But if the spirit (the one that raised Jesus out from death) dwells in all of you, that which raised Christ out from death will, through the indwelling of his spirit in all of you, revive and quicken also all your essential bodies which are now subject to death.

On October 3, 2008, I found myself sitting in the basement of a hotel in London with about thirty other Americans. A safety consultant wearing a clean-cut, European suit with wallets in three different pockets stood at the front of the room demonstrating the obligatory important safety tips.

“And maybe you find yourself in a pub one night after a few too many pints. Men: Always be careful with your eyes. In the U.K., looking into another man’s eyes for more than three seconds means you either a) want to fight with him or b) want to sleep with him.”

It is funny to me that this anecdote sticks in my mind. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should introduce a paper on going to a place like Oxford University, but the more that I think about it, it seems an appropriate metaphor for what Oxford means to me. Going there was about looking my fears and my heroes in the eye.

While I kept a blog, journal, and wrote many letters during my travels, In this presentation, I want to reflect on my decision to go to Oxford, where that decision came from, and what it means for me now as I move into the future.

While going to Oxford last year was primarily about studying Shakespeare and Modern British Drama, I also wanted to figure out people whose books have mattered to me deeply. I was shaped by authors who were shaped by Oxford, and I wanted to see how my life might be shaped by Oxford.

A lot of people seem to figure out what they want in life little earlier than myself. When I arrived at Capital, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. This was because I loved books, and as a Christian, I tried to model my life on the image of a servant Christ. I saw these two things coming together in the form of becoming a teacher. At some point along my path toward becoming a teacher, I forgot that the most important element of teaching was not being the servant or doing the work, but passing on passion for life. Studying education became a means of purely getting a job when I graduated. I somewhat recklessly followed the education track, and two years into my college career found myself very frustrated and burned out.

So I started digging through my past to find stability, to find something that didn’t frustrate me. If my life was a brick wall that had somehow come up crooked, I was looking to take the wall back down to where it wasn’t crooked anymore. After dismantling my position, I came upon two authors that I’d spent a significant amount of time with in high school and early in college, Sheldon Van Auken and C.S. Lewis.

One of the most formative books in my personal life was A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Van Auken. This book is the memoir of a young, intelligent man who falls in love with a woman, travels the world with her, studies in Oxford, becomes a Christian, loses his wife, and spends a lot of time reconciling the pain of losing what was most precious to him. The main source of reconciliation for Van Auken is a series of letters that he exchanges with C.S. Lewis that are reprinted in this book. In the letters it becomes clear that Van Auken’s loss of his wife was actually a severe mercy. It was a great mercy that after experiencing such incredible and vibrant life with Davy, Van Auken did not have to experience the pain of losing his wife to a religion that he did not yet agree with or what would likely have been some other more mental or spiritual breakdown of the passion they shared for life and each other.

As a very young child, Van Auken describes himself making a decision not to pursue the static things in life, but rather he wanted the joys and the sorrows, because the life with joys and sorrows, the dynamic life was infinitely more valuable than the static life. “If there were a choice – and he suspected there was – a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths” (18). This passage has been very difficult for me to reconcile with my own experience. On a conscious level, I always affirmed his decision. However I think that many times I made little unconscious decisions that were not actually to pursue the joys and the sorrows, but rather to pursue something just shy of the joys and sorrows.

Van Auken’s argument for pursuing a fuller, more vibrant life is difficult to contest. The case is essentially that emotions are how we derive value from life, that in all the greatest books, the grandest and deepest emotions are associated with love for a significant other or God, and that therefore, to live the fullest, richest life, one must pursue love at the cost of everything, including stability and safety. If we accept all of his premises, then to lead a good life (or even just a slightly better life) there is only one choice – love.

The trouble with this dichotomy between a life of volume and a life of cautiousness however is that the choice to pursue the most vibrant life is perpetually progressive. A life that is perpetually progressive is always moving toward greater vibrancy. Deciding to pursue a life of vibrancy means relinquishing any hint of stability. This is something that I can only now say that I recognize. Decisions to live life more vibrantly are decisions to be perpetually progressive.

