing pedagogy, moreover, could be applied to prepare students to participate in the material production of texts and performances without developing expectations for prize-winning publication. Poets, especially, can ready themselves and their communities through the ongoing practice and dialogue of poetry in any form.

The preference for the perfect-bound book—based in the environmental hazards of paper and ink production and the legitimizing interests of institutions—also will, by necessity, recede as handmade and online publications begin to carry the more important news. This is already happening. Micro presses, renegade newsletters, online blogs, magazines, and listserves more frequently convey the vital substance of our labor, while the larger presses legitimize work in a system that operates largely without peer review or other oversight processes to support the complicated tasks of literary judgment.

Slow Poetry argues, instead, that social values and skills of production can be reinforced with poetic action on all fronts. Where there is community—people forming in groups to build a meaningful existence—there will exist a poetics at the heart of it. Poetry reinforces attitudes and beliefs—and it can express great doubts.

But we cannot forget the power of the negative too—the critical and cantankerous spirit of poetry remains vital for pointing out the failure of our proposals. Slow Poetry is a movement of negation and simplicity; of acknowledged failure and the obdurate space of hopelessness. Any attempt to rise above such base values litters the world with unjustified optimism. Slow Poetry then provides a space for the negative to assert itself into the tasks of community. There is then a moral dimension to Slow Poetry. No environment is innocent—especially ours. Slow Poetry values doubt over belief and blindness over vision. The point of departure, after Robert Duncan, is "in the dark."

Please send material in word or pdf format to dmsmith@mail.utexas.edu. The following links contain essays, notes, and comments that provide background on Slow Poetry:

K. Silem Mohammad, "Nuissance Value and Slow Poetry," Lime Tree, July 2008 available http://lime-tree.blogspot.com/2008/07/nuisance-value-and-slow-poetry.html

Travis Nichols, "For slow and slow that ship will go," Harriet: a blog from the poetry foundation, August 2008 available http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/08/for_slow_and_slow_that_ship_wi_1.html

Kristin Prevallet, "Practicing Slow Poetry," Letters from Citizen Kay, July 2008 available http://citizenkay.blogspot.com/2008/07/practicing-slow-poetry.html

Dale Smith, "Slow Down," Bookslut, July 2008 available http://www.bookslut.com/marsupial_inquirer/2008_07_013233.php

Dale Smith, "Slow Poetry," Possum Ego, June 2008 available http://possumego.blogspot.com/2008/06/slow-poetry.html

----------

Notes:

1 See John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007); and Robb's blog, Global Guerrillas at http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com; and Dale Smith, Possum Ego at http://possumego.blogspot.com.
2 World news headlines today announce that pirates have taken hostage an oil tanker off the coast of Somalia with an estimated 2 million barrels of oil. Might such piracy eventually threaten safe passage through the Suez Canal?
3 The list here is long, though we shouldn't neglect to mention the various iterations of the New York School and the Deep Image movement along with the elemental interest in ethno-poetics, inspired by the anthologies of Jerome Rothenberg. Bay Area Language Poetry also features prominently as an example of community formation during the 1970s, and is a model that many have learned from.
4 Note how both DHL and the U. S. Post Office have cut thousands of jobs in recent days.

 

 

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Hayden Carruth R. I. P.

 

 

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(title unknown)

via Silliman's Blog by Ron on 10/1/08

Hayden Carruth

1921 – 2008

 

 

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Sockless Jerry rides again

read and learn

 

 

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Sockless Jerry rides again

via Country Party on 10/2/08

The bailout of Wall Street is the triumph of the wealthy establishment, right and left, over what we used to call the 'working class.' Today, it's called the middle class and it includes most Americans. Caleb Stegall finds a lesson—and a hero—in Kansas' past.

 

 

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Tuvan Throat Singing

I keep practicing, but no can do unless I am in the steam shower

Celia Mae McCloud Entered Eternal Life Yesterday.

My Grandmother, who taught me how to read, argue and win at cards.

NEWTON —

Celia "Mae" McCloud, 98, passed away Wednesday (Sept. 17, 2008) at Kansas Christian Home in Newton.

