Mad wonder and madcap wondering

The most astounding thing imaginable is to be alive. And being alive, we must surely be astonished from moment to moment, and then astonished again, no dazed, at our previous lack of astonishment.

Surprise is building on surprise here. Hair is awe-inspiring. Why should anyone have it? Or why should it be hair on people, and grass on lawns, and not the other way around? There's more mystery in a single blade of grass than in all the unsolved mysteries of history. Or rather not more mystery, because mystery, wonder, simply grows, expands on itself, defies our poor tongues and imaginations.

If we are not struck blind and dumb with wonder at every turn, then we were surely blind to begin with. Try to describe water, liquid in general, describe it for a people whose planet is devoid of liquid. It's so dazzlingly incomprehensible, untouchable, indefinable, the minute you step out of the rigid lines of your dull scientific vocabulary, you'll be utterly lost in stammering bewilderment. And that, only for water. You've not even begun to describe the world. Could you have imagined motion, or light, or music, had it never existed? A child- simple and intensely curious- knows more of the world than we do, and even at his most childlike, a child hasn't begun to know, because a lifetime is insufficient even for the exploration of one backyard.

'There is no freedom' years to me have whispered

We living, dying, choose from slavery

And slavery- our masked and silent masters

Stalk silent; still some soul-thirst drives us, goads us

To shriek out 'Freedom, freedom!' This eludes us,

To leave us begging, 'Freedom, or I die'

Yet no man wholly man is wholly free.

Chain merchants cry to me 'Throw off your chains!

Bind yourself now with cords of liberty!

Exchange a cell for dungeon and go free

My heart cruelly tied and struggling, frantic strains

Against a massive weight of Universe

Harsh voices in the mist and darkness shout

'This way lies soaring flight- beneath these stones!

Within these wings of lead- my mind is fire

And searing pain, in keenness of desire-

Somewhere shine stars- uninterrupted sky

There is a word, a world, where spring winds tear

In unfettered gladness through a swaying field

Into horizons constantly receding

Where orchards burst in furious shouts of white

Defiant blossoms shuddering into pink

Great whorls of life and sound and fragile freshness.

This gladly singing world still unexplored

And dazzling in its details- who can say

Why beauty heaps on beauty in this way?

And tiny veins race laughing through the leaves

To catch the glorious sun- the glow is swelling

Across reflecting waters- color, breath-

Full-charged with music- every bud is triumph

Each branch is clarion- ripples, wonder-

Feathers, grave miracles, and on a duck,

A million miraculous plumes

Make glossy neatness. Rumpled bark of trees.

My head is struck, and eyes half-blind with magic.

Small birds are flitting- who can say what holds them?

Nets of fine-spun silver strung from cloudbanks

They swing suspended, breath to breathless moment

Floating unfalling, graceful; every second

Atoms swirl in seeming-solid objects

Millions dancing in the page I write on

And vault in pert abandon through my ink.

The hidden laws of gravity continue-

Or seem to do so- when we speak of laws-

('The universe is ruled by this and that'

Scientists say with all the satisfaction

Rule-memorizers feel when spouting rules)-

I want to cry in fear- in joy and awe-

There is no law- this force which holds us living

Which shaped us from the shapeless, oscillating

And holds us shaped- poised on disintegration.

This turgor pressure of the universe

Grand, wild, creator God- this King of Romance

Lord of astonishment, I breathe and feel

Each breath as a surprise.

In all my desperate, night-weeping soul-pain

Doubt, existential days, wanderings in blackness

And suffocating fear- the empty hours

Stone blind and brain-sick, exhausting stubbornness

In radiant melody Your strange world calls me.

Where beauty is as great as mystery.

The sunset lights the lake in reddish gold.

I touch this tree.

Song-struck and struggling in surmise, delight...

Blame it on Angers...

I don't actually have a blog post, and I'm not likely to for weeks. ( :-O ) What I have are perhaps seven partial blog posts, pages of notes, fragments of poetry, etc... dawdling in my drafts folder, and wandering in between history notes.

So, you'll have to make do with what there is, and there isn't much. You can blame it on Angers, if you like. There's so much to see, and hear, and learn, and think about, and question here, that I can't seem to finish one idea before beginning on twenty new ones. My brain's bursting... If you're still reading after this disclaimer, courage! I hope you'll be able to make sense of the jumble. Each unit will be separated by spaces and quotation marks, which may or may not be entirely ineffective.

'I came this morning to the field where we would play together at cowboys.

Hero and gun-slinger, a rustler stalked by a knight in bandanna and spurs.

But nothing was left of our games there.

Only our two hats beside each other.

My white sombrero, dark with the grime of earth and years.

Your black hat bleaching mercifully grey in the winter sun.'

'Always the sense- that haunting sense which lingers

The world's a spinning toy,

And time-

And time like water, slipping through your fingers...'

"This kind of artificial emotional cushioning can't make you feel better; it only can make you forget that you don't. The world's in a haze of pain, and it's searching not for doctors, but painkillers.

Because sometimes, the only way to straighten and heal a broken limb is to wrench, and break it again. A deep infection must be lanced and drained. Our fear of pain drives us forever to pain, leaves us in pain.

The world would hate us, then, because the hard, real core of the Gospel cuts through the fog of drugged forgetting and lays bare the hurt- demands that it hurt, and hurt again to the very extremity of the agonized death of it's own self-love.