It is decisions like these that determine the soul’s afterlife according to C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. In this book the afterlife is not really about punishment or pleasure, but about being either more vibrantly or infinitely regressively. Hell is a place where people gradually become less and less, smaller and smaller, more and more grey, till they are so pathetic that they have ceased to exist. Conversely, heaven is a place where people become more and more real, more and more vibrant. This scared me because it showed me that religiosity couldn’t just be a ticket to some afterlife, they had to be passionate expressions of my search for a vibrant life.

The similar theme in Lewis’ Till We Have Faces moved me in high school. The essential discovery of the narrator, Queen Orual, is that she could not love until she had a face, until she could accept herself and the gods’ inability to provide answers or justifications for the inadequacies that they create. At the end of her life, Queen Orual says, “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words” (319).

What scared me about all of these books was that the farther I got in life, the more I found myself not making decisions that would make my life more vibrant, more colorful, and more full of joy (or sorrow), but rather decisions that led me to a place similar to hell, a safe, protected, gray road that seemed to lead to some kind of financial security, complacency, abstraction, and safety.

Though I probably couldn’t have identified these fears as motivators for my original decision to study in Oxford, it now seems to me that they were the primary factor. Studying in Oxford was for me, a chance to get my hands messy, to take risks, to “live the dream” in the words of my roommate. Going to Oxford meant confronting my fears. It meant throwing away the safe secure path that I had compromised for myself. Going to Oxford was also a chance to come face to face with the authors who’d excited me so much when I was younger.

While I was there, I visited all of the places that Van Auken and Lewis inhabited. I spent a couple afternoons re-reading the chapter of A Severe Mercy where Sheldon and his wife, Davy, go to Oxford and find God. I noted all of the physical locations, the parks, the apartments, the colleges, the streets, and the pubs. I spent a couple afternoons walking around colleges like Exeter and Worcester, where Sheldon had spent much of his time in study. I visited the secretive and exclusive All Souls College where he writes about having one of the most amazing conversations of his entire life over the most beautifully laid meal he could have imagined. I walked through Port Meadow, where he wrote about laying in the fields reading with Davy. I drank a pint at The Trout, a bed-breakfast-pub where he would occasionally get dinner with Davy.

Near the end of term, as the cool rains of December began falling, I decided to visit Magdalene, Lewis’ college, and wander around its enormous grounds, imagining Lewis walking in the deer park with his pipe and some students, talking about the nature of courtly love in medieval literature. I also visited the pubs that he’d been known to frequent, The Eagle and Child and later the Lamb and Flag. There I’d sit with friends and talk about life, love, and politics, in his honor.

In many ways, I think these adventures were a pilgrimage of sorts. I wanted to know these men who had created these books that had so profoundly shaped how I thought about what was valuable in life. I needed to understand them. I wanted to see their faces. While studying in Oxford, I’m not sure that I found their faces, but in looking for theirs, I began to find my own and realize its value.

Since I’ve returned, I found a number of thinkers helpful in understanding what was going through my mind as I dealt with these questions about identity that had now affected me so deeply.
In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Funcion of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalitic Experience,” Jacques Lacan argues that the very first stage of fetal development is a mirror stage characterized by a “certain dehiscence.” The infant sees images of himself that are complete (an ideal-I) but his experience in life is that he cannot do anything to alleviate the inadequacies (for example, hunger) that he constantly experiences. The problems of the mirror stage are not necessarily ever solved. As the child learns to alleviate physical inadequacies, she gains higher thinking skills that conceive an ideal-I that is so perfect, so ideal that it can never be realized. Reading then becomes a process that either augments or reconciles the dehiscence, that makes the ideal-I more or less achievable.

Emmanuel Levinas writes that the face-to-face action between two humans is the source of ethical behavior. He argues that in coming face-to-face with another person, looking them directly in the eye, is the only way to learn how to love someone. He writes, “The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness.” (150). Thus identity emerges when I am comfortable enough with my own face to recognize and embrace fundamental differences. Identity emerges when I can gently embrace my fundamental dehiscence. In this way, my trip to Oxford was about looking the people whose books I’d come to love, in the face to see if I could still love them. The question was not were they the same people that I’d encountered in their books but rather did it matter if they were the same people?

