Their height in heaven comforts not,
Their glory naught to me;
‘T’was best imperfect, as it was;
I’m finite, I can’t see.
The house of supposition,
The glimmering frontier
That skirts the acres of perhaps,
To me shows insecure.
The wealth I had contented me;
If ‘t was a meaner size,
Then I had counted it until
It pleased my narrow eyes.
Better than larger values,
However true their show;
This timid life of evidence
Keeps pleading, “I don’t know.
- Emily Dickinson
Having just begun in earnest to make arrangements for my year in Germany, today I was greeted with these foretastes of bureaucratic rigidity. I hope they aren’t harbingers of things to come.
The release of Coldplay’s most recent album has inspired me to do some internet surfing on them. Wow, I didn’t know that they had been critically drubbed. Yeah, they’re formulaic, but isn’t there a place for that? I think an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to art is valid, unless it starts to seem like an artist has cynically allowed himself to go on autopilot in the knowledge that his product will still make money.
I agree with Rolling Stone, however, that their lyrics on this album are often unclear to the point of being vaguely self-contradictory, and this is disappointing. Take the first verse from my favorite track on Viva La Vida, “Lovers in Japan.”
Lovers, keep on the road you’re on
Runners, until the race is run
Soldiers, you’ve got to soldier on
Sometimes even right is wrong.
The first three lines seem to be about perseverance, which (to me) would seem to be underlined by the repetitive structure of the melody, but then the fourth line completely undercuts that meaning without suggesting anything else.
On an unrelated note, Chris Martin earned major points with me when I read in Wikipedia that he is a big fan of A-ha.
It was my mother who taught me how to wander through the racks of the Belverdere-Tiburon library, and through a book, letting it take me where it would. She and my father took me to the library every week when I was little. One of her best friends was the librarian. They both taught me that if you insist on having a destination when you come into a library, you’re shortchanging yourself. They read to live, the way they also went to the beach, or ate delicious food. Reading was like breathing fresh ocean air, or eating tomatoes from old man Grbac’s garden. My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found.
– Anne Lamott, Plan B, p. 142-43.
My sister, who’s visiting from out of town, and I had one such juicy moment in the interstices — literally. I had driven my car into a ditch while trying to turn around on my way home from picking her up from where she had been dropped off after a 9 hour car ride with a friend from Virginia. I was completely helpless — had no idea what to do, didn’t have a AAA membership, and once we got triple A on the line (since my sister’s a member), they wouldn’t tow me because my registration was expired. She was great about it — took control, wasn’t annoyed, and didn’t mind my spazzing out. (One thing I can say about my family, they’re always great in a crisis.) Five people stopped while we were stuck to see if they could help, and one guy stayed with us the whole time even though he couldn’t actually do anything, just to keep us company. Talk about Christ-like. We ended up taking him to dinner, after someone with a gigantic truck successfully got us out.
Life often seems like a desert these days, except not as scenic, and minus any pillar of fire or cloud to guide the way. Sometimes an encounter with “what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them” sounds enviable.
I don’t have Moses in the flesh, or even a church I can drag myself to lately, but I did buy Anne Lamott’s Plan B today. Thank goodness for this black and white reminder that other Christians feel–and come through–despair. I think maybe God arranged it. The first two sentences are:
On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death. These are desert days.
I also like her take on why Rahab the prostitute chose to side with hostile foreign spies rather than her own people:
She did it because she was desperate, and so she listened to her heart. In my experience, there is a lot to be said for desperation–not exactly a bright side, but something expressed in words for which “God” could be considered an acronym: gifts of desperation. The main gift is a willingness to give up the conviction that you are right, and that God thinks so, too, and hates the people who are driving you crazy (20).
