Fleeing the conformity of what I viewed as an arbitrarily oppressive world, I’d flung myself into the service of something much more tyrannical: myself.
Jordan Castro’s essay on literature, escape, and addiction from the autumn Plough Quarterly, which I’m just now getting around to, was perfectly timed. About which I will hopefully say more.
Two really nice conversations • Last week, I was thinking about Holcomb’s song “Live Forever” (particularly the live version at the Ryman), but it was especially nice to here from Audrey Assad. If you listen, make sure to stay for the short song she sings at the end.
David Dark: “Individuals within large robots speak of individuals within smaller robots freaking out and losing their humanity.”
So, this is what a diaper change currently always looks like around here:
Michael Oakeshott:
To ask the poet and the artist to provide a programme for political or other social action, or an incentive or an inspiration for such action, is to require them to be false to their own genius and to deprive society of a necessary service. What they provide is action itself, but in another and deeper sphere of consciousness. It is not their business to suggest a political remedy for political defects, but to provide an actual remedy for more fundamental defects by making society conscious of its own character. The emotional and intellectual integrity and insight for which they stand is something foreign to the political world, foreign not merely in fact, but in essence. This integrity and insight cannot be introduced into that world without changing their character; and to attempt to introduce them makes a chaos of what is otherwise a restricted but nevertheless ordered view. It is not their business to come out of a retreat, bringing with them some superior wisdom, and enter the world of political activity, but to stay where they are, remain true to their genius, which is to mitigate a little their society’s ignorance of itself.
That comes from this excellent post from Michael Rushton, who adds,
In other words, it’s not just that attempts to address Trump through art are almost universally unsuccessful, but that there is, as we economists say, an opportunity cost — we lose something of art actually can do, “making us conscious of our own character”, so to speak.
So it’s possible that The Green Bible is actually poised between two audiences: one unready for the message, one already tired of it. Meanwhile, the creation, still “subjected to futility,” continues to “wait with eager longing” to be “set free from its bondage to decay.” And we, even at our best, still strive to know what it means to hold this world in stewardship. Creation remains always too large for us, too abstract. What’s real is this furrow of black soil, that crabapple tree: These we can protect insofar as we see them, touch them, and therefore know them. But no general principle, no notion of greenness, can tell us how to care for what occupies our field of vision this moment, what sifts between our outstretched fingers.
Richard Wilbur (and my kitchen chalk board) would agree — or at least, I take this to be a sentiment cut from the same cloth:
And now the quick sun,
Rounding the gable,
Picks out a chair, a vase of flowers,
Which had stood till then in shadow.
It is the light of which
Achilles spoke,
Himself a shadow then, recalling
The splendor of mere being.
As if we were perceived
From a black ship—
A small knot of island folk,
The Light-Dwellers, pouring
A life to the dark sea—
All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know.
If you can selectively curate clips to prove that “corporate media” is monolithically liberal, you can almost as easily prove it’s monolithically conservative. Heck, given enough time, you could make a supercut “proving” that “corporate media” can’t stop coughing.
This reminds me of something that Alan Jacobs ( @ayjay ) said that I had to go searching for. And I found it! From an essay titled “Blessed Are the Green of Heart”:
Still more ill judged is the over-egging of the rhetorical pudding. The project website tells us that “with over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth.” I am not sure what to make of this argumentum ad arithmeticum, unless the point is that the earth is approximately 1.88 times more important to God than love and 2.04 times more important than heaven. Based on my own research into this topic and following the same method, I am prepared to say that the earth is 7.04 times more important to God than donkeys (which are mentioned 142 times in the Bible).