Black Friday 2015

How this empire will lie when

in a century or so

it laughs its last choking joke

and flies farther than angels ken.

The waves of both maria,

maria vestra, not mine,

bring sad legs to these templa,

shrines of strange gods with pretty shine.

Their tired missionaries

take the gospel of self to

other shores. After one, two

years, they take off, leaving us to ourselves.

In this particular mound

of brown and black, I wander

lone, and not one spoken sound,

one whiff of skin, is tender

strange, without being familiar.

How does one live the life

of self in a community of selves?

It is a severed life

in the land which these people delved,

in temples like these—convenient lives.

I realize in writing this

I am angry. I want in.

There is tension

in being intentional

against other good news.

(And you, reader, see 

my fingers in their

natural state.)

How does one be in but

not of this religious

swimming pool of all worlds?

Day before Thanksgiving, 2015

I am listening to The xx and Daughter. Daughter is a emo-folk-rock band, emphasis on “emo.” The xx is super minimalistic. Solo guitar intro most of the time. Singing in the lower register. Bass is intermittent. Not minimalistic in the sense of, say, Philip Glass: repetitive and relatively simple thematically; rather, a “stripped-down” minimalistic. Bare-bones. Minimum. The xx could easily be a perfunctory band, but what do you do when you get enthralled in a world of crepuscular understated-ness, and find that it’s beautiful, in a way? What do you do?

There are no bird’s nests outside,
not that I could see, and I see
for miles. The world is ready for
death again, as it has been ready
for floods and ages. In its little
microcosm of the grand story
of the quiet execution on
the bald hill, which was not
even a mountain, the ground
drinks up the promise of life,
and is dead for another
eternity. But not yet. And that is why

I guess the point of my writing this is that I am bored. Not just the everyday “Oh-I-am-so-bored-whatdoIdowithmylife” bored. It is boredom at a fundamental level. It isn’t like general boredom, which shows itself at the surface, but knows that there really is something to be done. This boredom, i.e. mine, stems from the palpable fact that there is nothing to do, and hence, everything to be done, if that makes sense. I suspect it doesn’t. How do you learn how to be at leisure?

I have been reading too many epics

He sits in his bathtub, Prince

Hector of the city, when

wind comes by to prick, a wince

threatens, he bites it off, then

pants grasping for the golden

rails on the gossip walls. Ten

minutes pass he is shaven—

first shave, Hecuba, would you

believe it. Clang! The workmen

clang in the unseen (but to

clang in the visible our

Prince has yet this task to do).

Breakfast: the grapes are too sour,

and he makes it known with one

swift reprimand, for such pow’r

breathes rapt in his hand (not won,

but born with) and after milk

the sand outside in white sun

eats his sandaled feet like silk

until his plastic will brings

him to the pavement’s light lilt

but its gray stony scalp thinks

the shod ankles of the boy

are better off inside. Since

Hector follows Priam’s ploy

(or follows a boyish plot,

treats the hammer like a toy),

Athene pales as if in rot

and her shield lies decomposed.

Hector trundles forward not

ready. He stares at his toes.

The hammer in his knapsack

flies to Zeus and back, a roast

handle holding its head. Hacked

to the brain and pink his heart

Hector sees the  billow, slack

in step. The smiths’ fiery art

stinks, offense to him, but that

excused by his mind-tongue, tart.

Still, his arrogance never fat,

he enters in, tardy now.

He drops his bag on the mat

and explains glumly Just How

he got late. He doesn’t get

to finish. “Prince, please you bow.”

Hector’s child-hair tastes helmet.

He sees himself mirrored, Troy's

Prince Hector, and the onset.

___________

This poem was birthed only because of my inability to stop reading epics this year. I opted for fixed syllables in tercets (although not metered strictly), since I find free verse's liberty intoxicating and overwhelming. A fixed syllable scheme is also more fun for me: you begin with a rule—not necessarily with a story or even an image—then get surprised where it takes you. The (cheating) terza rima scheme is actually due more to Derek Walcott's Omeros than to Dante, because I'm not reading Dante in the Italian, and it isn't the Sayers translation either. Omeros is a postmodern epic, written in quasi-hexameter-terza-rima-variation, the incipit of which:

"This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes."
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. "Once wind bring the news 

to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes."

a-b-a b-c-d. Twelve syllables each line. Not Dantean terza rima, not Homeric hexameter, but a certainly more tractable fusion of both, and informed by free verse.

