Aach...ye speak like a poet, but ye punch like one too...
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Poem
RAINBOY
You don't know how he holds his form
but he finds a way to. Ten years old,
somehow full of water, like he were born
of the leak in the washing machine,
though you know you held him when the doctor
pulled him out from you, double-miracle.
Water's his flesh--he could cry through supper
and you'd never know, think
his face was dripping like it always does,
but his own laughter marks him
like rain falling into rivers.
You never let him bathe--tried it once,
but panicked when he ducked below
the water as a joke, invisible,
and stayed for hours. You didn't dare
to open the drain, and besides,
he was greasy, rainbowed for days
with soap that wouldn't wash away.
You try to hold his hand but go right through.
Rainboy. He stands liquid,
full of light between you and the lamp
when you kiss him goodnight,
but the shadows in the unlit hall
swim through his body when he runs to bed.
You try to tuck him in at night,
but the sheets soak through. By morning
he's curled above, uncovered,
quiet as a lake asleep on the bedrock.
When he walks through the rain to school
he dimples like the puddles that splash him back.
The kids once put a goldfish in his ear
and watched it swim behind his face;
the teacher followed with a small net
and fished it out. You drive him
to the movies for his birthday
and pass the river on the way
through town; he flattens his face
against the window and watches
the water sliding past, downstream.
He asks you where it's going.
To the sea, you say. What's the sea?
It's like you, only bigger.
At the movie you spread a tarp
across his seat so he won't soak it.
Yesterday he touched a finger
to the stove and didn't pull it back
until you saw him start to steam away
and screamed. What if it gets lost?
he asks you after goodnight prayers.
If what gets lost? The river--
what if it doesn't find the sea?
His eyes are wide and blue as swimming pools.
It always does, sweetie. It can't help it.
He falls asleep, and later so do you,
and dream you're with him
at the park above the river cooking hotdogs
on the grill and flying kites. He can't understand
why you're supposed to make it fly,
the pleasure in a thing that's caught and held
by wind, and when you hand the string
to him he can't hold it in his water-hands
and it goes free and disappears
against the clouds. It's late. You pack
the cooler up and lug it to the car
expecting him to follow, but hear
him laugh and turn around. He's running
towards the running water, arms stretched out,
scaring geese. The orange sun
against the hills fills him with departing light--
you might still catch him if you run
more quick than water runs downhill.
He runs downhill.
(11/28/04)
RAINBOY
You don't know how he holds his form
but he finds a way to. Ten years old,
somehow full of water, like he were born
of the leak in the washing machine,
though you know you held him when the doctor
pulled him out from you, double-miracle.
Water's his flesh--he could cry through supper
and you'd never know, think
his face was dripping like it always does,
but his own laughter marks him
like rain falling into rivers.
You never let him bathe--tried it once,
but panicked when he ducked below
the water as a joke, invisible,
and stayed for hours. You didn't dare
to open the drain, and besides,
he was greasy, rainbowed for days
with soap that wouldn't wash away.
You try to hold his hand but go right through.
Rainboy. He stands liquid,
full of light between you and the lamp
when you kiss him goodnight,
but the shadows in the unlit hall
swim through his body when he runs to bed.
You try to tuck him in at night,
but the sheets soak through. By morning
he's curled above, uncovered,
quiet as a lake asleep on the bedrock.
When he walks through the rain to school
he dimples like the puddles that splash him back.
The kids once put a goldfish in his ear
and watched it swim behind his face;
the teacher followed with a small net
and fished it out. You drive him
to the movies for his birthday
and pass the river on the way
through town; he flattens his face
against the window and watches
the water sliding past, downstream.
He asks you where it's going.
To the sea, you say. What's the sea?
It's like you, only bigger.
At the movie you spread a tarp
across his seat so he won't soak it.
Yesterday he touched a finger
to the stove and didn't pull it back
until you saw him start to steam away
and screamed. What if it gets lost?
he asks you after goodnight prayers.
If what gets lost? The river--
what if it doesn't find the sea?
His eyes are wide and blue as swimming pools.
It always does, sweetie. It can't help it.
He falls asleep, and later so do you,
and dream you're with him
at the park above the river cooking hotdogs
on the grill and flying kites. He can't understand
why you're supposed to make it fly,
the pleasure in a thing that's caught and held
by wind, and when you hand the string
to him he can't hold it in his water-hands
and it goes free and disappears
against the clouds. It's late. You pack
the cooler up and lug it to the car
expecting him to follow, but hear
him laugh and turn around. He's running
towards the running water, arms stretched out,
scaring geese. The orange sun
against the hills fills him with departing light--
you might still catch him if you run
more quick than water runs downhill.
