Coherent Narratives (in Life, friends, not here.)

Caution: This entry says nothing of consequence about anything of consequence. Things of substance, written somewhat coherently, are elsewhere; skip ahead or back if you want one of those. If you like your logic loose, loopy, and slapdash, read on.

...At any rate, Dominicans being everywhere does not mitigate the fact that the last place I would expect to find one in my blog is IN-in my blog, but it seems you can't escape them with anything near the sort of regularity and indeed predictability with which we routinely fail to bump into Cistercians at the Circle K (do Circle K's still exist? I used to buy my Now 'n' Laters there, and once got a Bit o' Honey with a mosquito half-embedded in the top), but Fr. Fones, of prudential-judgment-and-politics, whom/which you'll remember from a few posts back, left a lovely comment about one of my posts about poverty.

But that's not what I'm getting to. Although, if only more people would comment, that would be great. Although, 'more people commenting' does presuppose someone is reading, and I think that is where the whole idea sort of loses a bit of steam.

At any rate.

Unlike a journal entry or emails, I try to afford those nonexistent readers of my blog the courtesy not only of a concluding sentence, but often a good title, too, when something strikes me. This allows me to believe, by framing the post so nicely, that there is indeed a middle thus framed, leaving me free of guilt and able to carry on with outfit-coordination for another day.

However.

Dominicans were called sometimes, by some, in certain parts, the Black Friars, or the Blackfriars, due, unsurprisingly, to their wearing of a black outergarment. And Shakespeare's (well, partly Shakespeare's) Blackfriars Theatre in London is on the site of a 13th-century Dominican monastery which, after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in England, France, and Wales in the 16th century, had very few friars of any color left in it.

That fact notwithstanding.

I was trying to trying to come up with something vaguely amusing for the title here. Now, stepping up another century, the Black Robes were the Jesuits, the Sulpicians, and the Récollets in New France. But mostly the Jesuits. I could use 'black robe' if I gave it a twist. But I lacked a twist.

So at this point (in the naming of one stupid blog entry!) we have: Dominicans, Shakespeare, England, egomaniacal homicidal kings, Québec, Jesuits, and the color black. Which is a lot of things, but not much to work with. So I looked up stuff on the author of Black Robe, the Belfast native Brian Moore, who also wrote Judith Hearne, which became The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, which I did not see and have nothing funny to say about.

But Black Robe also became a movie about two centuries after bad King Henry, when in 1991 it was directed by Bruce Beresford, who had previously directed Driving Miss Daisy, which is about slow driving and a slow-building relationship. Black Robe happily retained in film form many of the difficult moral issues of the book. And it had Lothaire Bluteau, of Jesus of Montréal fame, in the lead as Fr. Laforgue, whose deep faith leads him to great courage. It's one of my favorite films, and is at times unbearably beautiful and at others unbearably disturbing.

Which of course has nothing to do with Dominicans. Inconveniently.

However, it turns out that that when he died in 1999 (in Malibu, which is far, far away from Shakespeare and the Algonquins of either 1600s-Québec or 1920s-New-York-City type), Moore was working on a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud, while in 1984 his screenplay for Simone de Beauvoir's (a thinky, ethical risking-her-life-for-the-good-of-others atheist if ever there were one) Le Sang des Autres, her novel about the French Resistance, was made into an American film by French director Claude Chabrol. And is said to be ungreat.

But to go back a century now, Arthur Rimbaud, while probably more anti-religion than either Mr. Moore or Mme. de Beauvoir, and not one to trouble himself overmuch with ethical problems - from gun-running (and some biographers say slave-running, as well) to stealing people's husbands - was, despite all that and his early death and even earlier renunciation of poetry-writing (at 20), one of the most influential poets in modern times.

Which brings us to me, as the stupid URL of this blog, oisive-vitesse (which only exists because I couldn't get vifargent) (who only has one post, by the way, from 2004), which is a very stupid pun on a very famous Rimbaud poem and also has to do with my driving style, which could very well be characterized (by a gentle person, charitable of heart and tolerant by nature) as 'relaxed,' or 'easy-going.'

