Kultur and Quixotism; epistemology and esthetic, comic and cosmic

I can't  even explain it,

 and don't have the right and rapt metaphor for it,

but reading Unamuno in English

                       --as rewarding as it is--

                              

pales compared to reading the original Spanish.

(I've been that way ever since I was in the Spanish Musical at Liverpool High School, and wrote my first Poe-ish limerick en espanol ..It's  St. Bobbi's fault).

Es una menita como una catedral...
                                                                         .ese.


I must agree that all translation is largely messianic, betrayal...
                           and AT WORST is actual  messianic betrayal.

Translation is inevitably una mentira  como una catedral, ese.

(for fun, see these links on my misadventures in  bilingual life:

Eye See Two Gringos, 

Mary Rocks! and 

"this is only a test")

See this section below, for example..


I love Unamuno's insights on Quixote
 (BTW, how ironic...quixotic, rather... that after 17 years of false strarts and endings, the famous/infamous Quixote film is finally finished),

 So here it is, a loaded section in Unamuno, From "The Tragic Sense of Life, pp 288-87 (or better yet,  en espanol at the click:"Del Sentamiento Tragico de La Vida" pp, 265-66):

Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude.  And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers, creating for ourselves a Quixotesque Spain which only exists in our imagination?

And again we shall be asked:  What has Don Quixote bequeathed to Kultur?  I answer:  Quixotism, and that is no little thing!  It is a whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a whole ethic—­above all, a whole religion—­that is to say, a whole economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is rationally absurd.

For what did Don Quixote fight?  For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for survival.  Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice, who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who is culture.  He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.

And the greatest thing about him was his having been mocked and vanquished, for it was in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame the world by giving the world cause to laugh at him.

And today? Today he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his endeavours so far as their temporal results are concerned; he sees himself from without—culture has taught him to objectify himself, to alienate himself from himself instead of entering into himself—and in seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be that of a Margutte of the inner man, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of laughter, but of laughter at himself. E ridera in eterno, he will laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not hear the laughter of God?

The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, realized his own comicness and bewept his sins; but the immortal Quixote, realizing his own comicness, superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it.

And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and he fights on. He is not a pessimist, because pessimism is begotten by vanity, it is a matter of fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don Quixote is neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the meaning of the word "snob" unless it be explained to him in old Christian Spanish. Don Quixote is not a pessimist, for since he does not understand what is meant by the joie de vivre he does not understand its opposite. Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite of Clavileno,[68] he has not got as far as the aeroplane, which seems to tend to put not a few fools at a still greater distance from heaven. Don Quixote has not arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition that not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their lives running at top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to which they are going, but from hatred of the place they are leaving behind, and so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of despair.

But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter, and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he has to fight, attacking the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy in order to bring in a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic, contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola, an Italian Quixote of the end of the fifteenth century, he fights against this Modern Age that began with Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind, reconciliation between reason and faith—this, thanks to the providence of God, is no longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight with it and will, to all appearances, be vanquished, but he will triumph by making himself ridiculous. And he will triumph by laughing at himself and making himself the object of his own laughter.  Unamuno

NT Wright at Google: "Simply Good News"

Love that he was invited, and love his approach

Since "there's no end to grief," let's "set endless love to musical performance" so in the ruins we can know that "to know is to mourn"

photo credit

As I have said/confessed/sung/prayed  more than once, "I grieve not grieving."

                   But I finally realized that that  itself is inherently grieving, and thus a good place to start.

May He who began a good work in me be faithful to complete my encounter with grief..

Life is ruthless, indiscriminate....and ultimately loving....in supplying us the traumascape and holy ground of grief.

                   But often we need to gather..or enter into... a soundtrack and soundscape to 

                                                                sustain, sanctify and hold our grief-ground.

"Songs to Grieve By" could be a delightful name for a Spotify playlist.  I'll have to claim it.

     Of course the songs that make the cut  don't have to  all be  classically sad songs;

                                             laments, wails 

                                                                         and Pink Floyd downers.