He runs downhill.
(11/28/04)
Friday, November 26, 2004
Debriefing
Contents
(1) Thanksgiving Itinerary
(2) Relics
(3) Bill Mallonee
(4) New Blogs
1. Thanksgiving Itinerary
Our family decided a couple of weeks ago to spend Thanksgiving with my aunt in Dallas, who is still living in grandmother's house until legal matters are settled enough to put the house on the market. My aunt is disabled, and had lived with her parents all her life. Granddaddy died back in '86, so this was her first holiday alone. Due to work situations, however, my brother and sister were unable to make the trip, so it was just my aunt, my mom, and me.
I left San Marcos after work on Tuesday, planning to stay a couple of nights with my friend Devin (more on him presently), as he lives in Dallas only a few miles away from my aunt. But Texas Weather (an entitity possibly sentient, probably malevolent, and at any rate most certainly cantankerous) had other plans. Our fair state has been in the midst of a weeks-long Biblical deluge, and the last night of storms found me driving north on I-35. Long story short, I was compelled to pull off the road in Waco and find a motel room for the night. I bought one of those enormous 24 ounce cans of Heineken at a gas station next door and drank it while watching a History Channel special on Alexander the Great. Then I fell asleep and slumbered fitfully for ten hours.
The next day I drove on into Dallas and spent the day helping my mom clean out the storage shed in grandmother's backyard--this as well shall be dealt with more thoroughly in a minute (this post--like rumors of romance, graduation, and the Kingdom of God--seems to be an endless deferment to a future consummation). That evening I crashed with Devin, and we stayed up late smoking pipes, talking women and theology (subjects consecutive rather than concurrent), and watching old X-Files episodes.
My mom and I made Thanksgiving dinner together the next day. This was nice--the routine for the past several years has been that Mama and Christina (my sister) make the meal, while Christopher (my brother) and I clean up afterwards. Which works well, but it's fun to be on the preparation side of things (although the parental unit ixnayed from the outset my impulses to, ah, extemporize on the recipes--she knows me too well). After dinner and cleanup I drove to Abilene and spent the evening with my Dad & his wife Jenni, and my brother & his fiance Heather. Afterwards my boon companion Nathan (the latest addition over at Socrates Front Porch) and I visited another old friend, Aaron, who is restoring the house where he's staying. When we arrived he was in the basement, unbelievably drunk and trying to repair the sump pump, the better to repel the pooled water from the recent rains. We kept him company for a few hours, during which time I received the grand tour of the house, a fascinating piece of architecture planned and built by an eccentric Texas millionaire--I described it at one point as the best-planned worst-planned house I'd ever seen, moments of genius mixed with moments of baffling incompetence. More on this later (at another date, not later in the post--I'm not sure I'm as yet enough of a writer to do the place justice).
Then this morning I woke up and drove back home, where am I am now sitting at my computer and composing this mini-moir.
2. Relics
Cleaning out the storage building was a fascinating bit of business. At one point my mom calculated that it had to have been ten or fifteen years since anyone had entered it for any reason other than stuffing another box into the mess. Grandmother belonged to that set of her generation who would buy things on sale to have them just in case. We found a wide assortment of garden tools, in many cases several versions of the same product, small household appliances (fans and space heaters) purchased with equal redundancy (five different brand new house fans), and enough extra bedding to start a small motel. She kept used boxes, too, with the styrofoam packing from products purchased over a decade earlier*. Hundreds of old clothes hangers. But mixed in with all this were the family relics--boxes of photographs and old letters. Books and Bibles from generations of the Nail and Yarborough families. Kids furniture from my mom's childhood. Tracts from the 40's proving the necessity of Premillenialism and newsletters from itinerant evangelists.
My mom took all the pictures and letters with her. They're pretty disordered; she wants to sort them and start working on a family tree. I got to bring home a box full of old Bibles and theology books that were used by Granddaddy and his father. Looking forward to reading through them, in particular for any marginalia they might have left. But the best relic of the weekend was an old Royal portable typewriter from the fifties. My mom and aunt used this in their typing classes in school. And she let me have it. Best of all--I tried it out just now and THE RIBBON STILL WORKS! The thing has been in storage for well over thirty years; I'd been worried that I'd never find a replacement ribbon. But instead I've been typing out random sentences on it for fifteen minutes; curious to see if poems happen differently there as compared to computers. I'm indescribably thrilled about this. An old typewriter. The only missing key is the 1. Everything else works. Truly I am blessed among men.
