Ogre Tones

It’s September 27. The new King’s X CD came out today. I dropped into the local music store that usually has the largest selection of their stuff and there was one copy. Not sure if there was already a run on them or they only got one in. But it went straight into the player in the car and I spent most of my lunch time reading the lyrics. I also picked up the only copy present of Jerry Gaskill’s solo project. Why is it that angst is such fine grist for poetry and heavy metal? And most other art, for that matter? These guys carry around a tremendous load of personal pain. The music is amazing. But there is so much anguish in the beauty. It’s a certain kind of beauty that requires the turmoil. Ahhh! One wants to be rid of the anger and frustration and heartache and just enjoy the beauty. But you can’t have the result without the process that causes it. Beauty amid suffering. Bittersweet. Today was a rough day for artists.

Adaptation

As I predicted, the start of the school year has eaten my lunch. I wish I could get to the point where I could do the job of professor like a nine-to-fiver, just pulling stuff from the file, walking in, wowing my students, then walking out to live my life until the next time class met. Everyone told me it would take several years to get to the point where I felt comfortable with the job. But even now in year six I am living panicked much of the time. I’m very uncertain if I’m cut out for this. But I’m getting side tracked. What I started out thinking here is that passion can only be suppressed for so long. Teaching and the subjects I teach are a passion, but I have others that must be squashed down and locked in a trunk in order for it to happen. Then all of a sudden, they will no longer be refused, the lock springs open, and I must deal with them. Last week I sat on the pinnacle of a stone wall-cum-gateway for eight hours in order to get a great shot of a B-25 being pulled out of a nearby lake. How could I spend all that time with the chaos of a new school year and the time swallowing challenges I am facing in my personal life? Sometimes a person just has to do something. The opportunity won’t be denied or maybe the prospect of applying one’s skill to that opportunity in hopes of something worthwhile coming of it that will bring personal fulfillment or perhaps strokes to a starving self-esteem. Anyway, I got some pictures. A local artist may be using one as a basis for a painting. The museum curator wants them. Cool. And today, for the first time in a few weeks, I feel the overwhelming need to write again. This time about a movie I watched last night:

“Adaptation” with Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and a fellow named Chris Cooper whom I have not heard of before or since but seemed born to this earth to play the role he had. The first time I saw this movie it weirded me right out. Recently my wife has developed a fixation on orchids. In my reading stuff she’s been writing and looking at pictures she has been finding I remembered something about a movie that had an orchid as a central element. She expressed the desire to see it and finally, yesterday, after looking at an online movie database for help, I was able to remember what it was. So we watched it together. The thing that attracted me to the movie in the first place was an inkling that it had a unique script structure. Indeed it does. In some ways I was expecting something similar to “Memento” in terms of out of the box writing. It does deliver although in a very different way. It is a story about the writing of a film screenplay based on a book. The script is for the movie you are watching, so it all folds in on itself and is very non-linear, though it’s not nearly as confusing as “Memento” in which you have to “get” what’s going on, which seems to happen all at once and then you can absorb the story. “Adaptation” looks a lot more normal but then there are these moments that are like looking at an Escher drawing where one can’t quite figure out which reality is real as both appear normal but there is no way they can co-exist. It is a brilliant piece of writing.