She was born on Aug. 24, 1910, in Walton to William C. and Grace (Stratton) Mills.

She married Robert F. McCloud in June 1935. He preceded her in death in December 1984.

Mae graduated from Walton High School and Bethel College in North Newton. She helped pioneer the Northview Opportunity Center in Newton and taught there for many years. Among her many accomplishments, she was chosen Woman of the Year in her area of teaching.

She is survived by two sons, Terry and Darla McCloud, and Arnie and Joyce McCloud, all of Newton; grandchildren, Scott and Mary Anne McCloud of Newton, Steve and Vonna McCloud of Newton, David and Tayna McCloud of Newton, Shelly and Paul Hardin of Davie, Fla., Beth and Brad Moulds of Hesston, Julie Mills and Jeff Weis of Newton, Jana and Greg Hinz of Newton; 20 great-grandchildren; and two great-great-grandchildren.

She also was preceded in death by her brother, Earl Mills of Newton.

Visitation will be from 1 to 8 p.m. Friday at Broadway Colonial Funeral Home in Newton, with family present from 6:30 to 8 p.m.

A family burial will be Saturday morning at Walton Cemetery.

A memorial service will be at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Kansas Christian Home.

Memorial contributions may be made to Kansas Christian Home or Hospice Care of Kansas in care of the funeral home.

Is education killing creativity?

amen amen amen

 

 

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Is education killing creativity?

via Presentation Zen by Garr on 9/16/08

British reporter Riz Khan put together a nice 20 minute interview last week with Sir Ken Robinson, our favorite creativity and education expert (and famous TED presenter). Even if you've seen Sir Ken's 2006 TED presentation, you'll find this interview an entertaining and thought-provoking refresher. Rizwan Khan is a veteran of the BBC and CNN; he currently hosts the Riz Khan Show on Al Jazeera English.

Part 1
In part one Riz shows a clip from Dr. Robinson's 2006 TED talk. Sir Ken starts out his conversation with the host by suggesting that our education systems (around the world) are outdated and mainly designed to meet the needs of industrialization. Sir Ken makes many good points — some you may not agree with — but he certainly is not saying that math and science should be taught or studied less, rather that music and the arts and creativity in general should be pursued more.

Part 2
In part two Sir Ken tells a couple of interesting stories and makes the point that talent is often buried quite deep within a student and it does not surface until the conditions are right. His new book The Element deals with exploring the conditions that help students find their own "element."



I hope you can take 20 minutes today and watch this interview above. If nothing else, it'll make you think about your own education or the education of your children, etc. When I look back at my own K-12 education, it's really all a blur. How about you? If I could do it all over again, I would study the arts far more deeply and from an earlier age. But I also would take far more science and math classes too. I do not know what an ideal education is, but I think Sir Ken is right when he says we need to transform formal education not just reform it.

I really admire the K-12 teachers of the world, they have the toughest and most important jobs in the world. I never had the talent or courage to be a teacher, but I appreciate the work they do and the challenges they face. Does anyone even have a clue what formal education will look like in the future?

Links
• Sir Ken Robinson's website.
• Sir Ken's 2006 TED talk.

 

 

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from Stanley Fish and this is what I do in my class

(1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills — of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure — that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over." All the rest is distortion, disruption, or at least distraction from what professors ought to do.

above the door in my classroom

An old inscription above many a threshold.

Pax intrantibus can only be translated as "Peace to those who enter," there is no single translation for Exeuntibus Salus that does it justice. Salus is one of those words with a panoply of meanings, among them: well-being, physical and emotional health, fortune, salvation, safety.

Perhaps the best translation would be "Peace unto those who enter; Health, wealth and happiness unto those who leave."

Paige Elaine Jaso (nee Lewis, Wilson & McCloud) R.I.P. August 9, 2008

My first great love, Paige, my Santa Lucia, entered eternal life Saturday, August 9, 2008. Rest in peace.

Pax and prayers for the repose of her soul.

scott

10 Productivity Myths That Hold You Back

 

 

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10 Productivity Myths That Hold You Back

via Stepcase Lifehack by Dustin Wax on 7/28/08

What are the myths and mistaken beliefs that are preventing you from being more productive in both your work life and your personal life? How are you actively undermining your efforts to pull it all together?