Like a child thrashing against the surgeon with his probing fingers and fearful knife, like the terrified dog which sinks its teeth into the too-knowing hand of the veterinarian, the world is cowering away from the excruciating pain of the truth. We fear the cure more than the disease.

There's space to hide in the universe- miles and miles for running. But the disease, the disease is fatal. We cannot evade death by masking its hideousness, by singing to drown out the noise of its approaching...

The cavity of rebellion will rot relentlessly until every tooth is destroyed. But the corruption of the heart is not dragged to healing as simply as a shrill, resisting child is carried to the dreaded dentist and his drill. Heaven help us if we dull the aching with distractions...'

"Ignorance itself is not a crime, but smug, indifferent, arrogant ignorance; the cheerful, cow-like resistance to questioning and seeking, the self-satisfied conviction of 'correctness', when never for a moment did they listen to a word from the opposition, or try to understand the other perspectives- or even base the forming of their formless views on more than hearsay, and pleasantries, and the opinions of others equally misinformed- this invincible, comfortable, saccharine, unbearable ignorance, how easy it is to despise it! It's so hard to be patient with those who are wrong stubbornly, but without intelligence or conviction.

And yet- I've certainly been guilty of such lazy, shoddy thinking myself...

Why do only some people in the world feel this restless, ceaseless knowledge-hunger and curiosity- this fire to know... nearly everything? At risk of falling into clichés, I feel like I've lived always like a bird in a cage, fierce and frantic to escape, silent, because all of the other birds seem so very happy to be fluttering lamely behind bars. The few people who are different, who can't be satisfied so easily, what makes the change? Is it simply a matter of creation and design? In that case, a sick disgust for the thoughtless who ignore beauty and play with learning as a sulky child plays with his spinach- it must be prideful and unfair. Can one hate the blind for their poor taste in art? Or the deaf for a lack of musical appreciation? Is the world crammed with shallow and dull minds by nature, or by choice? It seems that the history of the human race is the history of man's tremendous creativity in idiocy and atrocity. As much as I'd love to like humanity, there's no way around the conviction that our existence is generally a black stain on the universe.

Faced with this world, with such questions, the cramped little pond of thehomeschoolers- the very haven which gave me time and freedom to think and read for myself- is a nightmare kingdom of triviality. We argue heatedly about the minor, subjective questions- skirt and short length in inches, the proper tightness of jeans, the exact regulations for physical contact, the most correct method of courtship, dancing, studying, the 'acceptable' styles of music, the 'best' church (in the most minor, minor detalia) - and outside the high walls of our garden, while we dispute makeup and hairstyles, movie standards and social rules, Homer is singing, and Shakespeare is being performed, and Hemingway is writing, and Socrates is crying questions like a madman in the streets. And the world is dying, and being reborn, and the seasons are passing, and new and old music is crashing all around in astonishing melodies (but they can't know it, poor fools, they've covered their ears). I've seen such strange things blandly taken for granted; the pro-life coldly indifferent to their government's destruction of innocent life abroad, the members of an unearthly, eternal kingdom shouting brutal, simplistic anthems in lusty patriotism, cluttering their lives (as I do my own!) with ludicrous, superfluous luxury. I've seen some who claim to follow a Way of gentleness, humility, and love, carelessly, callously cruel to animals, blind to injustices committed against those who 'aren't like us'. Some, also, who claim to love a rational, intelligent God, who despise thought and knowledge. So much of the kindness, curiosity, humbleness, patience, humor, and wit I've met in my life has come from the unbelievers, the doubting, the faithless...

Strange world of upside-downs and colors blending in the mist...

And when I die, I beg that it should be with feet worn to the bone with walking beside the stumbling and helpless, and with relentless running after the tangled thread that leads through the labyrinth of my questioning. A heart fully satisfied that, however little was accomplished, it was done with passion and conviction; that seeking neither to lead or to follow, I went where I must go. And finally, because this conviction was founded on eternity and not myself, because though I am utterly unable to fulfill the rigorous demands of my conscience, I belong to a God who, in perfect holiness and fidelity, fulfilled it for me- fully in his own mysterious blood and infinite agony- my own life and death, the existence of mankind- the beauty and suffering, fury and joy of the universe, are not without final meaning.

What a horror existence is if this meaning is not present.

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

-Vaclav Havel

The lullaby game

When I was three years old my parents moved from the little A-frame house my father built in Columbia, Missouri to a remodeled garage on my grandparents' Pleasant Hill farm.

That move was hard on our family, though I remember little about it. Aside from two or three vague memories, all I know about the transition comes from the stories my mother told me later.

Living in that tiny remodeled garage with an infant, a toddler, and a pre-schooler was hard on my mother, as well. I don't remember that, either.

But I remember a corner of the bedroom my brothers and I shared. I remember a crib piled with quilts and too many stuffed animals. I remember a worn beige carpet, stained and overdue to be vacuumed, Alexander's dark blue eyes wide and serious above his snub baby nose and pacifier. I remember a nightlight casting a soft little glow in our room each night, and I remember what it was like to curl in my father's arms while he sang to us.

Not even my parents could tell you exactly when the singing began. I suppose it didn't begin at all. My father is a man who sings. From the moment they knew I existed, as a tiny, squirming creature cradled in my mother's womb, it was only natural that some of his songs should have been for me.