In deciding to go to Oxford, I was making a choice to look into the image of my ideal-I. I was looking into that image in order that I might gain clarity and knowledge not only about the authors and books that I loved, but ultimately I was looking to reconcile my life with the ideals that I had chosen for myself so long ago. I gave up a lot of security in deciding to go to Oxford. I paid a lot of money in the short term, and I also sacrificed the more stable path toward teaching that I had found myself on. In going to Oxford, I looked my fears in the eye. I looked into the mirror of the ideal-I and challenged it and what it represented in my life.

Though life since I’ve been back has not been any easier or necessarily more passionate, I do know now how important it is to find faces and look into the mirror of that ideal-I. I have re-learned again that loving life is not about stifling or ignoring passion, but looking people in the face and looking fears in the eye. It is in these moments that I am being, and gradually becoming more vibrant. This is ultimately now how I am deciding to live more like Van Auken.

And this is ultimately why I liked what the personal security consultant explained to us about looking men in the eyes. In looking people in the eyes, we realize that we not only exist, but we must react either passionately and violently, or we stand to lose everything.

-Samuel Beckett. Read some books.

Hey losers. Looks like you’re actually lost on the internet if you happened to stumble upon this. Things are pretty seedy back here. Kind of like that immigrant neighborhood on the other side of the interstate from you.

Well, today I was feeling nostalgic, so I got out my little ol’ notebook and found all the Dickinsonian fragments that I was one day going to bind into leaflets and give to all my friends. Fortunately, I don’t have any friends. Also fortunately I’m not that crafty or manipulative (with my hands). And also fortunately I believe that Little is Left to Tell and so I’m going to throw my pearls before swine, my words to the wind, and other cliches.

So Here You Have it/them. Poems that have never before been typed onto a computer!

Kind of, not really, better luck next time.

In Athens-

There are seventeen columns.

One was toppled. Who left

Sixteen columns and

one toppled. On the ground

in peace-s.

They must not

have needed those stones.

Their streets are painted virgin white-

White like a magnolia in June, like crisp sheets in a hotel room

Their streets were painted white-

White as the full moon reflecting off their greesy noses and gleeming teeth-

White so they could run through the streets

at night-

when pirates would come to enslave them for

sex.

The Sun reflected off

1000 graves in New Jersey.

I saw them from my window

I saw them from above.

Blazing white, burning-

Like one thousand ticks beneath one thousand magnifying

glasses all bursting into flame with a flash so bright it leaves

little tiny black spots on your eyes even after you blink many times.

1000 souls seared and charred

by a blast of light from the sun.

Then there was a cloud

and then there were just

1000 graves in New Jersey.

There is one man who is currently walking on our planet whom, though I have never actually met, will one day tell my great-great grandchildren that I met in a bar in Istanbul over apple tea. That man is Tom Waits. He makes me proud to be an American and I consider it a joy to be able to breath the same air from the same atmosphere that he does. As a tribute to this phenomenal author, poet, writer, singer, songwriter, actor, entertainer, I thought I would share a few of my favorite youtube clips. Please go buy his records.

While it is a little vague, I thought it was appropriate to begin with something this epic, so that we are all familiar with the nature of the beast of a man that we are dealing with here. Let’s continue:

Notice the extra-special little flourishes around 2:50. Fantastic commentary on contemporary religion. Moving on to my all-time favorite 10 minutes of Tom Waits:

Tom Waits and Jim Jarmusch apparently have a long relationship that must have begun when the two of them ran into eachother at a truck stop in between Portland, Oregon and Salt Lake City, Utah. Or maybe it began here:

I learned about that little clip while watching some of Tom’s late-nite t.v. appearances which are pretty much the Premier Cru of late-nite television. Case in point:

Consider also, exhibit B:

Exhibit C is also remarkable:

A separate post should be devoted to solely to his appearances on Letterman. It would allow for an incredible study on how time ages a man, i.e. Letterman. Exhibit D will be the final excerpt from late nite entertainment:

Not quite sure how this was even legal television at the time.