Yeah, I mean you.

The sad fact is that the beliefs that we hold about productivity and organization often prevent us from doing and being everything we want to do and be in our lives. While we cannot control the circumstances around us, the things that we think about work, life, effectiveness, success, and innovation affect the way we respond to those circumstances, and often for the worst.

Here, then, are ten common beliefs about productivity that keep people from enjoying the success they desire. How many of these are keeping you from being more productive, effective, and balanced as a person?

Myth 1: Organized equals clean

Too many people equate "organization" with the cold, sterile, un-lived-in spaces they see in glossy magazines. That's not organization – the cleanest-looking space might still take forever to find anything in.

An organized space is simply one in which the things you need the most are close at hand, the things you need often are easily found, and the things you need rarely are out of the way but easily retrieved when needed. That means that organization has to meet your needs, not some imposed notion of cleanliness.

If you never spend more than a minute trying to find anything in that mountain of clutter you call your office (or room or cubicle or kitchen), then leave it alone. At the same time, be honest with yourself – most people claim they can find anything they need, but when put to the test, they're left scratching their heads. If your clutter isn't working for you, put some time into figuring out how to make sure it does work for you.

Myth 2: I don't have time for a system

This is a popular complaint about systems like David Allen's GTD. The thinking goes something like this: "If I spend all my time maintaining my list and doing weekly reviews, I'll never get anything done."

The reality is that while most systems take some time to get set up, once you start using your system, the time you use in "maintenance" is more than made up for by the time you save not having to think about what to do – or making up for the things you didn't remember to do.

Myth 3: Systems are rigid and unflexible

This is another common complaint about productivity systems. The fear seems to be that, unlike everyone else's life, my life is so chaotic and unpredictable that no system can possibly accommodate it all.

I've read a lot of productivity literature in my life – it is, after all, part of my job! – and I've never come across a productivity system that didn't make room for differences in personality, work requirements, or personal situation. In the end, the important thing is to have a system so that you can respond effectively to unforeseen events without losing your grip on your whole life!

More to the point, though, if your life is really that chaotic and unpredictable, it's likely that its because you've resisted adopting some kind of system rather than because no system is good enough for your life. Which tells me that you haven't spent the time you need to figure out what your own life is all about – instead, you've just responded to everything the world has thrown at you as it's come. Adopting a system means spending some time figuring out what's important to you, what isn't important, and how to get rid of the less important stuff so you can start making ground on the important stuff.

Myth 4: Productivity means more work

Once you start down this rabbit hole, it can be really hard to turn yourself around. The idea is that if it takes me half as long to do all the things in my life as it takes me now, then getting productive means I'll be doing twice as much.

If you're not smart about things, that can sometimes be true, at work at least. Supervisors hate to see people lounging around while they're still on the clock, so finishing up your day's work at 2:00 pm means you'll be expected to find more stuff to do to fill in the remaining hours. So if you're that productive, you need to either leverage that extra work into a promotion or raise – or convince your boss to adopt a telecommuting plan so you can work from home.

But productivity isn't just about work, either. Being more productive in your life means you should have more time to do things like spend time with your family, take a vacation, read a book, visit a museum, or write your plan for world domination. Getting your work done in half the time just so you can do twice as much work isn't productive – it's dumb.

Myth 5: Creativity can't be fit into a system

Maybe you believe that productivity stuff is for business people, not creative people like yourself. This is wrong for two reasons. First of all, creative work is still work, and just as susceptible to procrastination, poor planning, and shoddy work practices as bookkeeping, house painting, and world domination.

The second reason is that while you may have a great grasp of the demands of your creative work, unless you're comfortable with the whole "starving artist" thing, chances are you have a lot more to do than just the creative stuff. Records need to be kept, clients need to be contacted, taxes need to be filed, projects need to be invoiced, and so on. And here's the rub: creative people generally don't much like doing all that routine, everyday stuff. Having a system to make that stuff as painless and speedy as possible means you can spend more time being creative.

