Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Providential Pursuits

As I recently alluded to in recounting my sonnet-writing adventure, I’ve had difficulty making up my mind at times.

The fact that we are largely the sum of our experiences is a basic fact with which I don’t think most of us would argue. What we have experienced makes us who we are today. Some attribute this to chance, some to providence or the guidance of the Divine, but I think we would all agree that the end result is the same. Which makes it remarkable to me that I just didn’t get it for so long.

When I finished my bachelor’s degree and became professionally engaged in the behavioral health field, I threw myself into that field, feeling that I had to forsake previous experience at worst, or relegate it to the status of a hobby at best. While making what I thought at the time would be my career in psychology, I still wrote and did things like designing special effects for a haunted house Halloween fundraiser for a local youth center to give myself creative outlets. At the end of the day though, I struggled with seeing myself holistically, feeling at times that I had wasted years and becoming frustrated that I felt I was always distracted by this or that, constantly being drawn into something new that interested me and immersing myself in the world of some new discipline.

Then I had an epiphany (I mention those a lot here, don’t I?). I had moved to the city in which we currently live to begin grad school. I was hanging decorations in my new apartment, attempting to decide what of the life I had brought with me in disarray merited a position of honor on my bedroom wall. One of the items I chose was a set of porcelain theatre masks that I had collected during my undergrad days. I think it was then that I realized that the days of my college years didn’t have to be just a part of my past that I remembered fondly, but should also be recognized as a very important part of who I was, and who I am. Sort of like playing an album that you haven’t listed to for years, and finding that you still remember all of the lyrics.

Today I was contacting former professors to arrange letters of reference for a doctoral program application. I ended up exchanging emails with one of my favorite professors from my undergrad days, and it was great to re-connect. That sparked my looking at photos and recalling that formative period of my life, something to which I seem be given much more frequently in the last three years or so. I’m remiss in keeping in touch with those who have been influential in my life, and these transitional periods have a way of bringing us back into contact with each other.

I know I’ve frustrated and bemused many people through the last few years, seeming to be the one who couldn’t make up his mind, who was involved in one of several disciplines at any given time, and who would never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.

In fact, I think that those experiences are finally combining to make something fascinating, because I’ve found the point at which all of these disciplines intersect to be far more interesting than any one discipline in itself. I can hear someone joking that “interdisciplinary” is just a word for someone who can’t make up their mind, but I think that it’s actually a quite necessary exploration. I think that individuals are cast in artificially compartmentalized roles because our culture doesn’t permit them to explore what they do through the lens of another interest. I’ve discovered that theatre and therapy work together beautifully, and theology and theatre, and poetry and mass communication. All this time I’ve been placing parts of myself into a corner, not realizing that all the parts of myself would play so nicely together, because I couldn’t immediately see how they would interact.

I sincerely hope, however, that I’m going to spend the next few years discovering how.

Photo Attribution:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevensnodgrass/ / CC BY 2.0

Difficulty with Duplicity

I’ve delayed writing this post, because it just isn’t normally the sort of post I write. So, the fact that Scott Roeder was convicted of murder for gunning down a physician who performed abortions is slightly beyond being yesterday’s news. So old, in fact, that most have likely forgotten the incident altogether, as we typically do after a few too many headlines in a given day. Be that as it may, however, I have a reaction that I feel needs to be said.

That reaction is: I have a difficult time with duplicity.

Roeder acted under what he apparently felt was a duty to protect children unable to defend themselves. In Roeder’s eyes, he was murdering to prevent murder. Somehow, that seemed okay to him…it seemed to work out in his mind. Add his name to the list of those who have murdered in the name of God.

I really don’t think that God is too happy about that.

This problem is symptomatic of (not only) American Christians who become zealously motivated toward a cause without stopping to think it through, without bothering to see problems of duplicity. The Christian Scriptures give a clear commandment…one of the Ten with which even most individuals not following the Christian faith are familiar: “You shall not murder.” Its in Exodus 20:13. Its rather self-explanatory in my mind. We’re not to take another’s life.

Now, different theologians debate the exact nuance of the Hebrew word, here. Some believe it means that taking another human life is always out of the question, others believe that only doing so preemptively is wrong, and that acting in self-defense is okay. That’s not honestly a debate I want to have here, because its not entirely applicable. Roeder took the life of Dr. Tiller, apparently believing Dr. Tiller to be a mass murderer because of the late-term abortions he performed.