Even though life is often best "tuned to minor chords"..

                    Some  of the songs selected should be uptempo and upbeat, 

and shamelessly embedded with unrepentant joy..

"California" by U2 is an intriguing choice.

The rocker is hardly a dirge; though a quick read at some of the lyrics might cause you to guess that it is.

This section has haunted  (stalked) me for months

I've seen for myself, there's no end to grief/That's how I know

 And why I need to know/That there is no end to love

All I know/And all I need to know is                          There is no end to love

                              

U2 has faced an unimaginable string of losses in recent months:the 

Bono's harrowing accident,

   the death of the band's chaplain, the indefatigable  "north star" Jack Heaslip,

         the death of Larry's father the week of the tour kick-off..

and yesterday , this:

Pastor Rick Warren:

U2's road manager for 33 years, the amazing Dennis Sheehan died suddenly last night here in LA. Dennis was a calm and kind Christian man. The team is heartbroken so Adam, Larry, Edge, and Bono asked me to share some scripture, words of comfort, and pray with them right before they walked on stage tonight. After sharing the ‪#‎ChooseJoy‬story from my son's death, I asked "So how do you go out and do a concert when your heart is hurting?" Bono said "We choose joy!" Right. Pray for Pam who lost the love of her life.  link

That  version of  "choose joy" is not some "name-it, claim it" happy-clappy motto (Denial is not just a river in Egypt),  but  a hardwon  naked trust in the endless love that is know only through the crucible of endless grief.

That doesn't preclude anger..even yelling at life, grief, the grieved...and God.

"I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Comfort me, COMFORT ME, COMFORT ME!!!" -Bono at end of "Wolves." #RIPDennis #U2ieTour

— Tim Neufeld (@timneufeld) May 28, 2015

Last night, at the end of "Raised by Wolves," itself a stunning public griefsong, Bono snippeted Psalm 23 in the outro (as usual), this time followed by "Comfort me.  COMFORT ME, COMFORT ME!"  (see video below).  Psalm 22 and 23 are two sides of the same whole and holistic grieflove lamentjoyprayer (see"The Lord Be With You...Even When He’s Not!")

Even St Paul unapologetically confessed, "I had no peace of mind."

                 And as another singer has added/midrashed "Peace of heart is better than piece of mind."

Peace of heart...finding love limitless in the midst of limanality and limitless grief is the only ways and means of knowing anything.  Not to mention are only lens for  knowing as we are known. ( By the way, we can know the Unknown Calle)r.

Note the last line  of that excerpt of "California"-- "there is no end to love" ---is itself a clear nod to Paul's 1 Corinthian's 13 insistence that "love never ends."

But do check well  the line before that, which has baffled me: "There's no end to grief.  That's how I know there is no end to love."

This  apparent nonsequitur and profound truth   is also thoroughly  Pauline.  NT Wright has detected in Scripture, notably in Paul, an "epistemology of love."

He even suggests that it must inevitably worked out in art; specifically music...even more specifically "musical performance":

....Is this then a reinforcement, from a musical point of view, for Dorothy L. Sayers’ thesis in The Mind of the Maker, to which I referred earlier?  Is there then indeed a Trinitarian pattern to the work of the artist or writer which, reflected back, provides some kind of evidence of who God may be?  I am not sure that this thesis can be sustained by itself, or that a natural theology built up by that means without help from elsewhere would arrive at anything approximating to the God and Father of Jesus, the giver of the Spirit.  But when the creative and aesthetic project meets the scriptural revelation — mediated, of course, through the thinking of the household of faith — then the two can perhaps at least be complementary.  I have explored elsewhere what I have called ‘an epistemology of love’, in which the sterile opposition between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reductions of ‘knowing’ are transcended.   I think, and hope, that what Paul Spicer and I discovered in our work on the Oratorio was something like that: a love for the subject-matter, a love worked out in art and scholarship, through which we both learned and grew and grasped afresh some of the central matters of Christian faith. And if this is true it may be a pointer to something else - something which the whole Theology Through the Arts project is all about: the non-reducible, and not merely decorative, function of imagination within historical work (as Collingwood insisted) and also theological endeavour, as well as in musical composition and performance.