Myth 6: I work best under pressure

There are people who believe they thrive under the pressure of an impending deadline. Nine times out of ten, they don't. They just enjoy the excuse because it means they don't have to take responsibility for the messes they end up in.

Keeping yourself in a high-stress, always-urgent mode isn't good for your health, and it's not good for your business. Health-wise, it means you're very likely to keel over on day, decades before your time. Business-wise, it means you aren't much of a pleasure to work with, which means that even when your work is good you'll be turning off employers, colleagues, or clients – and sooner or later you'll miss some important detail that you were too frantic to recognize, damaging your job, your reputation, and your career.

If you're lucky, you'll have your heart attack before that happens, though.

Myth 7: My lack of a system is my system

This one's actually true, though not in the way most people intend when they say it. The mess of habits, practices, and beliefs you have right now are, in fact, a system – and you're working it every day. Hard.

But what most people mean is that by not having a system, they're actually being more productive than if they had a system. For some, this is just a variation on Myth #2, but others really think that the mish-mash of habits they've cobbled together out of life experience is working for them. They don't see any room for improvement.

Which is what I imagine being dead is like. For living things, there's always room for growth.

Myth 8: I need inspiration to work

No, you don't. Inspiration is wonderful, but rarely compatible with getting stuff done. What you need is a system to capture those flashes of inspiration so that, when inspiration is on holiday, you've got plenty to work with.

We have a word for people who only work when they're inspired. That word is "unemployed". (The reverse isn't true, of course – not all unemployed people only work when they feel like it.)

Myth 9: Being organized is boring

This is a variation of Myth #1, flavored with a dash of Myth #6: some people crave the excitement that always being about to screw up brings them. This may reflect deep psychological trauma, but it may also just reflect a lifetime of bad working experiences – pulling a success out of imminent failure can feel great, and if your "everyday" successes aren't rewarded, it can be tempting to push for the imminent failure so you can pull the success out of the jaws of defeat all heroic-like.

Whatever the root, this myth is misguided because it places attention in the wrong place. Being organized isn't boring – being boring is boring. Make your own excitement and you'll stop being boring – and then you can stop using your disorganization as a crutch for a life not fully realized.

Myth 10: There's something wrong with me no system can fix

This one's probably true. Systems, no matter how good, can't fix the fundamental problems in your life. They won't make you smarter or more likable or better looking or more experienced.

What they can do is help you make time to figure out how to solve those problems. They can help you make a space in your life for real personal growth. And they can help you highlight the sources of those failures, by eliminating the "noise" that normally masks them.

In the end, your growth as a person, your success – however you define it — is up to you. Straightening out the things in your life that keep you from being effective and productive can be an important step towards that success, but it's a means, not an end.

But if you're holding tight to any of the myths above, you're not giving yourself a fair chance – you're standing in the way of your own life. And that's not doing you, or anyone else, any good.

How have you been holding yourself back? Have you overcome any of these misconceptions, and what happened when you did? Share your stories in the comments – I, for one, would like to hear about it!

---

Dustin M. Wax is a contributing editor and project manager at lifehack.org. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and women's studies in Las Vegas, NV. His personal site can be found at dwax.org.

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Please read

http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_new_meal_what_we_eat_who_we_are/

"What's the big deal?" many will ask. Let Pollan count the problems—declining health; an obesity epidemic; the collapse of the family meal; environmental degradation; a food system that will eventually tumble leading to food shortage and political unrest; the loss of joy and beauty in eating; the forgetfulness of a people bereft of one of the most basic pillars of tradition—grandma's recipes; and ultimately, the loss of freedom for a people incapable of the ordinary work of self-provisioning.

If that's not enough, our food also tastes like shit. In Wendell Berry's apt aphorism, our food economy is busy turning people into pigs rather than pigs into people. Or as Pollan puts it, "Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing." Tell me about it.