Some of them were songs that are sung to children. 'Over in the Meadow', 'The Gunnywolf song'. But mostly, my father left the children's songs to my mother. The things my father sang were strange, and haunting, and mysterious. Songs that no one would ever dream of as lullabies. Before I knew what they meant, I was in love with these songs.

I remember my father as he was those nights- boyishly dark haired and handsome, laughing and warm as the three of us crowded against his knees like eager puppies. We would sit on the floor, on the awful beige carpet, in the soft golden shadows of the nightlight, and each of us would choose a song. There were stories as well, on especially good evenings.

But those songs, those songs, where did they come from? I never began to ask myself until recently.

Because he loved the old musicals, he would sing to us from those. I remember his fine, rich tenor voice crooning 'Wouldn't it be Loverly?', and 'Sunrise, Sunset' .

'Sunrise, sunset

Sunrise, sunset

Quickly fly the years;

One season following another,

Laden with happiness and tears.'

"Someday, Shalucie bug, I'll sing it at your wedding. My little girl is growing so fast."

Folk music, rebellious music came to us as well, laden with hidden messages. 'Waltzin' Matilda', 'Charlie on the MTA', 'You Can Close Your Eyes'.

'Listen children to a story, that was written long ago

'Bout a people on a mountain, and the valley folk below

On the mountain was a treasure, buried deep beneath a stone

And the valley people swore they'd have it for their very own...'

'When I was a young man I carried my pack

And lived the free life of a rover

From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback

I waltzed my matildas all over.

But in 1914 my country said 'Son,

Tis time to stop ramblin' there's work to be done'

They gave me a tin hat and gave me a gun

And sent me away to the war...'

I always felt like crying when we came to the end of the song, and the legless old man watched his elderly comrades hobbling along in the parade:

'And the young people asked 'What are they marchin' for?

And I asked meself the same question.'

It was not for so many years that I came to understand the significance of the singer's question. But the question, and the answer, and the bloody beaches of Suvla bay were a part of who I was long before that.

One that I remember most clearly (yet there were so many that are woven into me as tightly as threads in a well-made Persian carpet) is an old, wistful anti-war tune.

'Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the flowers gone?

Picked by young girls, every one

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?...'

I begged for this song again and again. As a three year old, and four year old, and even twelve year old, I couldn't put into words what spoke to me in the lyrics. I hadn't the faintest idea what it was that the girls, and the boys, and the soldiers were never learning. I couldn't explain the comfort I pulled from the song's full circle- from flowers, to soldiers, to graveyard, and flowers again. I only knew that it was true, even before I knew what it was I was knowing.

Looking back, I realize that everything I became as an individual, everything I value and respect, all the strange and unorthodox opinions I formed :-P began with the songs my father sang to me. I find the core of our relationship in those memories as well. My love and admiration for him, longing to please him, were born in the warm circle of his arm around me, the flickering halo of the night light, the incomprehensible magic of his voice:

'And if you smile and you say 'Well things were different back then'

Well you have to remember, they were only just men.

There's a lesson for the learning for the likes of you and me.

Just have a little faith and you'll see.'

'Well the sun is slowly sinkin' down

And the moon is rising

And this old world will still keep turnin' round

And I still love you, I still love you.'

When my mother wonders how her daughter became a firebrand, a rebel, a pacifist, a dreamer, and a fierce independent, she can remember the crooning melodies that floated from our room each night, and my humming as I played with my toys- remember how I memorized every word of each song as the years passed, until, when my father faltered or stumbled over the lyrics, I was able to carry us along.

In our own ways, though perhaps to different degrees, my two brothers and I are both shaped deeply by my father's singing. His strange, surprising lullabies made windows for us into worlds and ideas our childhood friends never encountered. Being on the other side of an ocean makes these memories come back vividly, as I miss him more than I ever have in my life.

I've been thinking about this all day, because I just learned a song which reminds me of my father. A song which one day, should I have children of my own, I will sing to them in the cozy shadow of a crib. Because even if it takes them half their lives to learn what it means, I want words like this to be burning like golden seeds in their hearts from the beginning, waiting to blossom in that far away time known as 'when I grow up'.

If you'd rather hear it for yourself, here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbwQXVcbkU0

(I have a feeling that my father used to listen to Pete Seeger. Something about their singing feels alike, though I can't pinpoint the similarity.)

Die gedanken sind frei
My thoughts freely flower
Die gedanken sind frei
My thoughts give me power
No scholar can map them
No hunter can trap them
No man can deny:
Die gedanken sind frei

I think as I please
And this gives me pleasure
My conscience decrees
This right I must treasure
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator
No man can deny:
Die gedanken sind frei

Tyrants can take me
And throw me in prison
My thoughts will burst forth
Like blossoms in season
Foundations may crumble
And structures may tumble
But free men shall cry:
'Die gedanken sind frei!'

The Foreign Illusion

• • • I think, perhaps, it is safe to say that there is one quality all true travelers have in common. We are searching for something. Even when we least know what this something is that calls to us, this siren song of nebulous longing, we are driven by hunger for it, by questioning, by irrepressible curiosity. Is it around the next bend? In the next city? The next state? In China? In England? In France? Against all reason we feel that in blind ignorance we can find it, that we will stumble upon it unknowing if we only go far enough. There is a lost piece of ourselves, a gaping emptiness that is unsatisfied. So we search the eyes of foreign visitors and the pages of foreign books, and the soul-hunger, the isolation gnaws and remains unsatisfied. Somewhere in the world It is, and when we find this unknown we will have fullness. Fullness, sereneness, and life. I think I've seen the essence of this seeking sense expressed most beautifully, most sensitively, throughout the works of C.S. Lewis.