Back when I was in film school we were all eager to operate movie cameras and sound equipment and to get our hands on film to edit. But the great, nebulous thing was a good script. Nothing else matters if there is not a story. And that was the hardest thing. The terror over the looming senior project requirement was never about the ability to accomplish the film, but to come up with the story idea. The terror of the blank page. An irony of the movie I watched was that the exquisitely crafted script was all about a script writer consumed by his inability to deliver on the great honor and privilege he had been given being hired to do the job. The characters in the film are all extreme caricatures, but I saw so much of myself in several of them. That, in my opinion, is what good literature does. It shows us something of ourselves and of the human condition and helps us process some of it: passion both bottled up and unbridled, compassion and loneliness, pride and humiliation, intelligence and inanity, discipline and going to seed, constriction and flow. This movie has classic Hollywood staples, tried and true sellers in the marketplace: violence, drug abuse, sex. It has situations far out over the edge where we would never go. Probably not the kind of thing a Christian college professor ought to be consuming. But I find myself enchanted by the characters like those in a loved book. This is film as literature and worthy of its messiness. Life is messy. We don’t have to dine on sewage, but sewage is part of life that must be dealt with. We could be like an animal rights proponent who refuses to think about where the styrofoam trayed, plastic wrapped steaks and chicken legs in the grocery store come from. Or the clean freak who never considers where the stuff in the toilet goes after it gets flushed. But somebody has to deal with this stuff out of our sight. And if we want to understand life deeply, sometimes we need to go there. That’s my opinion anyway. Many disagree. I acknowledge that it is a dangerous way to live.

Anyway, this movie made me think a lot about passion and love. And I’m left pondering a question that prompted me to sit down and write this. A quote from the end of the movie in the traditional spot in the script where the moral of the story is inserted stated, “you are defined by what you love, not by what loves you.” I kind of felt like somebody had reached into my torso, gripped my spine, and shook it a couple of times. And I hadn’t remembered that at all from the first time I had watched. Part of me resonated, “yes, that’s a big part of my problems.” But then I jumped to another view. I love Jesus because he first loved me. That is scriptural and that is my personal experience. And it seems to be opposite to the message of the movie. (Imagine that?) It sounds backwards, but it may be in the tension of paradox that on some level I think there is some truth there. I so often wait for someone or something in life to love me, to love what I have to offer, my contribution, my ability, my product. But that waiting is for the most part futile. At best it’s a source of morsals to a starving man. The things I love may have no use for me. I may have absolutely nothing to offer them that they need. But they are my choices, my passions.

I am also having to wrestle, once again, with the seeming disparities of my passions and the calling I believe God has put on my life. I want to be obedient to pursuing that calling and I believe it a worthy spending of the currency of my life, ie: years, devotion, toil, pain, hardship, sacrifice. There seem to be promises in scripture that if we chase after God the right way, these things will come to a confluence of an integrated life. I’ve heard countless sermons that told me this was what “He will give you the desires of your heart” meant; my desires would become His desires for me and thus, would be met. To some extent, this has proved true. But to a great extent, I have to admit that either I am not there yet, or I passed it by and missed it.

I was also thinking this morning about old people. Why are old people so often quiet? They have been around and have experienced so much, one would think they would be the ones with something to say. But it’s usually the young ones clamoring for our attention with profound revolutionary talk – with in-your-face stuff to contend with. I wonder if the old ones who have been there, done that, and come back beat up realize that there are no ears for what they have to say, so they keep it to themselves. Part of me knows I haven’t grown up yet – doesn’t even yet know what I want to be when I do grow up. But part of me is feeling very old.

The Bomber in the Lake

During WWII an island in the middle of our local lake was used for bombing practice. They used practice bombs and some of the planes were aparantly old worn out ones unfit for front line duty. The Dolittle Raiders trained here out of what is now our municipal airport, one of two training bases for B-25 crews. Well, one day 61 years ago one of those worn out bombers lost an engine while low over the water. The pilot had little choice but to ditch the airplane. Fortunately in this case the crew had enough warning to prepare for the rough landing and to escape with their lives. Several other such incidents lead to fatalities and the aircraft went to pieces that were lost for good. But Mitchell B-25 tail no. 112634 made it to the bottom more or less in one piece and has been part of the lore our lake ever since. She has been sitting 150 feet down, too deep for casual sport scuba divers, but several hard-core types have made it down there to take a look in the murk. A local artist painted a scene of her sitting at the bottom as she might have looked in clear Caribbean water.