Adopting an alternative view of food does not require rejecting the possibility of a free and prosperous market economy. Indeed, the rise of the New American Diet—meals eaten in a rush and very often alone, made from processed and prepackaged ingredients—was not solely or even primarily the product of Adam Smith's invisible hand....The substitution of state-sponsored nutritionist technocracy for the collective wisdom of taste, instinct, common sense, and tradition is a perfect example of the triumph of Tocqueville's feared "immense tutelary power" ("absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild"). The same goes for the extraordinary industrialization and global "flattening" of our culinary economy....Price controls and multibillion-dollar farm subsidies prop up corporate agribusiness and discourage smaller producers from trying to find alternative market niches. Real local autonomy--setting regulatory standards that do not conform to national or international ones, restriction or taxation of imports or exports, and preservation of place-specific forms of agriculture and animal husbandry--is undermined because it makes for economic inefficiency. The natural capacities of location, season, and culture to link people together and shape the ways they farm and eat are countered by artificial measures designed to maximize yield.

But it is exactly these social and cultural dimensions of our culinary economy--the centralization of processing and production into an ever shrinking number of multinational corporations, the incredible distances over which food travels before it reaches our tables (an average of 1,500 miles in the United States), the loss of idiosyncratic foods and food cultures, and so on--that should raise the greatest concerns for traditional conservatives....Hence even the smallest acts of resistance to the hegemony of the present system, where corporate representatives and industry-funded scientists at public universities collaborate with government officials on regulatory policies and nutritional guidelines, are crucial steps in recovering local culture and reconstituting our "little platoons." This will nurture the ability to govern--or resist being governed.

The body's grace

this is going to be good I think.

 

 

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The body's grace

via Faith and Theology by Ben Myers on 7/25/08

Mike Higton has just started a new series, engaging with the theology of Rowan Williams' great essay on "The Body's Grace." You can check out the first two posts here and here. Oh, and if you've never read Mike's excellent book on Williams, you should really do yourself a favour.

 

 

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Young Manhattanite: Don't Shoot the Messenger's Bag

While I agree in principle... If by design you mean thinking things through, figuring out the problems space and the solution space, and designing controls to minimize the universal tendency to corruption I disagree. But from a theology of showing up POV. Amen brother.

 

 

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Young Manhattanite: Don't Shoot the Messenger's Bag

via FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE by belonax on 7/24/08

via http://youngmanhattanite.com/2008/07/dont-shoot-messengers-bag.html

 

 

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Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse

Poetry as the voice of demons and angels in the pre-psychobabble of angels and demons being interior only. It is bad luck to screw with the muse. It is also bad luck to mess with what is given. Rational for all things found, wabi-sabi impermanent, the happy accident, technomashing of texts with PERL scripts, automaticity, Cut-up AKA Burroughs and Byron Gilpin (sp?).

I like the combination of found content, put into formal rythmns and 3 second breath lines. Found haiku
Found collect and always about the sound, the metre and the breath hold of the line.

lpax

 

 

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Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse

via Harriet by By Reginald Shepherd on 7/24/08

Jack Spicer's notion of poetry as dictation is hardly original (and originality is a notion Spicer would quarrel with in any case), but Spicer acknowledges its sources and rings his own changes on them: Yeats' spooks bringing him metaphors for his poetry, or Cocteau's Orphée writing down poems broadcast on the ghost radio. That the idea of dictation can itself be read as dictated makes perfect sense. Part of the point of Spicer's poetics is that everything comes from the outside; there's no romantic interiority generating poems in the sensitive soul. This is a useful corrective to the fetishization of personal creativity, proposing instead what Robin Blaser calls the practice of outside. As Spicer writes of his posthumous collaboration with Garcia Lorca, "It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats' spooks or Blake's sexless seraphim" (After Lorca).

I like the idea of poetry as dictation, because writing does feel like that sometimes. I've had at least one poem that was literally dictated to me—I woke up and the poem was reciting itself in my head, though I had to come up with my own ending. Don't we all? In that sense Spicer conveys what it often feels like to do poetry. The recent history of the study of the mind, from Freud discovery/invention of the unconscious to breakthroughs in the biochemical understanding of the brain, certainly supports the idea of dictation, from some source or another. It has certainly revealed just how little of what we think or do is really under our control, though that's a pretty old idea dressed up in some new clothes. For the ancient Greeks, after all, the poet was a person possessed by a daimon, which is one of the reasons that Plato distrusted poets: they were not ruled by reason.