(Side note: Omeros is dazzling; not understandable entirely, but absolutely brilliant. I recommend it, if you have time to spare.)

The End (Midpoint) of Summer Reading 2015

The title is due to this period of time being singularly tricky to define. Well actually, no -- not if you consider the life of a pre-professional to be either During School or Not During School.

Oh wait, I forgot, I'm homeschooled. I could say it was Not During School for my on-off twelve years of homeschooling without a qualm, and still say it was very much School, equally without qualm.

Sure, that's just vacuous. And there is, even in the murky grid of the homeschool life, distinction between During School and Not During School and -- hah! there it is, I have been wasting time writing.

(*sigh* I am tired and bored a.t.m. No, actually not bored; writing is a stimulating activity, and I am just off reading David Foster Wallace, who is Caffeine. The two previous nights have been plagued by insomnia. Apologies if I am [exceptionally] incoherent.)

The point I'm trying to get at is I have an extended summer. I don't leave for school (read: College) til August. Extra reading this summer.

But it is borrowed time and it really feels like cheating.

Incipit the list:

1. Poems - Emily Dickinson
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
3. The Lost World of Genesis One - John Walton.
4. Paradise Regained - John Milton
5. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
6. The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes - trans. Robert Alter
7. The Chosen Ones - Alister McGrath
8. Lancelot - Walker Percy
9. Poems - Ranier Maria Rilke
10. Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys: Music History as It Ought to Be Taught
11. The Iliad - trans. Robert Fagles
12. Godric - Frederick Buechner
(Here's where my last post on summer reading ended, and thus resumit:)
13. The Hauerwas Reader - Stanley Hauerwas. Took me roughly a year to read. Provocative undeniably.
14. I Am an Impure Thinker - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. 50% of this book was miles over my head. The other 50% was kilometers.
15. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) - Jaroslav Pelikan. A very helpful account of the early development of Christian doctrine, and Pelikan isn't afraid to point out what he sees as problems in the nascent church.
16. Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a hypnotist.
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. I had absolutely no idea that this novel was Gothic, and when I read it I was disabused of the (very embarassing [see? I misspel to make it even more so]) notion that all 19th-century fiction written by women is Jane Austen
6. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert. Confession: I was bored by Flaubert's realism; or was it the translation?
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo. The translation leaves something to be desired, but Endo's story of two priests who attempt to minister to kakure kirishitan (hidden Christians) in a time of persecution in 17th century Japan and his exploration of suffering, apostasy, and silence (the perceived Silence of God in particular) are terrifyingly powerful -- disregard the title. And I keep the image of the book cover as my cellphone wallpaper.

13. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz. Diaz left an acerbic aftertaste, although it was long in coming. 
14. Both Flesh and Not: Essays - David Foster Wallace. My first D.F.W., and it was like tasting coffee or Toblerone for the first time over again.
15. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson. The sort of writing in Gilead is something I've seen only in some Japanese novels I've read (not Silence): quiet, and speaking volumes; modest, and more than estimable; restrained, and highly emotional. The protagonist of Gilead is perhaps someone who can stand shoulder to shoulder with Atticus Finch as a *human* character who exudes a refreshing Goodness.
16. Some poetry by Keats. (I was very vague with this last post.) I did read some of Keats: "Lamia" and some other poems whose names I've forgotten. He is, I think, a consequence of Dryden. I found the frequent rhymed enjambed lines disorienting, but decidedly brilliant at the same time.
17. The New Life (La Vita Nuova) - Dante. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation. The commentary between the poems feels really draggy. But the poems, as they are translated by Rossetti (brother of Christina Rossetti), are marvelous.
18. The Promise - Chaim Potok. I found much to relate with, although I daresay I enjoyed The Chosen more.
19. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe. Achebe is a dynamic chronicler of the profound change effected (yes, I use "effect" as a verb) by British imperialism. My first African lit ever (I think).
20. A Boy's Will - Robert Frost. Frost's first published collection of poetry, if I'm not mistaken. His poems have classicism (although an evolved one) and simplicity. Very enjoyable reads.
21. Collected Poems - Chinua Achebe. I revisited Achebe after Things Fall Apart. Achebe's verse on war conveyed effectively the harrowing experience of it all.
22. Death and the King's Horseman - Wole Soyinka. A play about a king's horseman in Nigeria who must commit ritual suicide but is stopped by British officials before he can finish. Soyinka dazzled me with his ability to Use Language. The tribespeople use poetry during the intricate ritual; the British imperialists use drab language all throughout. Soyinka effects (I'm going to harp on this) a striking contrast.
23. The Presence of the Kingdom - Jacques Ellul. Papa's notes and highlights are ubiquitous in this book (I think it is one of his favorites). (B.t.w. most of the books on this list are e-books.) Ellul wrote in this in the 1940's, but it is frighteningly relevant in 2015.
24. Girls at War and Other Stories - Chinua Achebe. That's a treble for Achebe on this list (novel, poetry, short stories). I still value Achebe as a chronicler of the African (Nigerian, specifically) colonial and post-colonial experience, but I am not impressed by his writing as much as I was by Soyinka's. Personal preference.
25. A Dance of the Forests - Wole Soyinka. This play lost me. It requires a degree of familiarity with Yoruba mythology, and w.r.t. this I am an ignoramus.
26. Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament - Christopher J.H. Wright. A fine, fine book on Jesus' OT identity, OT mission, and OT values, and how these affect our own identity, mission, and values. It was sort of like a confirmation of my other studies on similar subjects.

What I planned to read but did not (or haven't):
The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays - W.H. Auden 
How (Not) to Be Secular - James K.A. Smith
Imagining the Kingdom - James K.A. Smith
Dante's Inferno
The first part of Don Quixote
El Filibusterismo - Jose Rizal

What I am actually reading right now:
Selected Poems - W.H. Auden

Omeros - Derek Walcott

Noli Me Tangere - Jose Rizal. I "graduated" from high school in the Philippines without reading Noli. A reparative read.

Some Carlos Palanca Award-winning short stories

G.K. Beale's big fat New Testament Biblical Theology (at least 1000 pages! Not planning to read through.) 

thoughts on moving

we half a decade past
painted walls

we abraded our work
the paint today

we watched the walls
cry the orange green

red rivulets
tears run into and down themselves

we graffitists purged the walls
of our personal scribbles

extinguished the peculiar loudspeakers
we set up on those two insipid blank dimensions

we did not weep
with them

they stare out as they did before
we gifted them heartfelt impurities

those two dimensions are and will be enthralled
in themselves we did this to them we gave them back

we were not tinged
by dull and cutting regret

although we might have sometime wished we
hadn't bothered brushing keys onto their locks

we scraped their keys out of their faces
scraped them into their delapidated cells

do we have new walls
to paint we liberators perhaps no

Gilead's this-worldly Christianity

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is a slow business. Much like Frederick Buechner's Godric, the style and the pace of writing (quasi-memoir, almost "confessional") force the reader to control his or her reading speed (that is, if the reader wants to get anything at all out of the novel). There are no chapter divisions; it is framed as a letter by an aged Congregationalist minister to his son, who is not yet ten years old, having been born in the winter of his father's life.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel evinces a breadth of Christian influence. Robinson herself was raised a Presbyterian, but is now a Congregationalist. One recurrent theme is the minister's admission that he will miss this life when he is in Heaven (and, at seventy-four, he is very aware of his impending departure). He hardly downplays cavalierly the joys of eternity, but neither does he deny that he is likely to remember, and perhaps "miss," if that is possible in the next life, the "fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try."

It's an interesting remark. It may be something out of the vein of liberal this-worldly Christianity (although I'm far too ignorant about twentieth-century religious mainline history), but it does make good food for thought. (But I do hope that I won't miss this life too much once it's over.)

Narrative Animals

"And it's so true it's trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it's a built-in thing." ~ David Foster Wallace, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young"

Will be reading D.F.W. over the summer. Question is: Can he ever underwhelm?