I realize that I have thus arrived, as a non-specialist, at more or less what Aquinas says in his famous formulation: ‘As grace does not destroy but perfects nature, it is right that natural reason should serve faith just as the natural loving tendency of the will serves charity.’  There is of course a dangerous circularity about reaching that conclusion about method precisely by engaging in what, I hope, might be an instance of it happening in practice.  But I think I have said enough to show that this is a fruitful area for further enquiry and experiment, especially if — though this would be a matter for specialists to enlighten me further — what Aquinas meant by ‘natural reason’ is a large enough category to embrace aesthetic and artistic integrity, the composer’s and conductor’s sense of ‘what works’.  Certainly in this case the composer’s — and conductor’s — aesthetic and artistic integrity ‘served faith’ in a way that makes the ordinary jobbing theologian and preacher jealous.  If all theology, all sermons, had to be set to music, our teaching and preaching would not only be more mellifluous; it might also approximate more closely to God’s truth, the truth revealed in and as the Word made flesh, crucified and risen. 

 NT Wright, link

Is this how the band got through the concert last night?

Is this how they get through every night?

I too have felt (well, maybe not; which is itself the problem) the deaths of a series of loved ones:

a cousin who was like a brother, dear friends from church...

and I have grieved not grieving.

And even though I have been weaning myself from the evangelical idol of certainty  in recent years (and that is a grieving indeed)..

   in recent weeks, thanks to U2's "California," and their healthy navigation of their own grieving, I have been learning and leaning into all that I need to know.

Steven Garber writes of Walker Percy (whom I am pretty sure is a U2 influence):

One of his best stories is Love in the Ruins. It is the first of two novels featuring the character Tom More, a fictional descendent of Sir Thomas More, “the man for all seasons” who, in the 16th century, was the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor of England – and who refused to go along with Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce, so lost his head and his life. Percy’s More is a bad Catholic, a wandering husband who drinks too much, and a brilliant doctor. Written with a finger to the wind to the social turmoil of the 1960s, Percy wrote of Southern life embodied in the institutional frailties of the Love Clinic, a place where physicians and patients are thrown together in their hopes, longing to belong to someone somewhere.

Literally and metaphorically staggering his way through the story, More develops a machine that promises to save the day for the Love Clinic; he calls it “the qualitative/quantitative ontological lapsometer.” For anyone with ears to hear, attentive to the Enlightenment Project of the last few hundred years, Percy here captured the fundamental flaws of the modern world, fictional as they were in imagination and conception. When More is asked about the nature of a lapsometer, he replies – innocent as a dove, wise as a serpent – “It measures lapses – in the human soul.”

The dreams and debates of modernity, cascading as they are into postmodernity, are always at the heart of the human condition. It cannot be otherwise, as we are never more and never less than sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So we take our place as folks who long to love and to be loved. Percy understood that with an unusual eye: historically, philosophically, psychologically, politically, and, yes, theologically, seeing the complexity for Everyman and Everywoman. We want love, yet we also know how hard it is to love and to be loved.

There’s the rub. To know and to love; to love and to know. Can both happen at the same time? Can we do both? Can we have both?

Most of the time it seems impossible. For reasons beyond the scope of this short essay, I would argue that human beings more often than not choose cynicism or stoicism as alternative accounts of life and of love. Rather than an epistemology of love, a way of knowing that is manifest in loving, we choose to protect our hearts, “knowing” with the poet Byron that “he who knows the most mourns the deepest.” To know is to despair. To know is to flounder. To know is to mourn.  link

Related:

• "Know Kidding" = "Know Love" ?
• Wright: Epistemology of Love

• Crowder goes slumming /Psalming: Gilligan's Island, R-rated T-shirts, automated urinals, St. Airport...and sunsets and sushi
• Pepsi, Sex, Elevation...& Mission Trips That Are Actually Missional
• Soundtracking Grief and Missing Jesus
• an impossibly bad ending that's good news
• No Sanctified Church without Grieving our Grief

epistemology of film/history

Visions of the Past

The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History

by Robert A. Rosenstone

Official promo:

“If you’re in search of a thoughtful overview of film and history as rival routes to the past, check out the essays collected in Visions of the Past...Rosenstone nicely reverses the assumption that history exists only on paper, approved and stamped by historians.”—Carlin Romano, Chicago Tribune

“[A] fascinating analysis of the traditional and nontraditional historical film...This is solid scholarship written in a manner that makes it accessible for a wide range of readers.”—Choice

“The pieces represent work over a wide time span and demonstrate Rosenstone’s evolving attitude toward the historical movie...The author knows of his subject from various perspectives...[and] presents his arguments simply and clearly, without drowning the reader in jargon or obtuse references. Well recommended.”—Library Journal

“In these essays, Rosenstone writes with the fervor of the convert...urging historians to admit that film can often do what books can’t...Rosenstone is really rooting for modernist or post-modern cinema--the likes of Alex Cox, Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha--as the only adequate chroniclers of our fractured sense of the past.”—Sight and Sound

Can filmed history measure up to written history? What happens to history when it is recorded in images, rather than words? Can images convey ideas and information that lie beyond words? Taking on these timely questions, Robert Rosenstone pioneers a new direction in the relationship between history and film. Rosenstone moves beyond traditional approaches, which examine the history of film as art and industry, or view films as texts reflecting their specific cultural contexts. This essay collection makes a radical venture into the investigation of a new concern: how a visual medium, subject to the conventions of drama and fiction, might be used as a serious vehicle for thinking about our relationship with the past.

Rosenstone looks at history films in a way that forces us to reconceptualize what we mean by "history." He explores the innovative strategies of films made in Africa, Latin America, Germany, and other parts of the world. He journeys into the history of film in a wide range of cultures, and expertly traces the contours of the postmodern historical film. In essays on specific films, including Reds, JFK, and Sans Soleil, he considers such issues as the relationship between fact and film and the documentary as visionary truth.

Theorists have for some time been calling our attention to the epistemological and literary limitations of traditional history. The first sustained defense of film as a way of thinking historically, this book takes us beyond those limitations.  link

Ignatius of Loyola directs mimetic and histrionic kittens to play religiously on stage: copy-catechism

pic credit

From The Idea of a Theater by  Fergusson
 
The Histrionic Sensibility: The Mimetic Perception of Action

The trained ear perceives and discriminates sounds; the histrionic sensibility(which may also be trained) perceives and discriminates actions.Neither form of perception can be defined apart from experience but only indicated in various forms of its use...

Kittens in their play seem to be using something like our histrionic sensibility. They

directly perceive each other’s actions: stalking an imagined quarry; the bluff and formal

defiance which precedes a fight; flight in terror; the sudden indifference that ends the

play. Their perception of each other’s actions is itself mimetic, a sympathetic response of

the whole psyche, and may be expressed more or less completely and immediately in

bodily changes, postures, and movements.  The soul of the cat is the form of its body; but to some degree the soul is actual in different ways in different moments, depending upon what the cat believes, or make-believes the situation to be...When kittens perceive and imitate the actions of grown cats, the histrionic sensibility is being used for educational, moral (or by analogy) religious purposes: to explore the potentialities of the cat nature and the dimensions of the world in which the cat finds itself...

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola  would seem to be far removed from the play of kittens; yet their purpose is to reveal, through the techniques of make-believe, the potentialities of human nature and the realities of the human situation, as Loyola understood them.   When he explains to the devout how to make present to their feelings and imaginations as well as their reason, scenes from the life of Christ, he  sketches a technique like that which the Moscow Art Theater used to train actors. His immediate purpose is similar: to reveal a scene significant on many levels, and a mode of action capable of evoking a mimetic response of the whole being pp 236-238, The Idea of a Theater, Fergusson

Two Irish traditions (U2 and The Taking Salmon of Slane) grapple with innocence and experience

"One of the finest stories grappling with the balance between innocence and experience comes from the Irish tradition..."