The line I bastardized is from the poem 'La chanson de la plus haute tour,' and goes something like this:

'Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdue ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps viennent
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.'

And likewise something like this:

'Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
Through sensitivity
I have wasted my life.
Oh! Let the time come
When hearts open up.'

Which is ungraceful, but there you go. You get what you pay for. Anyway, 'oisive' means lazy, even though birds are anything but. Sort of like Canadian Smarties, which are no longer made by Rowntree and are basically sweeter M & M's, with nothing acidic or 'smarty' about them. And I'm not a lazy driver, but I'm sure it looks like either the car or I must be at times. Still, I have remembered this stanza always (I have no idea what the rest of the poem says) not just because I like the redemptive hope of the last line, not if such a time comes, but when (literally 'where,' but we'll not trouble ourselves excessively with that for now; the certainty holds either way), but also because it can seem sometimes that all our youthful passion for fifty thousand different things simultaneously could have been wasted.

I don't think it is. I think we take it with us. I think perhaps one has to reach a certain age to be able to look back and see just how shockingly coherent the narrative of our lives is. Maybe the aggregate of facts simply has to be large enough to let the pattern emerge. All my childhood obsessions I still have, if sometimes in mitigated form. All my tastes and predilections (except those for footed pjyamas and tea with sugar) remain about the same, with some accommodation for education and fine-tuning (I no longer want literally to live in a genie bottle; I'm content to hang a Moroccan lantern inside, and string some curtains around, my bateau ivre of a bed and call it done), and I'm most satisfied or content when I have some version of the things that made me happiest as a child and adolescent - down to the bottle full of buttons I spent countless hours sorting and resorting on my grandmother's floor. I don't think it's wasted; I think we just sometimes take too long to realize what it taught us about ourselves.

So the Bartender Says to the Horse --

Why the long face?

Alright, so I explained why I like and respect thinky atheists. But there are plenty of stinky atheists, too, and my bonhommerie is as stressed in thinking about them as it is with the feelgood self-help pseudopagans who take their spiritual direction alternately from 'Prosperity Gospel' quacks and shrink-wrapped plastic 'I Ching' sets from Barnes and Noble.

Part of the stinkiness I can't bear is their frequent supercilious meanness. Anybody who believes anything is dumb, not just different, wallowing smugly in willed ignorance, so restraint isn't called for: the idiots won't get the joke, anyway. Of course, religious people can be just as intolerant as this in their rhetoric, as well -- and knowledge of that fact is sometimes fodder for the mean atheists' lack of consideration. But for now I'm leaving uncharitable believers alone, since they really make my head bleed, and sticking with the angry atheists.

Now, before you say, 'And what about all those rants about Calvinists on here, Vif?', let me remind you they were not about real Calvinism nor even about John Calvin. When I go off on Calvinism it is about the entrenched and invisible secularized vestiges of Calvinism that underpin so many of our attitudes, habits, and neuroses here in the U.S. It's a bit like Althusser's ideology, a bit like Barthes' mythology, and a lot like a troublesome patch of morning glories which, despite having all the flowers and stems and leaves mowed down, are just as present as ever because their roots have already spread widely through the garden. You don't have to believe in the existence of God or John Calvin or even Geneva in order for these Calvinistic assumptions or aspirations to affect your view of culture, commensality, kindness, pleasure, and success. You just have to live in the United States for a while.

So, that having been resolved to all parties' satisfaction, my stinky atheist of the day is Mr. Eddie Izzard, who appears to believe that declaring his atheism over and over earns him a de facto Genius rating and the right to make jokes ridiculing the most heartfelt and sincere of beliefs. He likewise lampoons God and Jesus themselves in extended fashion as bumbling idiots, with Jesus as a sort-of sad sack sucker-Messiah who doesn't know what he is doing and doesn't much care.

Honestly, there are ways to do religious humor. I've seen plenty of stuff that succeeds mightily and yet doesn't offend even when it pokes fun at or contrasts particular beliefs or practices. And I don't just mean brilliant Jewish insider humor, but as well stuff from outside that yet manages to convey a level of respect for the subject. It is not impossible, not at all, but it requires subtlety, maturity - and compassion.