*There are worse thrift-related fates. A great aunt on my dad's side would hoard used Christmas wrapping paper.
3. Bill Mallonee
Bill Mallonee is an independent singer/songwriter, the genius behind the now-defunct Vigilantes of Love. The man is the definition of prolific--in the fourteen (?) years since founding the Vigilantes he's released something like sixteen or seventeen albums of original material either with the band or under his own name. But although he's one of my favorite songwriters currently active, I never like his albums the first time I hear them. I've learned to listen with faith and patience, knowing that after days or weeks the songs themselves will break through the sound and light up my soul like fireworks (a similar dynamic is behind my week-in/week-out appearance at church).
I say this because yesterday, halfway between Dallas and Abilene, his most recent venture, Dear Life, got through to me. It's taken a few weeks, but it happened. And I have to recommend it. You can buy it at either of the previous two links. This is more acoustic and laid back than his recent albums...some alt-country leanings, but nothing like his Vigilantes masterpiece Audible Sigh. If Neil Young instead of Dylan had recorded Dylan's Nashville Skyline album, only with some Brit-pop influences showing through in places, you would have something in the neighborhood of Dear Life. Thematically, this is typical Bill--a hard, unflinching look at the pain of being alive and alone...with redemption peeking in at the corners. Some sample lyrics:
Go and buy.
4. New Blogs
Lastly, but not leastly, I've got a couple of blogs to add to my links, both written by friends of mind. Tossing Stones into Glass is kept by Stephanie, a friend I met through the Derek Webb message board (the same place I met Matthew). Turns out she was in speech and graduated from Odessa High the same year I graduated from Abilene High. This means that we used to frequent the same speech and debate tournaments but never met (although I remembered the names of a few of her teammates who used to cornhole Michael and I in debate rounds). If you saw Friday Night Lights, she attended the school the movie's about, while I attended the school that evidently thrashes them halfway through the film (which, believe me, is a less-than-historical detail). She goes to church with me now. Her blog's been up for awhile; I'm just now remembering to link it.
Devin (from earlier in the post) is a friend who's just finishing his first semester at Criswell College, a college and seminary in Dallas. His brand new blog is called Kethu-bim, which he tells me means "The Writings" in some biblical language (I dunno--he's the seminarian). He was the intern at my church for a couple of years, and (along with Jonathan) drove buses with me for awhile. He's possibly the most unpretentious person I know, and among my closest friends.
A funny story--the first time he came over to my house I was sitting on the porch of my apartment smoking a cigarette. I'd thought briefly about putting it out and eating some gum since a "church person" was coming over, but decided against it--screw 'em if they can't take a smoke, right? Devin walked halfway up the stairs and saw me sitting with a Marlboro in hand.
He asked, "You smoke???" As if it were a sudden shocking revelation.
Great, I thought, A hundred people at church and I make friends with the Puritan of the bunch. But I said, "Yeah."
"Wait right there," he said, then ran down the stairs to his car and fished something out of the glove box. Walked back up the stairs and sat down next to me, lighting one of his own. "Man," he said, "I'm so glad you smoke. I was wondering the whole drive over if you'd freak out if I showed up smelling like cigarettes."
And have been fast friends ever since, although we've both made the jump from Marlboros to pipes (the occasional relapse not withstanding). So go encourage him as he learns the ways of the blogosphere.
Postscript
And that concludes this update. Believe it or not, there's more I wanted to say, but I've been writing this for something like two or three hours, and am rather tired of it. More to come later on something I was thinking about on the drive in today--about how beliefs can be as much homonyms as can words. Until then...
Contents
(1) Thanksgiving Itinerary
(2) Relics
(3) Bill Mallonee
(4) New Blogs
1. Thanksgiving Itinerary
Our family decided a couple of weeks ago to spend Thanksgiving with my aunt in Dallas, who is still living in grandmother's house until legal matters are settled enough to put the house on the market. My aunt is disabled, and had lived with her parents all her life. Granddaddy died back in '86, so this was her first holiday alone. Due to work situations, however, my brother and sister were unable to make the trip, so it was just my aunt, my mom, and me.