      
      

      "

      "We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness..."
      
      

      "It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."

      
      

      "All joy...emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."

      
      

      He doesn't simply make me want to go to a place I have searched for and never found, he makes me believe that such a place exists. This is, for all of us who love Narnia, the crux of the matter. We are hungry for a world where we can be completely, as ourselves, knowing fully who we are, and being fully known. Lewis, in his own longing for this, had a magical gift for expressing it and evoking it in all his writings. One feels that there are worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds which travelers may find, and that the thing one seeks is waiting in them.
      But the doors leading from our world into the other worlds are rare and hard to find. And so, we wander into crowded cities in Asia, and fertile plains in Africa, and conical huts, and tree houses on stilts, and jungles and floodplains and coastal cliffs, and we look for the thing we do not know.
      If we are dedicated, we study the languages, and if we study and progress with enough talent and passion, we are at last able to express our wanting and our lacking in new and lilting tongues. But there is only disappointment to be found along this way. Because they answer us, and we find that there, on the other side of the ocean, they are failing in the same, wistful quest. We may learn from one another, but we cannot find the country we searched for, the country where everything is whole, where the scattered pieces of what we are come together, where beauty is a comprehended reality and not a glimpse that haunts and beckons. It does not exist in this world. Yet we are thirsty for membership in it.
      If we cannot find it, we will imagine it and pine for it. If it does not exist, we will die wanting it. It if has never been thought of, we will instinctively invent it. We will cling to the image, the idea of our true country against all probability and disappointment.
      "I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
      
      
      A conversation with a new friend in France drove this idea home to me last night. We were discussing, each, our dissatisfaction with our home countries, our desire to travel, to speak with people from around the world, to learn new languages and bury ourselves in new cultures. Home seemed hopelessly constrained, pedestrian, narrow-minded, and dull. But being foreign to each other, we were each fiercely curious about the other's country and culture. France is a riddle to me, a mystery fascinating and strange. For him, the U.S. is equally unfamiliar and fascinating. We're both 'enthousiastes' about China. He said:
      
      
      "I think it's an illusion, but ...

    • I mean

    • our own country seeming boring must be an illusion

    • but I can't help feeling that ...

    I'm a stranger to no one ... I meet somebody, he listens to me a few minuts and then is convinced he knows who I am ...
    I've never felt this way with foreign people ...

• • i'm sure it's not the only thing I have in mind

• but although I'm trying

  • I can't express the rest

  • France is boring to me ...

  • And living here forever would eventually result in a total sadness ...

  • As I am dying, I would think that I haven't lived 1/1098070789796676 of what I could have lived ..."

    
    
    I'll let you make your own interpretation of this. I think it can stand alone. But for we travelers, the journey becomes our identity. We are seeking a homeland that is not an illusion. We are seeking the new, and the strange, and beyond that, the familiar- the known, but not-known that our hearts cry out towards. We are seeking, driven to continue and continue seeking, to be understood. We want to be heard, and seen, and known, and so pant after this achievement across the world, never coming nearer to the understanding we desire. No two human beings can meet and comprehend each other in this way. No such completeness is waiting in exotic buildings, customs, and foods. It is a quixotic, sterile quest, true and lovely only in the sense that we are questing, as we were created to do.
    
    
    "For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13)
    
    
    Lewis chimes in again:
    
    
    "If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally."
    In the end, then, the choice is our own. This hunger I feel will not be abated by France, nor will it be satisfied by China. My appetite must be developed to meet this truth, or for me, as for so many travelers, beauty will never be more than grief, and new beauties but the repetition of disappointment. The emptiness of my own homeland, and the rich opportunity of foreign life are equally illusions. But the illusion is not about these. The illusion is about myself. Until I am complete in the city that is to come, 'hidden with Christ in God', I am complete nowhere. And staying in this incompleteness forever, never loosing my stubborn pride and accepting the kingdom which has been found for me, is what will result in total sadness. Not life in the midwest, or in France, or in China. Everywhere, the world is infected with the same disease. A visa cannot carry you to the cure.

Bon Dimanche!

This morning Hannah and I walked to a cathedralesque church about half an hour from the dorms to attend service. We weren't precisely sure what denomination we were visiting, but the moment we stepped inside, it became clear that our hosts were Catholic. So, I've officially participated in my first Catholic church service.

What I didn't expect, was the beauty of it all. I've always been puzzled by the draw the Catholic church has for many Protestant artists and intellectuals. Although I respect my Catholic friends, many of their beliefs strike me as un-biblical and superstitious, and their traditions suffocatingly restrictive. And yet, as we walked into the church, I was stunned. The interior was ancient and ornate, with a high, peaked ceiling, and exquisite carving and decoration. The lower walls were paneled in dark, heavy wood, and the floor was of worn sandy flagstones. Seated on frail wooden chairs with wicker seats, a sea of elderly worshipers stretched out ahead of us. Neat, white haired women huddled into their dark coats and scarves, while stoop-shouldered, mild-faced men leaned protectively beside them. One young couple knelt on the stone floor in front of their seats, dark heads bowed. A small boy, one of only two or three young people in the room, squirmed impatiently beside his grandmother. At the front, a few nuns could be glimpsed, scattered here and there, serenely veiled in dusky blue. At a little lectern, dwarfed by the massive height of the ceiling, a frail man in a crimson jacket was singing.