And to close, let’s look at a little bit of Tom Waits on love. Sorry this one you’ll have to follow the link to:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=p8X_RjblHg8

This post will be updated soon… I’m forgetting the other videos that I watned to include.

State Highlights

Barely a week after he was convicted on seven felony counts, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska held on to a narrow lead in his bid for re-election.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Stevens, a Republican, led his Democratic challenger, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, 48.2 percent to 46.7 percent, a margin of about 3,600 votes, with 99 percent of ballots counted. Three other candidates split the remaining votes.

Mr. Stevens’s longtime colleague and sole Alaskan member of the House, Representative Don Young, led the race for his seat. Mr. Young, a Republican first elected in 1973, has also been under federal investigation. With 99 percent of ballots counted, he led Ethan Berkowitz, a Democrat and former state lawmaker, by about 52 to 44 percent.In the state Senate, Democrats picked up enough seats to get a 10-10 split with the Republicans, who still control the House in Juneau.

Mr. Stevens, a 40-year incumbent and the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, was convicted Oct. 27 on seven felony counts of failing to disclose more than $250,000 in gifts and home renovations. Two days later, Mr. Stevens returned to Alaska for a six-day campaign sprint in which he insisted to voters that he had been wrongfully prosecuted and would have his conviction overturned.

Polls showed him behind and some experts predicted his defeat.

“I don’t believe there is another senator in America who could survive politically what he’s been through,” John Binkley, a prominent Republican in the state, said late Tuesday at the Egan Center in downtown Anchorage, where candidates traditionally gather on election night. “It is a testament to how much he has done for Alaska.”

Many national Republicans called on Mr. Stevens to resign, including Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. Some Senate leaders threatened to expel Mr. Stevens if he stays in office and loses his appeal of his conviction. Yet the state Republican Party encouraged voters to keep Mr. Stevens in office, and the senator’s campaign paid for a blitz of final advertisements, including a two-minute commercial on Monday night.

Mr. Stevens said more than once in the last week that he had not been convicted, a reference to the fact that a conviction is not formal until sentencing, which has not yet taken place. He told voters at one small rally that his situation was similar to that of the lacrosse players at Duke University who were wrongly accused of sexual assault in 2006.

“Those fellows went through an ordeal like mine until they discovered that it was actually a scheme of the prosecution,” he said. “The abuse of power was overwhelming.”

Mr. Stevens suggested in the past week that if he were to lose his appeal, he would resign rather than face a possible expulsion from the Senate.

“He said he would do what’s right for Alaska,” a spokesman for the Senator, Aaron Saunders, said Tuesday night. At the same time, Mr. Saunders questioned whether senators could muster the two-thirds vote necessary for expulsion.

Mr. Begich, the son of a former Alaska congressman, Nick Begich, a Democrat who was killed in a plane crash in 1972, ran a careful campaign in which he rarely criticized Mr. Stevens. Instead, he let consistently bad news about the accusations surrounding Mr. Stevens do its own damage. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also spent heavily on an advertisement accusing Mr. Stevens of corruption.

Like Mr. Stevens, Mr. Young is known for bringing home millions of dollars in federal money. Mr. Young stopped short of declaring victory late Tuesday, but he was clearly optimistic based on the results tallied shortly before midnight Tuesday.

“I don’t listen to the polls, never have,” Mr. Young said while supporters chanted around him at the Egan Center. “The people believe in me.”

The victories will keep intact Alaska’s three-member, all-Republican delegation. Senator Lisa Murkowski is the state’s junior senator. WILLIAM YARDLEY

From the NYTIMES.COM, Senate Race, State Highlights: Alaska.

If you count the number of times that Fox News speaks about Obama’s Universal Healthcare plan, you could travel from hear to the moon on hot air. And yet Obama is not advocating a Universal healthcare system, and to think that he is advocating that, you are sorely deceiving yourself: read the policy for yourself.