I left San Marcos after work on Tuesday, planning to stay a couple of nights with my friend Devin (more on him presently), as he lives in Dallas only a few miles away from my aunt. But Texas Weather (an entitity possibly sentient, probably malevolent, and at any rate most certainly cantankerous) had other plans. Our fair state has been in the midst of a weeks-long Biblical deluge, and the last night of storms found me driving north on I-35. Long story short, I was compelled to pull off the road in Waco and find a motel room for the night. I bought one of those enormous 24 ounce cans of Heineken at a gas station next door and drank it while watching a History Channel special on Alexander the Great. Then I fell asleep and slumbered fitfully for ten hours.
The next day I drove on into Dallas and spent the day helping my mom clean out the storage shed in grandmother's backyard--this as well shall be dealt with more thoroughly in a minute (this post--like rumors of romance, graduation, and the Kingdom of God--seems to be an endless deferment to a future consummation). That evening I crashed with Devin, and we stayed up late smoking pipes, talking women and theology (subjects consecutive rather than concurrent), and watching old X-Files episodes.
My mom and I made Thanksgiving dinner together the next day. This was nice--the routine for the past several years has been that Mama and Christina (my sister) make the meal, while Christopher (my brother) and I clean up afterwards. Which works well, but it's fun to be on the preparation side of things (although the parental unit ixnayed from the outset my impulses to, ah, extemporize on the recipes--she knows me too well). After dinner and cleanup I drove to Abilene and spent the evening with my Dad & his wife Jenni, and my brother & his fiance Heather. Afterwards my boon companion Nathan (the latest addition over at Socrates Front Porch) and I visited another old friend, Aaron, who is restoring the house where he's staying. When we arrived he was in the basement, unbelievably drunk and trying to repair the sump pump, the better to repel the pooled water from the recent rains. We kept him company for a few hours, during which time I received the grand tour of the house, a fascinating piece of architecture planned and built by an eccentric Texas millionaire--I described it at one point as the best-planned worst-planned house I'd ever seen, moments of genius mixed with moments of baffling incompetence. More on this later (at another date, not later in the post--I'm not sure I'm as yet enough of a writer to do the place justice).
Then this morning I woke up and drove back home, where am I am now sitting at my computer and composing this mini-moir.
2. Relics
Cleaning out the storage building was a fascinating bit of business. At one point my mom calculated that it had to have been ten or fifteen years since anyone had entered it for any reason other than stuffing another box into the mess. Grandmother belonged to that set of her generation who would buy things on sale to have them just in case. We found a wide assortment of garden tools, in many cases several versions of the same product, small household appliances (fans and space heaters) purchased with equal redundancy (five different brand new house fans), and enough extra bedding to start a small motel. She kept used boxes, too, with the styrofoam packing from products purchased over a decade earlier*. Hundreds of old clothes hangers. But mixed in with all this were the family relics--boxes of photographs and old letters. Books and Bibles from generations of the Nail and Yarborough families. Kids furniture from my mom's childhood. Tracts from the 40's proving the necessity of Premillenialism and newsletters from itinerant evangelists.
My mom took all the pictures and letters with her. They're pretty disordered; she wants to sort them and start working on a family tree. I got to bring home a box full of old Bibles and theology books that were used by Granddaddy and his father. Looking forward to reading through them, in particular for any marginalia they might have left. But the best relic of the weekend was an old Royal portable typewriter from the fifties. My mom and aunt used this in their typing classes in school. And she let me have it. Best of all--I tried it out just now and THE RIBBON STILL WORKS! The thing has been in storage for well over thirty years; I'd been worried that I'd never find a replacement ribbon. But instead I've been typing out random sentences on it for fifteen minutes; curious to see if poems happen differently there as compared to computers. I'm indescribably thrilled about this. An old typewriter. The only missing key is the 1. Everything else works. Truly I am blessed among men.
*There are worse thrift-related fates. A great aunt on my dad's side would hoard used Christmas wrapping paper.
3. Bill Mallonee
Bill Mallonee is an independent singer/songwriter, the genius behind the now-defunct Vigilantes of Love. The man is the definition of prolific--in the fourteen (?) years since founding the Vigilantes he's released something like sixteen or seventeen albums of original material either with the band or under his own name. But although he's one of my favorite songwriters currently active, I never like his albums the first time I hear them. I've learned to listen with faith and patience, knowing that after days or weeks the songs themselves will break through the sound and light up my soul like fireworks (a similar dynamic is behind my week-in/week-out appearance at church).