When people cry 'Is nothing sacred anymore???' they seldom intend their lament literally. Rather, it is a wish for a return to some measure of delicacy, consideration, and politesse: what most mean is 'Is nothing off-limits anymore? Is nothing private anymore?' and 'Is nothing beyond the bounds of decency and common courtesy anymore?' It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politeness.

And this is where Izzard's juvenile monologue about idiotic Creators and half-wit sons loses my interest. It was, and should have remained, settled a couple centuries ago that the natural sciences can tell us little of value about religion, and that religion likewise can tell us much about the cultivation of the soul but rather little about geology, or geometry, or cattle-breeding. That an individual has come to this epiphany in the 21st century and is shocked to find religion lacking in scientific insight (as in Izzard's version of Noah) just seems odd to me. A person can find himself unmoved by religion for various reasons, but that there is inadequate discussion of thermodynamics in John of the Cross is one, were it me, that I would feel slightly silly proffering as the crux of my atheism.

But I would also say that even if the individual believes the experiences of John, or Jonas, or Rumi or Rahman Baba to have been 'all in their heads,' ridiculing their interior experience, in addition to being uncharitable, mean-spirited, and thus indefensible morally, is also simply as stupid and pointless in a pragmatic sense as making fun of a friend who thinks he looks better in his new haircut than he does: it's his haircut; let him live in it. You have a right to your own path of haircut self-discovery, and if on it you decide you prefer to continue with the tried-and-true No. 3 in perpetuity, you absolutely are under no obligation to get a copy of your friend's style.

This reactionary approach moreover conduces to the sort of us-v.-them mentality that - you guessed it! - religion is famous, and endlessly parodied and excoriated, for: they're stupid, we're not, so join our club. That an atheist presumably above the fray should resort to the same dirty tactics he would quickly condemn in others is, while not shocking (since we're all only human) still lazy - and, again, puerile. I would cringe and wince and undoubtedly throw up a little in my mouth if I had to read my high school journals filled with every pithy quote from Camus and Gide and Rimbaud that I felt could serve to prop up my (age-appropriate, let me add) stance that Religion is idiotic crap for crappy idiots who like crappy things. Thank God no one gave me a microphone, because in my defensive and angry posture I, too, sounded a bit like a crappy idiot.

Although it helped me terrifically with French!

'The Starry Heaven above Me, and the Moral Law within Me.'

('Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.') - Kant

I have to say, I love atheists. Or at least I love the bright ones. Because, look, they are maintaining a consistent position: either a thing is provable solely by reason, in which case I will believe it, or is not fully accessible to rationality, and then I won't. And if I'm anything (which at my weight is not always certain) I, too, am some kind of Enlightenment-style humanist in many, many ways. Maybe it took me a long time to admit it, but I'm out and proud now. The only catch in my case being that I don't believe humans are the end of it, nor that everything that does or could exist is necessarily comprehensible to or articulable by human reason. Our reason could have limits, just as our sense of smell does relative to a dog's, or a bear's. And, certainly, relative to anything having unlimited powers of every sort.

But I understand the position. And the last point would be an absurd speculation from a rationalist point of view, since what would my reason know about the existence of such anythings? I also think that there are many breeds of atheists, particularly of the Enlightenment variety, who agree on many basic premises about the inhering dignity of man with those who arrive at that position due to a belief about the divine source of that dignity. In either case the 'Man is born free' position holds, and each appends from his perspective the implied-moral-imperative second clause without which the beginning is nothing but a quaint and inert metaphysical claim.

However, the group that does drive me nuts, and has since I was in high school, is the 'spiritual but not religious' crowd, the mass migration of which to Big Sur, the Napa Valley, and beach huts in Costa Rica would leave the greater Seattle area bereft of 70% of its tax base. The rationalist atheists have it hard, and they know it, and they take their responsibility seriously, because they realize it's up to them to figure things out. If one cannot rely on any Authority beyond one's own logic to give guidance, the responsibility is great and the burden a heavy one.