Obama is advocating a plan that will enable a lot of people who do not currently have access to healthcare and probably need that access to get that access. It by no means affects all people, and it is by no means creating a universal healthcare system. America has a patchwork system, and this plan that is being advocated by Obama and Biden is an extension of that patchwork. Obama is not making a socialized or nationalized compulsory health service (i.e. Britain or Sweden or France) or even a single-payer system (i.e. Canada).

George W as Henry V

So an elitist brother of mine is studying Shakespeare at Oxford and he’s currently reading Henry V and was referred to this article by a lecturer on Shakespearean Criticism.

The election of an “elitist” president has been decried on both sides of the aisle in this absurd quest to appeal to joe-six-pack/joe the plumber who apparently votes according to the philosophy that a dose of ignorance is a good thing in a politician. Yet, I am elitist-ly venturing that before anyone deems themselves prepared to argue one way or the other about which candidate is really elitist and that said elitism is actually a negative thing, they read the above entire article and follow up on the criticism. (It is surpisingly easy, because all you have to do is follow links).

I’ve read the play, I’ve read the critics that he cites, and he is pretty spot on with that analysis. You can judge the socio-political stuff for yourselves. Consider the pull-out quotes:

Perhaps this is what appeals to the Republicans the most — the reality of aristocracy smoothed over by the rhetoric of democracy

And then later:

The audience for this supposedly self-evident connection is not someone who has read the play; rather, it is someone who hasn’t, but trusts the cultural authority of Shakespeare

And this is why I think you should read this. You have plenty of time: I’m not going to post much else in the meantime. And I don’t really want to talk about anything else till we’ve figured out how this relates to America 5 years later.

Consider for a moment Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. These are the two institutions in America that have been chartered by the American Government to purchase mortgages. Investment in these corporations has previously been thought to be secure. Almost as secure as purchasing bonds. And it should be. These are people’s homes that we are talking about here. These houses are where families are raised. These homes raise the children that will continue to carry the American flag and work in our factories and run our business and farm our lands and teach their children and write books and build new technology. Consider for a moment the mission statement on Freddie Mac’s website:

Freddie Mac’s mission is to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the housing market.

Congress defined this mission in our 1970 charter [PDF 54K], which lays the foundation of our business and the ideals that power our goals.

Our mission forms the framework for our business lines, shapes the products we bring to market and drives the services we provide to the nation’s housing and mortgage industry. Everything we do comes back to making America’s mortgage markets liquid and stable and increasing opportunities for homeownership and affordable rental housing across the nation.

Our mission strives to create:

• Stability: Freddie Mac’s retained portfolio plays an important role in making sure there’s a stable supply of money for lenders to make the home loans new homebuyers need and an available supply of workforce housing in our communities.
• Affordability: Financing housing for low- and moderate-income families has been a key part of Freddie Mac’s business since we opened our doors. Freddie Mac’s vision is that families must be able both to afford to purchase a home and to keep that home.

Freddie Mac’s Decline

Fannie Mae provides stability, liquidity, and affordability to the nation’s housing finance system under all economic conditions. We are a shareholder-owned company with a public mission. We exist to expand affordable housing and bring global capital to local communities in order to serve the U.S. housing market.

Fannie Mae has a federal charter and operates in America’s secondary mortgage market to ensure that mortgage bankers and other lenders have enough funds to lend to home buyers at low rates. Our job is to help those who house America.

Fannie Mae was created in 1938, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at a time when millions of families could not become homeowners, or risked losing their homes, for lack of a consistent supply of mortgage funds across America.

The government established Fannie Mae in order to expand the flow of mortgage funds in all communities, at all times, under all economic conditions, and to help lower the costs to buy a home.

In 1968, Fannie Mae was re-chartered by Congress as a shareholder-owned company, funded solely with private capital raised from investors on Wall Street and around the world.

Fannie Mae has a unique duty to the public it serves — and the private investors that fuel its service — to be a model company focused on service, reliability, and value.