My issue: I missed the part where that makes killing him okay. And therein lies the duplicity: “you shall not murder,” an injunction that some recognize at Divine in origin, but certainly one that has became a societal norm whatever your belief, makes it wrong to kill. What the individual has done is not at issue in that phrase. If one has faith in God and follows the Christian Scriptures, there are other parts of the Scriptures indicating that God will take care of the wrongs of individuals. Nowhere does it become our responsibility to take someone’s life in order to expedite that process.

I am Christian by faith. My personal opinion is that the late-term abortion procedure Dr. Tiller performed in his medical practice is abhorrent and barbaric. The faith that leads me to believe this, however, tells me that Roeder’s murder of Tiller was just as abhorrent and barbaric. That same faith tells me that going to war with another country for vengeance and oil control is just as abhorrent and barbaric. This is all the same logic, that I derive from the same statement: “You shall not murder.”

Depending on who you ask, that makes me a pacifist, naive, short sighted, ideological, or any number of other things. I’m not into the labels. I just know that it is wrong to take the life of another human being. We don’t have that right. To assume that we, for any reason, are entitled to murder another human being is to play God.

It seems to me that we are extremely underqualified.

The Loss of J.D. Salinger

I think it would sound cliche to say that the literary world lost an amazing writer this week, but the cliche would make the fact nonetheless true. J.D. Salinger passed away this week at the age of 91 after decades of living as a recluse in my wife’s home town of Cornish, New Hampshire.

I, like many, knew almost nothing of Salinger’s work after Catcher in the Rye. Recently, though, I became exposed to him through the recommendation of a friend and an accident involving chocolate. Several months ago, a friend was giving me critique on a short story I was in the process of finishing. He recommended a story with which I was unfamiliar: A Perfect Day for Bananafish, which was part of a collection called Nine Stories. I went to the local Barnes & Noble, and, being interested only in that specific story, found a copy of the collection and sat down to read the story over a cup of coffee, with the intention of re-shelving the book after. My cost-saving grad student ways hadn’t completely left me.

The description that my friend had given Bananafish as being the “perfect short story” resonated with me as I marveled at the precision with which the story was written. The body language of the woman described in detail, the squirmy, uncomfortable feeling in the dialogue between the protagonist and the child on the beach, the weighty symbolism of the mythical Bananafish, the abrupt suicide at the end that was described eloquently and without gratuitous violence, leaving me stunned and staring at the last sentence. Something I was glad to have read.

A few days later, I returned to Barnes & Noble and took the book from the shelf again to read the next story, curious to experience more of Salinger’s prose. This time I accidentally stained a page with chocolate from my drink, and decided that the only ethical thing to do was purchase the book instead of re-shelving it. I’m so glad that I did so, because stories such as The Laughing Man, to which I discovered a fascinating connection to some anime I enjoyed, left me digging for the message behind the metaphor (ironically, something Salinger would likely have not wanted). Others, such as the simultaneously abrasive and poignant For Esme–with Love and Squalor, left me with profound sorrow and adoration. The underlying theme of the loss of humanity in war is difficult to miss in Salinger’s work. I’ve since read all of his published collections of the “Glass Family fiction,” save one difficult-to-find short story that I’m hoping to lay hands on soon. Watching Salinger’s search for faith through the course of these works was riveting, although his faculties appeared to be loosening a bit by Seymour: An Introduction. Sadly, I don’t think he found the faith for which he was searching by the time these works were finished.

Salinger’s rhythm and cadence stay in your ear long after you’ve read him, and his characters, not to mention his New York, linger like an aftertaste with all their implications to ponder. I hope there were more manuscripts, as has been rumored, and that those will find their way to publication now. I’m in even more hope that, in reading them if and when they do see daylight, I will discover that Salinger found his way to the faith he desired.

Scrambled

When I was in college, I decided to write a sonnet.

Perhaps I should step back for a second and say that this was a strange time in my life. I was really, really into the whole “tortured artist” image. Assuming I recall the timeline correctly (it tends to blur for a couple of years), I had just come out of a near-Goth period that was marked by an obsession with Poe, and had become quite enamored with Shakespeare’s poetry. Or, maybe I have those two events backward. In any case, I tried to write a sonnet.

As you probably know, I was a theatre major, and I was exploring some great playwrights’ other literary endeavors at the time (Shakespeare’s sonnets, Tennessee Williams’ fiction). So, it was this whole exploratory phase in which I wrote a disastrous attempt at a poem about a girl I thought I was in love with (unrequited, of course) and had this bright idea that I would write so many sonnets that I wouldn’t have names for them all, and have to entitle some of them by number. You know, like “Sonnet #3.” Because that would just be artistic and cool.