By contrast, the 'spiritual but not religious' people often accept their 'authority' from a multitude of sources: it doesn't have to be right, as a religious person might say; it doesn't have to add up right, as a rationalist might; it just has to feel right, the standards for which are as varied as the number of soi-disant gurus and self-help books in the world. What to me is more chilling to me than the unpleasant aesthetics of that reality is that this 'spirituality' can be as devoid of ethics as the user wishes.

An atheist indeed can be a maniacal Machiavellian egoist, to be sure, but I'm not talking about them, and I have encountered few in my personal experience. I think at the same time that far too many shade-grown-coffee-drinking hemp-clad 'yogis' and would-be bhikkhunis end up, in their ever-fluid quest for self-development or self-enrichment, becoming terrifically self-involved egoists themselves. If, admittedly, extremely bendy ones.

It seems to me that at base the one belief that unites most of these 'spiritual' individuals is this: there is a Power, some sort of divine something, and I owe Him/Her/It/They/Us some form of recognition, but it is up to me to discern what shape this recognition might take in my case. All too rarely does this Divine Power impart an ethical code, because ethical codes are the province of religions, and the 'spiritual but not religious' eschew religion, and religious authority, as being inherently oppressive. But while 'feeling good' is a reasonable criterion for adjudging the after-effects of a yoga class or colon cleanse, it is nonetheless insufficient proof of the moral rightness or wrongness of a given act. It is in no way parallel to the fearless and rigourous self-searching that both rational believers and rational atheists must undertake in order to live an ethical life.

Enlightenment thinkers adjured us to use our own minds and pursue freedom, rather than blindly ceding our will and our powers of reason in deference to the dictates of monarchies or the Church. However, were I forced to cede all my powers of thought, I would rather do so to the likes of thinky ethical atheists like Diderot, Condorcet, Hume, Mille, de Beauvoir, Zizek, Clarence Darrow, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, James Connolly, Harriet Martineau, and James Rachels than to Oprah, The Secret, 'quantum mysticists,' or anyone aiming a burning hank of sage up at me from the Down-Dog asana.

4 out of 5 French Existentialists Agree:

'if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.' --Nietzsche

If you are sick of feeling like a self-absorbed abyss, and you live near Seattle, there may be a great opportunity to change that. The self-absorbed abyss part; I offer no suggestions nor assistance as to relocation. Tent City is going to be up at Prince of Peace Lutheran in Shoreline for the next three months. With collaboration through the Shoreline YMCA and a grant from ELCA, there is a meal program there Wednesday nights for about 150-190 people.

With Tent City there, there will be an additional 100 or so people. Most of the volunteers start somewhere between 3:30-5, and the meal will now run from 5-7-ish, to allow for a second seating. Volunteers are needed for set-up, service, bussing tables, doing dishes, and cleanup. If you want to volunteer, please call the Shoreline YMCA at 206-364-1700.

If you need more convincing that doing nice things is a nice thing to do, here are what some famous religious figures have to say on the matter:


'Feed the hungry and visit the sick, and free the captive, if he be unjustly confined. Assist any person oppressed, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.' -- Muhammad

'Compassion and love are not mere luxuries.
As the source both of inner and external peace,
they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.' -- XIV Dalai Lama

'But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?' --John the Baptist

'Even offering three hundred bowls of food three times a day does not match the spiritual merit gained in one moment of love.' --Nagarjuna

'Love of all creatures is also love of God, for whoever loves the One loves all the works that He has made. When one loves God, it is impossible not to love His creatures. The opposite is also true. If one hates the creatures, it is impossible to love God who created them.' MaHaRal/ Yehudah ben Bezalel Levai

"Open my heart that compassion may
be my companion;
Where I meet pride, humble me;
Where I meet anger, calm my fears;
Where I meet injustice, cause me
to act in love's way.
May I be as gentle as the doe,
as fearless as the lion,
as faithful as the dog." --King David

'Live with compassion, Work with compassion, Die with compassion, Meditate with compassion, Enjoy with compassion. When problems come, Experience them with compassion.' --Lama Zopa Rinpoche

'I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.' -- Francis of Asissi

Whether you call it tzedekah, chesed, rahmah, ihsan, metta, boddhicitta, mercy, compassion, or good works, everyone from Zoroaster to Abraham thinks you should be cultivating it. And if in their saffron robes and pilgrims' sandals all the foregoing are unconvincing, remember that the great existentialist unbelievers Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir all risked their lives to save those of others in the French Resistance. Surely not everyone needs recourse to a metaphysics or baleful eschatology just to wash a few darned dishes???