I say this because yesterday, halfway between Dallas and Abilene, his most recent venture, Dear Life, got through to me. It's taken a few weeks, but it happened. And I have to recommend it. You can buy it at either of the previous two links. This is more acoustic and laid back than his recent albums...some alt-country leanings, but nothing like his Vigilantes masterpiece Audible Sigh. If Neil Young instead of Dylan had recorded Dylan's Nashville Skyline album, only with some Brit-pop influences showing through in places, you would have something in the neighborhood of Dear Life. Thematically, this is typical Bill--a hard, unflinching look at the pain of being alive and alone...with redemption peeking in at the corners. Some sample lyrics:
After all the towers have fallen
And all the presidents have packed up and left town
You'll need a meal that's the real New Deal
After all this dust settles down
--"After All This Dust Settles Down"
I awoke from comic books, suburbs of my slumber
Complacent curbside summers, footnotes of my wonder
And everything's so vulnerable, especially when it's fashionable
If I show you all my heart, honey, isn't that the truest art?
--"Ready and Red-Eyed"
People sure buy a lot of what doesn't make them happy
But our love is money in the bank
--"High...and Lonesome"
But I met this girl with the Holy Ghost
She turned me on to The Clash
We made love all night long to Love Tractor and Pylon
But in the morning we played Johnny Cash
--"The Kidz on Drugz (Or Life)" [quite possibly the coolest four-band-name-check-in-as-many-lines ever]
There's drugs to help you see God, and drugs for when depressed
And drugs that make you harder still for when you get undressed
And there's drugs for the guiltiness so you feel one with the universe
But girl, you were the only one to ever break the curse
It could've been your eyes, but I suspect it was your kiss
Honey, I'll never be normal after this.
Now everyone's a junkie, and since daylight's such a pain
We're all lookin for some darkness to stick into our veins
For some of us it's lust, for some of us it's power
For some of us it's playing songs and drinking after hours
And it could've been your eyes, but I suspect it was your kiss
Honey, I'll never be normal after this
--"I Will Never Be Normal (After This)"
Go and buy.
4. New Blogs
Lastly, but not leastly, I've got a couple of blogs to add to my links, both written by friends of mind. Tossing Stones into Glass is kept by Stephanie, a friend I met through the Derek Webb message board (the same place I met Matthew). Turns out she was in speech and graduated from Odessa High the same year I graduated from Abilene High. This means that we used to frequent the same speech and debate tournaments but never met (although I remembered the names of a few of her teammates who used to cornhole Michael and I in debate rounds). If you saw Friday Night Lights, she attended the school the movie's about, while I attended the school that evidently thrashes them halfway through the film (which, believe me, is a less-than-historical detail). She goes to church with me now. Her blog's been up for awhile; I'm just now remembering to link it.
Devin (from earlier in the post) is a friend who's just finishing his first semester at Criswell College, a college and seminary in Dallas. His brand new blog is called Kethu-bim, which he tells me means "The Writings" in some biblical language (I dunno--he's the seminarian). He was the intern at my church for a couple of years, and (along with Jonathan) drove buses with me for awhile. He's possibly the most unpretentious person I know, and among my closest friends.
A funny story--the first time he came over to my house I was sitting on the porch of my apartment smoking a cigarette. I'd thought briefly about putting it out and eating some gum since a "church person" was coming over, but decided against it--screw 'em if they can't take a smoke, right? Devin walked halfway up the stairs and saw me sitting with a Marlboro in hand.
He asked, "You smoke???" As if it were a sudden shocking revelation.
Great, I thought, A hundred people at church and I make friends with the Puritan of the bunch. But I said, "Yeah."
"Wait right there," he said, then ran down the stairs to his car and fished something out of the glove box. Walked back up the stairs and sat down next to me, lighting one of his own. "Man," he said, "I'm so glad you smoke. I was wondering the whole drive over if you'd freak out if I showed up smelling like cigarettes."
And have been fast friends ever since, although we've both made the jump from Marlboros to pipes (the occasional relapse not withstanding). So go encourage him as he learns the ways of the blogosphere.
Postscript
And that concludes this update. Believe it or not, there's more I wanted to say, but I've been writing this for something like two or three hours, and am rather tired of it. More to come later on something I was thinking about on the drive in today--about how beliefs can be as much homonyms as can words. Until then...