Have you ever tried iambic pentameter? And I thought unrequited love was rough!

The point is that I was branching out my interests, and was early in a process of changing my mind. I began my college career as an applied music major. That lasted a semester before I became a music education major. Then the entire school had to go. My new school, which became my alma mater, welcomed me as a communication major. Then theatre became a second major. Then psychology became a minor, and somehow ended being how I make a living. During the process I wrote for a newspaper or two, took some print layout and technical writing courses, and eventually decided to do a master’s degree in theology.

Honestly, I just can’t seem to make up my mind. Do you see what one little innocent sonnet turned into?

Over the last year or two, I’ve decided that I’m up for a second career, and that I really need to decide on something and stick with it. Ever since that sonnet (and likely before it), however, I’ve had so many interests rolling around in my head that the only thing I can land on as being workable is to be a professor. That leads me to my current preparation to apply to PhD programs, but narrowing my interests into anything less than nebulous is just…well…more difficult than unrequited love and iambic pentameter combined.

Tonight, I was discussing a fast-approaching application deadline with a friend who’s giving me advice from the other end of the whole doctoral thing. He made a passing comment that suddenly seemed to synthesize a really fantastic research idea for this “interdisciplinary” program to which I’m going to apply. It was eureka! moment of sorts, a lightbulb-over-my-head kind of way to pull everything together…but then there was that one loose end that occurred to me that I didn’t think I could make fit…

…and then that led to another…

I’m just a little bit jealous of people like my wife, who has completed two degrees in the same field and will likely stay in that field for her third. That would make life so much simpler! Perhaps I will at some point settle upon which of my interests are primary and which are secondary, come up with some way to triage them into a course of coherent study. But that just doesn’t seem fair when there are all of these really great things that interest me out there.

At best, I’m trying to just stay with my current interests and not pick up any more. That would just leave my brain scrambled. And as for the ones I have, I’m clinging to that magic word, “interdisciplinary,” and pondering, “how am I going to incorporate them? Let me count the ways…”

What’s Behind Door Number Two?

Monday night, I was retreating into good conversation with a friend in the corner of a local coffee shop. My friend was telling me a story about his daughter, who is currently in her freshman year of college. He said his daughter was recently interviewed at a chain coffee shop (not the one of which you might immediately think), and was asked the question upon which he claimed the interview likely hung, which he paraphrased this way: Which is more important: a good product, friendly service, or fast service?

He then asked me which answer I would give. I immediately responded with “a quality product.”

Apparently, the correct answer for the interviewing coffee shop was friendly service. I should have guessed, since the interview took place in North Carolina. Don’t you just love the South? I was amazed. I’ve seen this principle in action, but have never been a believer. Producing the best quality product is by far the most important concern in my eyes. I immediately write off the “fast” answer, because almost nothing worthwhile is done quickly, be it coffee or friendships. I simply cannot comprehend the “friendly” view.

Take, for example, the coffee shop in which my friend and I were sitting. You see, my friend agrees with his daughter’s interviewers: friendly service is paramount to such an establishment. My friend knows the proprietor of the coffee shop we visited last night by name, as do I. He feels welcome in that shop, and this is what brings my friend back. I feel just as welcome in that shop. However, frequently, of late, they have not been able to offer me the coffee I wanted from their selection. I would rather pay a local business for my coffee than a national chain. However, if I can’t find what I want, I tend to go where I can get what I want: high quality coffee (in this case of a specific brew). I don’t care about how friendly the service is if I can’t get great quality coffee.

Now, let me insert a caveat. I have left restaurants and not returned (at least not for a long time) because of someone being needlessly rude to me. I’m not saying that treating an individual with respect isn’t important. I’m just saying its not as important as the product you’re serving, be it food or coffee or action figures or tomatoes.

(I have no idea where those last two came from, either)

Why is my perspective different from my friend’s? My feeling on this, at first blush, is that it is part of the creative instinct: whatever one is making must be as near to perfection as one can make it. Perhaps, though, I’m suffering from consumerism: I feel entitled to exercise my choice of products, thus placing the value on what I purchase instead of the human beings involved. There’s a third option, also: perhaps I’m again experiencing the angst of being a Northerner transplanted into Southern culture. We don’t waste so much time being polite up there. Its simply too cold. And, moreover, we don’t engage in false politeness (as in saying anything you want about someone as long as you end it with “bless their little heart”).

So, I pose a question to you, dear reader. Which of those three do you think my perspective is? Or is there something at play here I haven’t seen?

And, perhaps most importantly, which would you choose: service, or quality?