I wish I could describe the music.

His lone voice was rich and sweet, quavering a little with age, filling the room to the last shadowy corner and dizzying height. Below and around his voice, like water flowing, the strong, low chords of the organ began to move, so natural and soft one hardly noticed them at first. And I felt as though some great, towering and enormous music were moving the universe. When the choir joined, it was like drowning in beauty and solemnity. The chapel was hushed, and filled with singing in the same moment. If a wine, aged and mellow could be a song, then this was the sound of wine. It was light, but not the light of a garish day in the sun. It was like the light that shone in little glows of color from the exquisite stained glass windows. It was like a dusty sunbeam falling from a hayloft into the soft, shrouded interior of a barn.

The rest of the service passed, divided between bursting ecstasies of song, clear resonant voices reading Scripture passages, the murmured, measured responses of the congregation, and the occasional moment of deep stillness. The chapel breathed in its silences. One could almost hear the cold air seeping everywhere from the icy stone walls and floor. My heart wouldn't stop pounding and swelling with the music. I could feel something ancient, and strong, and indomitably powerful as the resounding notes poured around me, in the high clear solo of a flute, piercingly sweet and bright, which cried throughout the room in a wild climax. And all about us, now standing, now sitting, now shuffling in a sort of march to take communion, were the elderly parishioners, fragile and obdurate and grave. If a nation can have a soul, then I feel as though I've glimpsed the soul of France. If a nation can have a soul, then I came near enough this morning to touch it.

I understand now, the majesty and allure the Catholic church holds for non-Catholics. And I can't wait for next Sunday, to go back.

Reaching the familiar unknown

When I was packing to leave to France a few weeks ago, the question which troubled me most was this: Which books should I bring? Under ordinary circumstances, I drag three orange crates of books to school with me at the beginning of the semester, and keep bringing more from home every time I go back to visit. (For the record, I always regret this when I'm moving home at the end)

Airline travel is not designed for this sort of bibliophilic extravagance.

In the end, aside from a hefty assortment of French language resources, all I brought was my Chinese-English Bible, my beginner's Mandarin phrasebook, and 4 thin paperback volumes of poetry: Kipling, Wilde, WWI British Poets, and a concise anthology of best-loved poems- books I've been thumbing through tirelessly since high school. (Tragically, Christina Rossetti, Browning, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins didn't quite make the cut.)

My idea was that 1. Unlike a novel, poems can be read over and over again. They're efficient and accessible. 2. There's no way I can get by re-reading these already half-memorized volumes of poetry for five months. Eventually I'll be starved into reading almost exclusively in French out of sheer desperation. (this has already begun)

But one other force was at work. The little huddle of English books on my shelf are filled with lines that have shaped and defined me as a person. Between their increasingly limp covers, I saw my own emotions- loves, hatreds, fears, joys, ideals spring to life, hardened into words I could return to again and again. When I encountered them for the first time, it was an almost physical shock; raw feeling taking form and clothing itself in language. And I knew in each of those moments that I wanted more than anything to tame words like that, to whirl them, and woo them, and capture them on the page so that reality became doubly real, preserved in neat lines of magical printed symbols. Because in the poetry I love most, I didn't find something new. I found something I'd known all along, and never known how to express. It was the familiar, the recognizable, that haunted me, called to me. Sometimes, things leapt out at me which I didn't fully understand until years later. Kipling's 'The Vampire' was like that. I memorized stanzas of it, and then, several years afterward, in a quiet flash of clarity, it slipped into place as neatly as the missing piece of a puzzle.

"And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame

That stings like a white hot brand,

It's coming to know that she never knew why

(Seeing at last she could never know why)

And never could understand."

Or Alice Meynell's 'Summer in England, 1914'

"And while this rose made round her cup,

The armies died convulsed; and when

This chaste young silver sun went up

Softly, a thousand shattered men,

One wet corruption, heaped the plain,

After a league-long throb of pain."

I always remember Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, my high school sweethearts as well. There was something in the grim, heart-haunted music of a forgotten war that shouted to the fiercely earnest and hopelessly confused sixteen year old girl I was.

"But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning."

"By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever mourns in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears."

Wilde's 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' is full of new things at every reading, quick flashing turns of beauty and rage and bitterness.

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word...."

"I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every wandering cloud that trailed

Its ravelled fleeces by."

I've always imagined that all over the world there are things which in some way uniquely belong to certain people. For one man it might be the clean lines of a little cathedral in Germany, for another, a certain row of willow trees leaning over a blue-sky lake on a daffodil-fluttering March day. And you might wait five years, or forty, or a lifetime to meet the things that are yours- the climax of a little-known symphony, a line in a book that springs at you like a crouching tiger, and never know what you're waiting for. But sooner or later, sight by sight, sound by sound, word and smell and feeling, they come to you one at a time. And when they come, you know, you recognize them and catch your breath, and halt for a moment of flame and desire and serenity that crystallizes into joy. It is the familiarity that is strange- blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh crying to you from the unknown, like seeing your face in a mirror for the first time, like seeing the prints of your own feet etched deeply into a path you've never walked before.