I also admire Spicer's ambition to make poems out of real objects, to "put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem," and his conception of words as what sticks to the real, though I don't think that's possible, except to the extent that words are real objects out of which we build real poems. Language is a thing in the world as well as a thing about (in both senses) the world. Poetry, at least in part, is made out of the attempt to achieve that identity between word and world even while knowing that such a goal is unattainable. If you don't try, you're just playing games, doing parlor tricks (what Eliot meant when he said that poetry was a sophisticated diversion—luckily, he was lying). If you don't realize that it's impossible, then you end up with religion or dogma. Allen Grossman speaks of poetry as an impossible goal that every poem tries to achieve. If only every poem did so try! That dovetails with what Spicer writes that he learned from Robert Duncan, "not to search for the perfect poem [which doesn't and can't exist except as an aspiration] but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem." That seems to balance the exploratory, experimental impulse with the recognition that failure is inevitable, that judgments still can and must be made. There are, after all, greater and lesser degrees of realization.

Interesting and even inspiring though Spicer's notion of dictation is, with its promise of escaping what he calls "the big lie of the personal," I wonder if it's not simply the mirror image of romantic inspiration. Instead of coming from deep within one, from one's soul or innermost self, the poem comes from outside one, from the Martians or the spooks. In either case, the poet is passive, and abdicates thought and responsibility. He listens for the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. This can be seen as a kind of askesis, an emptying out of the self so that some Other can occupy that space, if only temporarily. It can also be seen as an evasion, since no one truly has the mind of winter of Stevens's snow man, at one with what surrounds him. Spicer's Martians seem to be the Muses dressed up in space suits, another way to preserve the romantic (small "r") notion of the poet as a specially inspired individual with access to the transcendent, and to preserve both the notion that there is a transcendent (Derrida's transcendental signifier?) out there waiting to be tapped into and the confidence that it can be reached. As Spicer insists in his Vancouver lectures, there is "a difference between you and the outside of you which is writing poetry," but the poet is still the radio. Not everyone receives these transmissions, after all. Capital "R" Romanticism, in its various incarnations, too often betrays the transcendent by identifying the poet's inspiring genius with his or her ego.

We ourselves are the real, part of a reality and a reality in ourselves. (Are we ourselves?, as The Fixx asked in song long ago.) That desire to connect with something outside us is also a desire to connect with something inside us (and vice versa—the way in is the way out, as Heraclitus might have said). We are part of what we see and talk about, but we are also inaccessible to ourselves in the same way and to the same degree that the "real world" is inaccessible to us. This idea of an internal and inaccessible real, an internal transcendent, is very Lacanian: for Lacan, the always lost Real is the level of immediate and unitary somatic experience, absent lack and lacking absence, from which language inevitably and necessarily alienates us. It is literally unspeakable.

So poetry is both about eroding boundaries and borders and about recognizing borders and boundaries that were invisible, and the poem isn't a representation of the world but an analogy of it. The materials out of which the poem is built (words, sounds, images, lines, phrases) are analogous to the materials out of which the world is made (bricks and rocks and twigs and leaves and mites and midges). If words are objects in the same way that bricks are, with their own heft and palpability, then that is the way (the one possible way) to make poems out of real objects. Analogy is one of Spicer's favorite words, and one of Stevens's.

The poem, when it is at its best, when we are at our best, is a kind of agon between the poet and the language, and the poet has to bring all his or her resources to bear, or it's not a real struggle at all, just a performance. After all, Stevens did say that the poem has to resist the intelligence almost successfully. For that resistance to be meaningful, the pressure of the intelligence must be strong. As Spicer notes, "The more you know…the more building blocks the Martians have to play with." Perhaps in reaction against Modernist "intellectualism," too many American poets from the Forties onward (beginning with the generation of Lowell and Bishop and Jarrell) have surrendered or renounced their intelligence, which too often has resulted in taking dictation not from the Martians but merely from the culture at large, or (as too often) small. But poetry demands better listening than that.

 

 

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