Thursday, November 18, 2004
In case you were wondering...
No! For the last time! I'm not married, gay, or a convicted felon!
(file under "Things You Never Expected to Say to a Bus Full of Middle Schoolers")
No! For the last time! I'm not married, gay, or a convicted felon!
(file under "Things You Never Expected to Say to a Bus Full of Middle Schoolers")
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Housekeeping
Well, I've gotten tired of the integrated comments feature, so I'm switching over to Reblogger. Leave a comment to let me know if it's working.
Don't know what to say? Well, you can wish Punch Like a Poet happy birthday--today is the one year anniversary of the founding of this little corner of the internet. Ye gods.
Well, I've gotten tired of the integrated comments feature, so I'm switching over to Reblogger. Leave a comment to let me know if it's working.
Don't know what to say? Well, you can wish Punch Like a Poet happy birthday--today is the one year anniversary of the founding of this little corner of the internet. Ye gods.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
My Big Fat Greek Bus Ride
I drive a school bus for San Marcos CISD. In addition to my usual duties pertaining to the transport of children to and from school, I'm occasionally called upon to drive field trips or charter routes. Any organization can charter a school bus, provided it doesn't overlap with regular routes, and some of our most frequent customers are the various fraternities and sororities on campus. The Greeks, as they're known (I assume) for the use of Greek letters in their name (Kappa Gamma Omega, Alpha Epsilon, Delta Felta, etc), like to charter our buses to take them drinking on Friday and Saturday nights, which means we essentially serve as unusually well-paid designated drivers. Whatever.
I should mention here that I have a really, really low opinion of the social Greek clubs. I mean a really low opinion. When/if I find out a person belongs to one my respect falls faster than a burning couch from the second-story window of the Delta Fraternity House. Let's pay a bunch of selfish, affluent white kids exorbitant amounts of money to be our friends and get drunk with us. Good times.
But I digress. Last night I drove one of three buses chartered by some Greeks to take them to Seguin (about thirty minutes south of San Marcos) for some bizarre drunken paint fight. Don't ask me to explain it. All I know is we dropped them already half-lit in front of this old hotel and picked them up five hours later completely trashed and covered in paint from head to toe.
Someone had already yacked outside the door to the hotel, so I took the precaution of spreading trash bags throughout the bus, hoping they'd be used in the event of someone getting sick (I've had people throw up on my bus on these trips before and not even have the decency to notify me). After they started loading (and I can't overemphasize their paintedness--if they'd gone swimming in vats at the Sherwin-Williams plant they couldn't have been dirtier) I took my post at the door to keep them from bringing drinks on board. One girl staggered up to the bus and kneeled down by the front passenger side tire. When she got back up and stumbled onto the bus, I told her, "I've got bags around the bus in case you need them."
She looks at me in utter confusion. "What?"
"In case you get sick again," on the assumption that she'd been kneeling by the wheel to throw up and not in fact to check the tire pressure.
She gives me this huge smile. "I love you so much," she says. "Do you remember me from the ride up?"
Were you slathered in paint then? "I don't think so," I reply, as she leans over and gives me a big best-friends hug.
"Your name is Jonathan, right?"
"No, I'm Daniel. But you were close."
"I'm Alex." She offers me her hand to shake and smiles again. "Thanks so much."
"You're welcome." And she stumbled to her seat and out of my life forever. Not that that's a bad thing.
I drive a school bus for San Marcos CISD. In addition to my usual duties pertaining to the transport of children to and from school, I'm occasionally called upon to drive field trips or charter routes. Any organization can charter a school bus, provided it doesn't overlap with regular routes, and some of our most frequent customers are the various fraternities and sororities on campus. The Greeks, as they're known (I assume) for the use of Greek letters in their name (Kappa Gamma Omega, Alpha Epsilon, Delta Felta, etc), like to charter our buses to take them drinking on Friday and Saturday nights, which means we essentially serve as unusually well-paid designated drivers. Whatever.
I should mention here that I have a really, really low opinion of the social Greek clubs. I mean a really low opinion. When/if I find out a person belongs to one my respect falls faster than a burning couch from the second-story window of the Delta Fraternity House. Let's pay a bunch of selfish, affluent white kids exorbitant amounts of money to be our friends and get drunk with us. Good times.