Sometimes, they are only a glimpse, then gone. At others, they remain to be cherished and pondered. For this reason I carted this thin stack of English poetry to the other side of the world with me, and, perhaps, at core, it is the same thing that drew me here in the first place, the same thing that drove me to study French so relentlessly and illogically for almost three years.

Coming from the New World to the Old World, which is new to me, I am in a constant state of discovery. Because history is the most eternally new thing in the world, never ceasing to grow, never losing its freshness. I'm here, in part, to learn what I already know, to remember what I've never forgotten. Adventure begins like this. Education begins with adventure.

Thunder of an 'age-old anvil'

"Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing-"- Hopkins

Today, like every day, is history. But today is the kind of history that is printed in textbooks and which college students study as part of the cause and effect leading up to colossal events; the kind of history one does not see every day of the year. Today, news of Kim Jong Il's death was released, plunging North Korea into frantic grief, and the world into frantic trepidation. This announcement has struck the pond of world events like a well-aimed pebble. It is too soon to tell, yet, how far the ripples will go, or when they will strike the shore.
One little ripple which a Chinese friend showed me on Facebook today is this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSWN6Qj98lw.
For me, it is the most poignant sight of the year. As I watched, I suddenly realized that the most tragic love, most tragic faith, is that which is utterly misplaced. Men who cry out in despair to deaf idols are not merely guilty of sin, they are the great voice of hopelessness in the universe, they are the blackest depth of soundless grief revolving in the bleakest cell of unapproachable pain. And so, I found myself weeping with this people. An oppressor, torturer, and madman tore terrifying tears today from his people. Not the usual tears of hunger, of fear, of injustice, of pain, of loss which have haunted North Korea for so long, but strange, unnatural tears. Dignified Asian men of solemn ages and high position are here seen sobbing and convulsing before the nation like little children. As I watched the writhing mob, it were as though every woman wept for her child, every man for his beloved, every child for his parents. My heart is still shaking; the emotion, the rawness of it, clawed at me from the screen as the video played.

God have mercy on this people, for they are "...a people plundered and looted, all of them trapped in pits or hidden away in prisons. They have become plunder, with no one to rescue them; they have been made loot, with no one to say, 'Send them back.'" (Isaiah 42:22)

In only a week we will celebrate the coming to earth of God in the flesh, of the King of eternity who throws off the slavery of the heart and soul, and beckons the world into the kingdom of light. In only a week, well fed and surrounded safely by all we love, we will sing with smug satisfaction the soaring hymns of hope and joy. And while we sing, and eat, and laugh, Korea mourns. While we marvel at the glorious mercy of God, North Korea is dying in starved, brutal ignorance. While we luxuriate in 'holiday cheer' the few people of that nation blessed with the knowledge of, and faith in, Christ, are laying down their lives in starkly joyous surrender, 'That the Lamb who was slain might have the full reward of His suffering.'

May God have mercy not on North Korea only, may God have mercy on us, the sleeping church. My own callousness is hideous to me, my selfishness more than I can bear.

Today, like every day, is a solemn one in the history of the world. Tomorrow, still, is an undiscovered treasure in our hands. Faced with this great and terrible world, swaying in the agony of its pain, how will we live? How must I live my daily life?

Reading List for Christmas Break

The best part of Christmas break is the possession of hours and hours to read. Something tells me that this Christmas break will be a bit too busy for that, as I prepare to fly out for Angers, France at the beginning of January. However, the other best part of Christmas break is creating unrealistic, beautiful goals, so I made a reading list anyway. It is as follows:

'Factory Girls'- Leslie T. Chang (I already started this, and it's so, so excellent. :-) )
'The Gay Genius'- Lin Yutang*
'Le Petit Nicolas'- Sempé/Goscinny
'Vacances du Petit Nicolas'- Sempé/Goscinny
'Les Récrés du Petit Nicolas'- Sempé/Goscinny
'Cultural Literacy'- E.D. Hirsch
'Persuasion'- Jane Austen*
'Graded French Reader'-
'501 French Verbs'
'From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya'- Ruth Tucker*
'Too True To Be Good'- George Bernard Shaw*
Assorted poetry with a heavy slant towards Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kipling, and Christina Rossetti.*
'Muslims, Christians, and Jesus'- Carl Medearis
'I Chose Freedom'- Victor Kravchenko*
'At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl- Inge Jens
'The Short Life of Sophie Scholl'- Hermann Vinke*
'The Great Divorce'- C.S. Lewis*

Realistic expectations cannot be too highly applauded. :-P
Marked items are those which I have already read (4-5 times ;-) ), or those which I have nearly finished, and simply need to come back to. These are the 'low priority' listings.

Technically, I could check 'The Great Divorce' off the list, because I read it yesterday in my first act of Christmas Break Independence, but I already want to go back and re-read it.
It offered a lot to ponder, and it helped me come to terms with some ideas I'd been struggling with. Accepting the goodness and justice of God in a world that makes a mockery of both concepts, and, what is even more difficult, applying these known characteristics of God to certain agonizing instances in the Old Testament, has kept me awake... way too many nights this semester. I've felt heart-broken and confused, frustrated and angry as I try to make sense of the world and its Maker.
Seeing though, through Lewis' clever device, just how deceptive and self-serving, how empty and enslaving human arguments are against the overwhelming Holiness that is God, I was painfully broken and humbled. As I listened to the querulous questions and demands of the ghosts, who obstinately refused to enter Paradise, who were unable to recognize how much better God Himself was than the shabby ephemeral concepts of him, and themselves, which they insisted upon retaining, I recognized myself, and my own pride- my own intellectual falsehoods and stubborn, egocentric opinions... and healthy, shamed humility rolled in. It was like a breath of fresh, cool air- sharp, but invigorating and sweet with life.