So that’s the background. Tonight, just before midnight, they pulled her out of the drink. She took quite a beating in the ditching, having an engine torn off and her back broken just in front of the wings. Her nose is bent down and askew. The left wing tip was smashed, assumedly from hitting the bottom first as the remaining left engine pulled everything downward rendering a pretty sorry mess. And she was probably close to worn out on the day of her last flight. But, 61 years later, the B-25 is still with us. The depth of the water saved it from the scrap metal smelter’s fire that turned most of her sisters into cans and cookware. The green painted aluminum skin dried before our eyes after being wet since my father was a little boy. She still bears the stars of the Army Air Force proclaiming her a proud servant of the United States of America. She will never fly again. Of 160 or so remaining B-25’s, she is the second or third oldest, so is too valuable an artifact. She will go to a museum where all can come and see her and appreciate a tangible memorial to a brave time of brave people. It was a wonderful thing to witness this large chunk of our nation’s hertiage resuced from the mud.

the terrible teens

When our kids were little, older parents would tell us that the teen years were going to be awful. "Just wait until they are teenagers!" they would say as if we had birthed a couple of time bombs. Some people we knew did have some really bad times with high schoolers. But tonight, my son and his fiance and her best friend/roomate are over here carrying on and laughing and everyone is comfortable and having a pleasant evening. Our baby is over at the school studying hard on a Friday night. I know this because today she came by my office and gave me a big hug and after she told me she loved me she said she was going to stay on campus all weekend to buckle down and get caught up in her classes. I was just pondering what to type into the ol' blog here so the thing wouldn't go completely stagnant and I realized that we are just a few months away from our little girl turning twenty. The terrible teen years are almost behind us. And I'm still waiting for the terrible part to start. My experience is that every stage has been wonderful and every new one has been more wonderful than the one before. Now when I look at them I see a couple of winsome, talented, friendly and friend rich adults who are some of the finest people I know. And they are incredibly good looking, of course! I am one very blessed father.

Heart, Mind, and/or...

I recently gave a little lecture I do every year about this time with the new video students. I talk about communication having to take place on both the intellectual level and on the emotional level in order to have any effect. Pure intellectual data has no effect on someone unless you give them some reason to care about the information. And wild, heart-stirring emotion doesn’t do much good without something significant to say. So you have to have both going on at the same time. I realized this year that I was leaving out something very important – the spiritual.

I have been pondering this a bit and part of me wants to think that the other two modes must be functioning in order for a spiritual connection to be made. But perhaps sometimes it is the opposite; there is no intellectual understanding or emotional caring until after a spiritual connection is made.

I also got to thinking about some experiences my wife has had over the past several years. She has had occasion to deal with a number of children with autism. Unlike some disabilities that leave a person intellectually stunted but emotionally vibrant or others that sap the emotional life but leave a brilliant mind intact, autism can rob from both of these domains at the same time. A child can walk around very much alive, but have extremely low intellectual function and little breadth of emotion save for a few extremes like passivity and rage. The lights are on and somebody is home, but that somebody can do practically nothing and cares even less. It’s a terrible state and when I get to heaven I think I will be curious as to what it was all about, if we will care about such things then. I think if all were known it would be about us and our response and not so much about the people with autism as they really don’t seem to care.

Anyway, I’m not getting to my point. My point is that my wife has experienced what she believed to be spiritual connections with these children. Something quite beyond intellect and even emotion as those things were basically dead. Can spiritual vitality be present in a human being with practically no mind and no emotions? Could it be heightened like hearing seems to be to a blind person? I don’t begin to understand it. I don’t offer any explanation. But I do think I have been leaving out something important in my lecture. I’m hoping to hear some comments to help me fill in the gap.

breathless

beauty at the river

Whew!

Made it through the first week of classes and they seemed to go pretty well. For the first time ever I have a video class of whom half claim to be morning people. Video people are usually night owls who will sleep until noon if left to their own devices. This bunch is an anomoly. I expect the dynamic will be a bit different this go 'round. Will be interesting to see.