No, the writer (David Whyte) does not mean the Irish tradition that is U2, even though their two new CDs  ("Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience" ) do grapple right there.

 Here's (p. 148ff in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America)  his reference.






Whyte also coins the delightful phrase"innocence in the world of experience."  (154)

 All this in the chapter, "Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge," subtitled, "Innocence and Experience in Corporate America."  (see link above, p. 161, for the "fish story").

How do we live this out in other corporate entities and organisms..

           


   ..... especially the Corpus Christi?




Explore all this,
         soundtracked by U2
             and guided by Whyte..
               

Blake on ecclesiology, profane becoming sacred, and thinking against oneself

It's kind of freaky that just a few days ago--before you and I had any idea that U2's surprise releases
would be called "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience"..

..I pulled out two books:

• Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience"
• Inchausti's  "Subversive Orthodoxy

One theory is that "The Joshua Tree" was to be a double album; one disc "Songs of Innocence" and the other  "Songs of Experience".

One reviewer headlined a review of U2's "Pop" as  More Songs of Innocence and Experience.

One can see why Bono likes Blake. From Inchausti:

If one were to seek the great archetypal  precursor for prophetic Christian thinker championing the soul's return from the spiritual exile of Enlightenment rationalism, William Blake comes very close to casting the mold.  Condemned as heretical by some and as too orthodox by others, he was one of the first to point out exactly how the new sciences were distorting the role of the imagination in human affairs and putting the soul to sleep.

          Altizer  and Hamilton..described Blake's contribution to Western thought

Blake was the first of the modern seers.  Through Blake we can sense the theological significance of a poetic reversal of our mythical traditions, and become open to the possibility that the uniquely modern metamorphosis of the sacred into the profane is the culmination of a redemptive and kenotic movement of the Godhead

          This, I think, is an essentially accurate description of Blake's intellectual influence.
           I would, however, reverse the figure and the field.  Blake does not celebrate the sacred 
           becoming profane, but the profane becoming sacred.
                   

....Blake reminds us again and again that true knowledge--that is to say, knowledge of our ontological status as creatures made in the image of God--cannot be grasped by calculation; only through a vision.  And vision--in its most concentrated and inclusive firm --is what psychoanalysts call the "imago," an internal picture that transform s facts into meanings..

..His theme is that the church lost its radical energy by giving up its apocalyptic vision for a more accommodating set of doctrines, and so the church became more hierarchical and tradition-bound at the very moment it should have become more democratic and imaginative..

Christian thought critiques mainstream culture but also sees itself under judgment; our best modern Christian intellectuals have turned thinking against themselves into a veritable art form: from Blake to Dostoyevsky, from Kierkegaard to Chesterton, all the way to Dorothy Day and Walker Percy, the exemplary mode of Christian thought has been a triadic structure of self-reflection, paradox and irony that reverses the values of this world and the logic of cause and effect  pp 19-28, 178

Austin Farrrer on "probable tracks" of Jesus' temptations: subversion of Paethon and temple tantrum connections

hotel in Israel

Austin Farrrer , though apparently "one of the most profound and prophetic theologians of the twentieth century"  (so back cover says!) was new to me....but the price was right on one of his books (1.50):  "The Triple Victory: Christ's Temptation According to St. Matthew."

As one with a special interest in the temptations of Jesus, literary structure of Matthew, I wouldn't have resisted the testation to buy it at double the price (:

Come on..NO reviews on Amazon US or Amazon UK (He was British)?!...

"His activity in philosophy, theology, and spirituality led many to consider him the outstanding figure of 20th century Anglicanism. -Wikipedia

Turns out he was  well-respected by C.S. Lewis,and had an intriguing solution for the synoptic problem.  Wiki calls him a "maverick."