Like all who participate in the housing market, Fannie Mae has a responsibility to help home buyers, homeowners, and communities through market challenges. We believe in the long term health of America’s housing market. The nation is growing and that growth will bring a renewed demand for housing and for responsible, sustainable mortgage lending. Fannie Mae will be there to help meet America’s changing housing needs.

Fannie Mae’s Decline

Thing #1:

A while back I went to a L’Abri conference in the depths of a Rochester, Minnesota winter. Ever since then, I have been receiving newsletters from Dick Keyes, a leader and scholar at the L’Abri Southborough, MA. This month’s newsletter was one of the most honestly provocative things I have ever read in my life. Nice work Dick:

We just returned from our L’Abri members’ meeting in England. In preparing the Southborough report for that meeting it struck me that it was a great wonder that this branch of L’abri or any of the other L’Abri communities exists at all. The heyday of communities in the recent past in the U.S. was from 1966 to 1973, during which time over ten million Americans lived in some kind of intentional community. Almost all of these communities collapsed by 1975. The collapse was not because they were no longer needed, it was because they didn’t work.

As we spoke at the members’ meeting, it seemed that “community” had been a major topic of discussion among students at several of the other L’Abri branches, just as it has been this last year in Southborough. This is precisely because our students have experienced such isolation and loneliness, with social forces pushing them toward high mobility, disconnection, competitiveness, speed, money, performance, measuring and being measured by surfaces. All the while the institutions which had provided strength and support for the individual’s stability and growth – local community, family and church – are themselves profoundly weakened by the same fragmenting forces of modernity. Virtual communities on the internet, though sometimes better than nothing, seem to call attention to the problem of loneliness more than to be any solution to it. You could well argue that the need for real life communities of all different sorts is greater now than in the 1970s.

One disillusioned communitarian wrote in the early 1970s that when communites were based on freedom they inevitably failed within a year. The communities that lasted were built around authority, sometimes rigid religious authority. He reached the sad conclusion, “If the intentional community hopes to survive, it must be authoritarian, it offers no more freedom than conventional society. I am not pleased with this conclusion, but it now seems to me that the only way to be free is to be alone.”

It goes on. In the name of building real community(?), I will share the letter with you if you see me in person sometime. My apologies to the internet “community”

Thing #2:

Some people are doing something called the 100 Things Challenge. This amounts to getting rid of everything but the 100 things you use most. Its very anti-consumer and it is a fascinating and I’d love to talk about it with anyone in person.

Thing #3

BONUS TIME!: I have a hilarious story about an old oil man on my front porch that I’d love to share with you if you have time for an ear-full. Not an eye full. Too important.

The FUTURE:

I’m about to leave the country for about 6 months and I’m setting up a new blog to inform people about that experience and the things that I am learning through it. I’ll post a link up here about that in the very near future.

Sincerely,

The author of Moment of Deck

Looks like we’ve been getting all kinds of hits over here at Moment of Deck blog. Maybe if there were a few more updates on this guy, it would inspire the readership.

Some of you may remember “B-Tard” from a long time ago. Anyway, he’s giving us (in true John-Cusack-High-Fidelity) his top 10 records released since Jan. 1 2006.

So its going to be like a little fad here, and I’m going to put up my top 10 since then (mmm mental alliteration).

10. Cat Power: The Greatest

Yea. Bought this album soon after I heard the song Metal Heart covered by the ol’ stand by David Bazan. I got it on vinyl, and I know that it was Cat Power’s lonely reverberated vocals on this record that kept me company through the long dark days of January-February 2007.

The Memphis Rhythm Band keeps things pretty tight throughout the entire collection. Highlights include numbers like “Willie,” “Where is my love,” and “Hate” all of which rank right up there with her tune “Cross-Bones Style” a tune that until about a month ago had more listens on my iTunes than all other songs combined.

*Special note to the retards currently fixing my turn-table amplifier: get the freak down to business you’ve now had it for more than 2 months and you’re still waiting for parts? c’mon.