But I digress. Last night I drove one of three buses chartered by some Greeks to take them to Seguin (about thirty minutes south of San Marcos) for some bizarre drunken paint fight. Don't ask me to explain it. All I know is we dropped them already half-lit in front of this old hotel and picked them up five hours later completely trashed and covered in paint from head to toe.
Someone had already yacked outside the door to the hotel, so I took the precaution of spreading trash bags throughout the bus, hoping they'd be used in the event of someone getting sick (I've had people throw up on my bus on these trips before and not even have the decency to notify me). After they started loading (and I can't overemphasize their paintedness--if they'd gone swimming in vats at the Sherwin-Williams plant they couldn't have been dirtier) I took my post at the door to keep them from bringing drinks on board. One girl staggered up to the bus and kneeled down by the front passenger side tire. When she got back up and stumbled onto the bus, I told her, "I've got bags around the bus in case you need them."
She looks at me in utter confusion. "What?"
"In case you get sick again," on the assumption that she'd been kneeling by the wheel to throw up and not in fact to check the tire pressure.
She gives me this huge smile. "I love you so much," she says. "Do you remember me from the ride up?"
Were you slathered in paint then? "I don't think so," I reply, as she leans over and gives me a big best-friends hug.
"Your name is Jonathan, right?"
"No, I'm Daniel. But you were close."
"I'm Alex." She offers me her hand to shake and smiles again. "Thanks so much."
"You're welcome." And she stumbled to her seat and out of my life forever. Not that that's a bad thing.
Quotes from Mark Noll
Been rereading Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind the past couple of days. Those of you who haven't read this book should run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore and pick up a copy. I offer a couple of quotes to whet your appetite.
From the chapter "Political Reflection"
And from the chapter "Thinking About Science"
Been rereading Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind the past couple of days. Those of you who haven't read this book should run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore and pick up a copy. I offer a couple of quotes to whet your appetite.
From the chapter "Political Reflection"
The most obvious thing about the nature of [Evangelical political] reflection is that it mirrors the characteristics of evangelical life more generally. Evangelical political reflection has depended upon moralism that we could call antiecclesiastical (or at least an-ecclesiastical) because evangelicalism in America has been a movement stressing moral activism without providing a major role for the church. Evangelical political reflection is oriented in a populist direction because evangelicalism has been a populist movement. Evangelical political reflection has drawn upon intuitive conceptions of justice because evangelicals have in general trusted their sanctified common sense more than formal theology, systematic study of history, or deliverances from academically trained ethicists. Evangelical political reflection is nurtured by a common-sensical biblicism for the same reasons that a "Bible only" mentality has flourished more generally among evangelicals (159-160; italics mine).
The evangelical tendency to exalt the supernatural at the expense of the natural makes it nearly impossible to look upon the political sphere as a realm of creation ordained by God for serious Christian involvement. The same tendency also makes it very difficult to search for norms in this life that combine reverence for God with respect for the variety of political institutions that God has ordained.
Modern difficulties created by speculating on prophecy resemble the problems created by the penchant for conspiratorial thinking, which also has a long history among evangelicals. Both prophetic speculation and conspiracy thinking depend primarily on the mind of the observer for their understanding of the world. Prophecy buffs apply a grid from Scripture to their understanding of the world; conspiracy theorists bring a similar grid from what they know to be true in general to what they are experiencing about the world. Neither takes seriously the information presented from the world itself. Both have much more confidence in their minds than in the evidence of their senses. This situation, however, reverses the scale of confidence communicated by Scripture, where we are taught, first, to respect God and what he has done (including his creation of the world, his guidance of all human affairs, and his preservation of the human ability to learn something about the world) and, second, to mistrust our own decieving hearts (174-5; italics not mine).
And from the chapter "Thinking About Science"
The testimony of Augustine, Bacon, Galileo, and Warfield can be summarized by focusing on a concrete example: if the consensus of modern scientists, who devote their lives to looking at the data of the physical world, is that humans have existed on the planet for a very long time, it is foolish for biblical interpreters to say that "the Bible teaches" the recent creation of human beings. This does not mean that at some future time, the procedures of science may shift in such a way as to alter the contemporary consensus. It means that, for people today to say they are being loyal to the Bible and to demand belief in a recent creation of humanity as a sign of obedience to Scripture is in fact being unfaithful to the Bible, which, in Psalm 19 and elsewhere, calls upon followers of God to listen to the speech that God has caused the natural world to speak. It is the same for the age of the earth and for all other questions involving the consitution of the human race. Charles Hodge's words from the middle of the nineteenth century are still pertinent: "Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible, and we only interpret the Word of God by the Word of God when we interpret the Bible by science."