 I like him already...even if/especially if he is sometimes wrong (:

Even in the preface,  Frederick Borsh partly agrees with accusations  of  Farrer's sometimes fanciful flights into literary structural analysis, midrash and typology.  But he defends him as being  very thoughtful, creative..and ahead of his time as far as redaction/compositional criticism etc.  "He may have seen too many typologies, but he was not wrong in understanding that biblical writers often thought in typological categories.  This keen awareness pays particularly rich dividends in his study of Christ's temptations." (p. 2)

He does well, as does Donald Kraybill, in seeing many links from the temptations  to the rest of Matthew's gospel.

I haven't read enough for a review yet, so I'll  just

1)ask if any are familiar with this work

2)quote this:

Satan's insinuation...contains a hidden poison: "If you are the Son of God..If you cannot or dare not, what sort of divine Son are you?"...

Jesus declines..not because it is wicked..but because it is wicked to make a willful use of spiritual power...

"throw yourself down"...The suggested action is so utterly useless in itself, it can have one purpose only:.."Jump and find out; if you won't jump you can't really believe it."

...Christ refused to do what Phaethon did [doubt his paternity].  But could he have even thought in those terms? We may give a double reply.  First, though Christ did not think that God was an inhabitant of Jerusalem, he took the sanctity of the holy place with complete seriousness  He can, indeed, be  said to have pulled his own death on his head, by taking the law into his own hands and cleansing the temple from trade.  Second, we must say that in dreams or visions symbols become realities...

..It would be absurd to claim any sort of certainty for the suggestions we have advanced.  We cannot be sure what paths of association Christ's visionary thoughts, as St Matthew represents them, follow out.  Yet our guesses are not valueless.  They were the sort of lines along which a devout Jewish imagination ran; and the exercise of working out probable tracks and junctions in the movement of such a mind puts us in sympathy with the author we are trying to understand..  Chapter IV

"A Coalition too Small? Anabaptism and the New Calvinist Gospel" by Anthony G. Siegrist and Gary Wiebe

link

"know what we see rather than see what we know"

Abraham Heschel, in The Prophets: 

“What impairs our sight
           are habits of seeing
            as well as the mental concomitants
                             of seeing. 
Our sight is suffused with knowing, 
  instead of feeling painfully
                          the lack of knowing what we see. 
The principle to be kept in mind is
                  to know what we see
                       rather than to see  what we know.”
-Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction. vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. xi.

What would Bono read? "Invisible" and two Spanish mystics

image source

If you know the U2 song, "Invisible," how do you NOT hear it when you read this section of  Yovel's The Other Within:The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity:

"the simplistic mysticism of the Alumbrados was superseded by the mystical theology of the Converso monk Francisco Osuna.  Osunsa's follower, Saint Teresa of Avila, became the greatest mystic of Spain, and her own disciple and partner, Saint John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz), is Spain's towering mystical poet.

The mystical theology was opposed to the prevailing scholastic theology.  God was not an object of knowledge--certainly not the kind of dogmatic knowledge promulgated by the ruling scholastic schools--but of love, and ultimately, union.  To reach God the soul must sink deeply into itself and  be purified of all thoughts of created things.  The lover of God must be free of sensation, desire and rational reasoning; she or he must transcend all particular forms of life, thought, and wish, and plunge in silent concentration into that "dark night of the soul"  (the title of Juan de la Cruz's best known poetic collection), from which God alone might respond to his love.  Ceremonies and vocal prayers are equally of little use.  What matters is the heart; and the heart, in order to find its religious intensity and depth, must be liberated from external distractions like speech and ritual.

Yes, Osuna insisted, this does not lead to nothingness, but rather to supreme being and totality.  Our thinking nothing is also thinking all. for in it we think nondiscursively of Him who by wonderous eminence is everything."  -Yovel, p. 255

The line I am trainspotting here in U2's "Invisible" is one of the following (the actual lyric is debated; it's a new song and no official lyrics are available):

• "I don't think about you that much..unless I stop to think at all"
• "I don't even think about you that much...unless I stop to think it all"
• "I don't think about you that much...unless I start to think at all"
• "I don't even think about you that much..unless I start  to think it all"

See  Invisible - U2 Lyrics from @U2, listen up and decide for yourself..