You should read 'The Great Divorce' too, and if you're not convinced, the following excerpts will prove it to you:

"'Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.'
'The saying is almost too hard for us.'
'Ah, but it's cruel not to say it. They that know have grown afraid to speak. That is why sorrows that used to purify now only fester... [Y]ou and I must be clear. There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.'"

"Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken."

"'What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.'
'Ye see it does not.'
'I feel in a way that it ought to.'
'That sounds very merciful; but see what lurks behind it.'
'What?'
'The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should veto Heaven.'"

"Ye must distinguish. The action of Pity will live forever: but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of Pity, the Pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty- that will die. It was used as a weapon of bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken."

"[The action of Pity is] a weapon on the other side. It leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world's garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses."

"Time is the very lens through which ye see- small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope- something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all."

"That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory."

"Milton was right... The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy- that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks."

"There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organiser of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares."

"Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already."

"...no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods."

I think I'm a little in love with C.S. Lewis all over again... Then again, how could anyone help being so? :-) #christiangirlproblems

Paradox and pain

"Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth"- Jean Paul Sartre.


In my linguistics class, we have been talking for the past week about the relation between language and ideas, the concept of language as a vehicle for culture. Our final project is to construct a message in the medium of our choice which we would choose to send to inhabitants of other planets as a representation of human life on earth.


So, I've been thinking, what is human life on earth?


Actually, all semester, no, even longer- almost, it seems, for as long as I can remember, some such question, vast and indefinable, has been smoldering in my heart, furious as suppressed lava, threatening to erupt and leave me empty and utterly cold.


How to define the human experience, the purpose of human existence? The answers I've accumulated fail to satisfy, somehow. I barely can explain my own past and place in the world, and my story is a pleasantly uneventful one. In those homes where pain is daily nearer and more vital than I can imagine, in those lands "where life is evil now", what is the unifying thread? What pattern can be traced in senseless suffering?


Sometimes, like a fever in the brain, I'm haunted by the contrast surrounding us everywhere in our world- the shining displays in department stores against the crowded disease and filth of a refugee camp, gleeful, laughing children beside tottering skeletal ones, bright eyes smiling beside blank, horror-shadowed faces. Smug materialism beside raw, hoarse desperation. The deep, simple naturalness of love allowed to run its course unobstructed beside the despair of loss, of separation, of sudden devestation. And I ask myself, which is real? Children weaving daisy chains in a May meadow, or a bus blazing in a Palestinian street? Clear northern lakes reflecting the unruffled majesty of mountains, or grass whispering over the nightmare secrets of Babi Yar? Man defying injustice, or Man breaking under torture?


And I wonder, is no one else wondering the same thing? How can we go about daily life so calmly? I have been waiting all my life for someone to snap under the weight of it all- to stand up in the middle of a crowded room, and shout aloud "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nanking, Dresden- Oh, God, let it not be true, or let me die!"


I can't help but feel that, when we think of these things at all, we are instinctively idealists. The nightmare is everywhere, does not have to be searched for, but the happy ending is like buried treasure, sparkling in some secret cache beneath the smoking rubble of earth. Journalists dig for it, optimists paint it in sweeping strokes on the blank canvases of the public imagination. The truth is that we cannot grasp the things that happen in the world every day, especially in nations like the U.S. where life wears blinders and death is neatly sanitized, respectably whisked away from public view. Lurid newspaper articles have the flavor of science fiction; we read them with something that is almost pleasure, because, at our core, we do not believe them to be true. We are ahistorians. We do not believe in history- if we for a moment comprehended it, we would go mad.


And yet the beauty cannot be argued away. The world is fiercely full of life, flourishing, replenishing, dazzling. Vegetation billows and races like green wildfire over the killing fields of Cambodia. In China, the grandchildren of the Cultural Revolution and famine go to the movies, chat online, and discuss sports and celebrity gossip. Normalcy sweeps with merciful rapidity over the indescribable and incomprehensible years of each nation. I am lost in this paradox- the rosiness and darkness of mankind, the cruelty and kindness of nature, the inescapable horror and irrepressible delight of the world. And I have, as yet, no complete answer to my question. What has man done? Why does man continue?


I have always been seized, when faced with the dangerous and fractured state of so many other places, with the desire to leave this semblance of sanity and go there, to face down the lurking nightmare and know, once and for all, what this other half of reality is, if any ointment can soothe it. To effect even a small change for good, to live and die for something difficult and deeply right is a leaping instinct, more powerful than cowardice.


A scene from 'The Robe', a favorite book from high school has haunted me for years. On the road to Jerusalem, two Roman commanders fall into a discussion of the ideal God- what God would be like were they allowed to create Him for themselves. Demetrius, a Greek slave, is listening, and begins pondering the idea for himself. He thinks of the destruction of his home and family, of his enslavement, of the injustice and suffering he's witnessed over the years, and decides:


"This nobler god- if he had any interest in justice, at all- would appear, at such a tragic moment, and sternly declare, 'You can't do that!'"