Glowing Balls of Wisdom

The post a couple days back looks like I'm accusing Ron Reagan, Salman Rushdie, and Georg Lichtenberg of being unthinky atheists. It's really just because while I could get them aligned right to left in the box as I wrote, and thus format the pictures spatially where it made sense with the text, Lichtenberg would crawl all over Rushdie once I posted. Not being a gay man, it was more perplexing than hot. (Not that I am accusing the gay world of having crushes on Salman Rushdie and Georg Lichtenberg, mind you; the world may be a strange place, but I don't think it is that strange.)

Had the post gone as I had wished, i.e., had my formatting prowess been simply sub-par rather than hideously, unfathomably, preternatually low, then under 'devout atheist' in pink the three would have been arrayed left to right, with Lichtenberg and his glowing ball in the middle. Then and only then would have come the stuff about being reactionary and anti-reason. Unlike Seattle weather, my technological abilities will - quite often, really - cease to amaze.

Gay Post #3 (Don't Worry Mom; I Still Only Love Michael Bywater. I Swear.)

Well, I couldn't be more excited. Headbang8 of the Deutschland űber Elvis (still here) blog blogrolled me after my lauding his witty recounting of an uncomfortable encounter with the Deutschlandisch police. I'm tickled, well, pink, I guess, not only because that's my only chromatic option in that cliche, but also because his blog is by turns very funny and well-thought-out, and he is as gay as my gay exhusband. Which I suppose means nothing other than that if I were gay, we'd have that in common, and that pink is somehow therefore apposite. A tenuous link, but one I'm more than happy to grasp at. Plus, even though he is a devout atheist,

he is not one of those stinky, unthinky kinds who are as dull as their religious-fundamentalist counterparts: he asks questions, as all good believers and non-believers alike should do. (As opposed to just the people in between, who seem to be the only ones consistently and reliably to have no problem doing that!) (Which makes the religion question different from, and in fact less prickly than, the musical theatre one, as there are no agnostics with regard to that particular cultural phenomenon.)

Anyway, I so routinely experience near-meltdowns while tackling technological issues (notice my sorry excuse for an umlauted u above and you'll get the picture; other than the MS Character Set, and pillaging them from other sites, I don't know how to get one up on Blogger) and forget what I am doing halfway through, that I at some point abandoned giving the descriptions of sites I like, or even separating the list into categories. Mr. 8, however, apparently encounters no such difficulties routinely, and therefore appended a brief description of me to his link.

What he put as his description was 'very, very well read,' so I put a different version of the Unamuno header up to substantiate that accusation. Of course, that required some mind-bending, positively deadly HTML, much hand-wringing, and forty-five minutes of crying into the neighbor's cat's fur, not to mention the fact that I destroyed my carefully-crafted color scheme and now have to put the blog name and rotating blog description in black in order that they be seen over the too-variable hues of the picture. I also tried black-and-whiting versions of the previous blue-and-red header so that I wouldn't wreck the color scheme, but it looked wrong with all the colored photos around.

Anyway #2, I don't really know what I think of a complete stranger encapsulating me as 'very well read.' Of course, he is gay, so 'gorgeously well read' is perhaps hoping for a bit much. After all, I look nothing like Celine Dion (I'm sorry, gay people; I know it's a cheap shot, but I can't help it any more than I can tolerate her mincing anorexic-motherhood persona), so what would he know? I am so much more, of course: poor driver, good cook, bad hairstylist, great decorator, inept photographer, skilled volunteer, terrible flyer, cloying writer.

---Nuts! I have to go! I feel a song coming on!