What B.B. Warfield concluded about evolution in 1895--at a time when he was less certain than he would later become, that evolution adequately explained the divine creation of the world--states even more clearly "the better way" toward science that evangelicals, to their great loss, largely abandoned in the wake of fundamentalism. "The really pressing question with regard to the doctrine of evolution," wrote Warfield, "is not...whether the old faith can live with this new doctrine...We may be sure that the old faith will be able not merely to live with, but to assimilate to itself all facts...The only living question with regard to the doctrine of evolution still is whether it is true." By "true" Warfield did not have in mind a question of scriptural exegesis but a question of natural science: whether "(1) we may deduce from the terms of the theory all the known facts, and thus, as it were, prove its truth; and (2) deduce also new facts, not hiterto known, by which it becomes predictive and the instrument of the discovery of new facts, which are sought for and observed only on the expectation roused by the theory" (207-208).
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Poem
An older poem that just recieved a fairly significant facelift. The question for you: does the humor seem strained or forced? If so, where and why?
FOREIGN OPERA
Of course I don't speak the language,
but I'd swear the Italian on the radio
just sang you that he loves you, and if you don't
return his love he'll throw himself, voice first,
into a sausage grinder,
an unusually large sausage grinder,
the sort you might come across
on a tour of a meat packing plant north of Naples,
not the smaller variety you can hide in your cabinet,
nor one of the larger models
behind the deli counter at the supermarket.
No, he says, it would have to be enormous,
as industrial sized as the pain in his heart,
and I remember again everything we'd love to suffer
for love. And I say let him suffer, if he loves you
let him jump, because if I had a guitar I'd tell you
in my Texas trailer trash twang,
in my Sunday-cookout-at-the-State-Park culinary idiom
how much I love you, how I'd rather be charred black,
fat dribbling onto coals, onto unusually hot coals,
dished with cool scoops of potato salad
on the side and washed down
with sweet, clinking mouthfuls of iced tea than go without
your tender affections, your rare charms.
An older poem that just recieved a fairly significant facelift. The question for you: does the humor seem strained or forced? If so, where and why?
FOREIGN OPERA
Of course I don't speak the language,
but I'd swear the Italian on the radio
just sang you that he loves you, and if you don't
return his love he'll throw himself, voice first,
into a sausage grinder,
an unusually large sausage grinder,
the sort you might come across
on a tour of a meat packing plant north of Naples,
not the smaller variety you can hide in your cabinet,
nor one of the larger models
behind the deli counter at the supermarket.
No, he says, it would have to be enormous,
as industrial sized as the pain in his heart,
and I remember again everything we'd love to suffer
for love. And I say let him suffer, if he loves you
let him jump, because if I had a guitar I'd tell you
in my Texas trailer trash twang,
in my Sunday-cookout-at-the-State-Park culinary idiom
how much I love you, how I'd rather be charred black,
fat dribbling onto coals, onto unusually hot coals,
dished with cool scoops of potato salad
on the side and washed down
with sweet, clinking mouthfuls of iced tea than go without
your tender affections, your rare charms.
Last night
I can barely remember the dream, but I was sitting at a table with a woman. We were talking, and she began to quote from Eliot's Four Quartets. I don't remember the lines; in skimming through the Quartets again this morning I don't think the dream-lines had anything to do with the actual poem. One of those dream connections; I suppose my mind connected the sense of what she was saying with the sense of the poems and made it concrete. She was quoting me a passage that was a lamentation for the dead Christ, and yet was at the same time a lamentation for broken, suffering humanity, and the two were somehow the same thing. We both began to cry; she while she spoke, me while I listened.
I can barely remember the dream, but I was sitting at a table with a woman. We were talking, and she began to quote from Eliot's Four Quartets. I don't remember the lines; in skimming through the Quartets again this morning I don't think the dream-lines had anything to do with the actual poem. One of those dream connections; I suppose my mind connected the sense of what she was saying with the sense of the poems and made it concrete. She was quoting me a passage that was a lamentation for the dead Christ, and yet was at the same time a lamentation for broken, suffering humanity, and the two were somehow the same thing. We both began to cry; she while she spoke, me while I listened.
Order Dead Man, Daniel's new chapbook, for $6 (plus S&H). Read more about it here.
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