For me, this has always been the essence of human need. For God to sweep in and disperse evil in one breath, crying out in a voice which would echo beyond the universe, 'You can't do that!'


Western culture is inundated with the chivalrous ideal of the knight in shining armor galloping up at just the right moment to rescue the helpless and imprisoned. Somehow, my vision of God seems to tangle itself inextricably with myths of Camelot and the slaying of dragons.


But the true story is something better, bound in the hearts which accept it with iron cords of loveliness and anguish. All-powerful Creator God, beyond human logic and understanding, made man. This I do not understand. Man sinned, and was divided implacably from God, is falling and sinning still. This, also, I do not understand. This God, this eternally existent I AM did not simply disperse us into non-existence, nor did he prevent our initial act of self-destruction. My mind reels uncomprehending in the face of it. God became man, and suddenly, some irresistable force became clear and evident in the world. How could God become an intimate participant in the strange sordid beauty of pregnancy and childbirth, live as God and child, God and man, in seamless holiness and humanity, embrace in humble, selfless obedience a brutal death, and something deeper in realms beyond human ken? How could the appalling wickedness and screaming agony of every man in every time be concentrated on the willing body of this Son of Man, this innocent one? This story I could not have written, is deeper and more wonderful than the simple, elemental 'You can't do that', which my heart is still hungry for.


At Chinese Bible study the other, night, while discussing a Gospel video, a dear Chinese friend explained to me "Actually, I feel that this cannot be the story of a god. I feel that a god should be somehow great, should be immortal, above man. But this story, it is a man born in shame under shameful circumstances, of ordinary parents, and in poverty, a man who grows up and dies the death of a criminal before he has accomplished anything- how can you call this a god? How can this be God?"
Sweet comrade, how can I tell you in words, this truth that I cannot understand myself- that this God-Man born in shame has taken away the shame of all who love Him, that this God-Man born in poverty, has brought light and hope, waited for in desperation and anguish over thousands of years, to an impoverished world, that this God-Man who, innocent, died the death of the guilty has bought all of us, guilty, the right to His own guiltlessness, His own utter rightness? How can I tell this wonder that dazzles my feeble mind, that the death and suffering and hatred I cannot accept are answered in Him, that dying, He crushed death forever under His feet, that in Him, Life and Love meet at last and are perfect, are conquering forces irresistibly reshaping blood, horror, and weeping. Faced with the question "How do we explain the existence of such suffering in our world if God exists and is good?", another Chinese friend answered, laughing "Obviously, the gods have no power."


It is with hesitation and trembling, but also with confidence, that my searching heart answers: 'No, it is not God who has no power. It is darkness which has no power. It is death which has no power. It is madness, and war, sickness and terror which are coming to an end, while God in His incomprehensible Goodness will go on forever, carrying we weak and foolish ones who were privileged to be His followers into eternity with Him.' This does not silence the tumult inside of me, or the rage of confusion, or the tears which won't stop falling- the instinctive cry of my heart 'But you can't do that'. But it is a rock which life is built on, a wall against endless falling into nothingness.


A message to another world, what would it look like? I search, and I answer, and I can answer only this: "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'He did not make me'? Can the pot say of the potter 'He knows nothing'?" "Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore, stand in awe of God." Satisfied to wait unsatisfied, resting in acceptance of restlessness, turbulent and soothed, stumbling and upheld, we live in the light of this, or die in the rejection of it. This, at last, is the meaning of man. And so, when torn by the double-edged sword of reality, of beauty and hideousness struggling within one another, we are not disenchanted, but rather enchanted all the more by the Lord who placed Himself in the whirling center of it, and gathered us into the shelter of His arms.

Pre-Culture Shock :-P

If I had to put into words (but which words?) the reasons behind this semester's difficulty, I would have to say that the cause is that every day makes me more vividly conscious of speaking another language- not only in the physical sense, but mentally, culturally, metaphorically. I sit in a room with family or friends, talking with them in English, but in my head, I'm translating to French, with exclamations and scattered words in Chinese. To hear one symphony is exquisite, but three symphonies at once is a cacophany. My ears are ringing at every moment with a cacophany which only I can hear. When I was a five year old entertaining myself by chanting the two or three French words my father taught me in a smug sing-song, when I was eight years old promising with reckless naivette to learn every language in the world, when a three year brush with Latin became a window for me into fairyland, I didn't know what it meant to pursue such a dream over years and years. I still don't. But they never told me, then, what we were giving up- that the price of belonging everywhere was to belong nowhere, that the more we could express to the globe, the less we could explain even the simplest things to the ones left behind at home, what it would feel like to have a head swarming and teeming with thoughts in three tongues, like paints on an artist's palette, mingling and flowing together till colors were formed that exist nowhere in reality, and are invisible to all other eyes. To be fluent in multiple languages has always been for me, the most magical thing in the world, but it's a terribly desolate magic at times- a one way ticket into Narnia. The end, I begin to realize, of persevering through culture shock, and finishing what I've begun, is to dwell on the fringe of multiple universes, and have no part in any of them. After choosing a life of wild adventure, there's no way of trotting cozily back home and returning to normalcy as though nothing had passed.


'That the Lamb who was slain might have the full reward of His suffering', the creations of the culture-creating God choose a lifetime of culture shock gladly. It is because of Him, and not because of this, that we will never be the same. It is a people transformed by joy who choose the agony of transformation across cultures and languages. No retreats- No reserves- No regrets.