As if that's not enough, a few pages later, in an analysis of Teresa's spirituality:

"When the soul is out of itself in the state of union, it suddenly surges into great heights, like a huge tongue of flame bursting from a fire, or a giant eagle kidnapping the soul and flying with it to majestic heights.  This creates an experience of sublimity, leading to sweet, painless suffering during which Teresa remembered herself as "flooded with tears without pain."  Her description suggests that the whole human being, and not only the soul as opposed to the body, attains  elevated existence."  -Yovel,  bold emphases mine

Of course, here is another tie to a key line of "Invisible":

a body in a soul

This line is probably  partially triggered by a known influencer of Bono, C.S. Lewis.

(See a great post on this song  by Tim Neufeld here.  Excerpt: "He often suggests that spirit and flesh are inextricably linked : 'A body in a soul'—really, did he sing that?? Yep. That’s some great theology! Could be the subtitle for a whole course on theology of the human person. 

But, it  also makes one wonder..as Bono read Teresa as well
                                               ..or Yovel?

¿Quién sabe?

Of course, fans will also note Yovel/s/Teresa's reference  above to elevation, yet another U2 song, based on a mystical prayer technique.

I have wondered about his bedside reading before...See:

• "I wanted to know Jesus, but you gave me a library"
• No Line"/"And There Was Light"

We know the B-Man  has read Lewis,

            Eugene Peterson, 

                            Watchman Nee...

                                           and even Smith Wigglesworth..

but how deep does his well go?

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Bonus: See Mother Beth's post on "Invisible"  here.
Obviously with a visibly invisible God, there's plenty of good theologizing to be done..

"Faith Wthout Words" by Carolyn Arends

link

amerikan arkitecture: even realer than the fake real thing?

image source

My wife, on her first visit to Disneyland (specifically, Tiki Room):  "It's all fake!"
Me: "I think that's the point."


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Below excerpt from pp 36-38 of   The Experience Economy (updated edition here )

... Note that the Rainforest Cafe, which combines the dining room with a retail shop and bills itself as A Wild Place to Shop and Eat," is not out to simulate the actual experience of being in a rain forest . Rather it aims to stage an authentic-and esthetic-experience of the Rainforest Cafe.

 Another wild place to shop can be found in Owatonna, Minnesota, at Cabela's, a 150,000-square-foot outfitter of hunting, fishing, and other outdoor gear. Rather than add elements of entertainment to the store, Dick and Jim Cabela turned it into an esthetic experience, centered (literally) around a thirty-five-foot-high mountain with a waterfall and featuring more than a hundred stuffed taxidermic animals, many of them shot by the two brothers or other family members. This part of the store represents four different North American ecosystems. Elsewhere, two huge dioramas depict African scenes that include the so-called Big Five big-game targets: the elephant, lion, leopard, rhinoceros, and cape buffalo. Three aquariums hold a number of varieties of prized fish, while almost seven hundred different kinds of animals in total are mounted in and around every department of the store. Truly, as Dick Cabela told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, "We're selling an experience."" So much so that more than 35,000 people visited the refurbished store on the day it opened, and the company expects more than one million visitors every year

The esthetics of an experience may be completely natural, as when touring a national park, primarily man-made, as when dining at the Rainforest Cafe, or somewhere in between, as when shopping at Cabela's. There's no such thing as an artificial experience. Every experience created within the individual is real, whether the stimuli be natural or simulated. Extending this view, renowned architect Michael Benedikt discusses the role he believes architects play in connecting people to a "realness" within their created environments: 

Such experiences, such privileged moments, can be profoundly moving; and precisely from such moments, I believe, we build our best and necessary sense of an independent yet meaningful reality. I should like to call them direct esthetic experiences of the real and to suggest the following: in our media-saturated times it falls to architecture to have the direct esthetic experience of the real at the center of its concerns

 . While architects may lead, it really falls to everyone involved in the staging of esthetic experiences to connect individuals and the (immersive) reality they directly (albeit passively) experience, even when the environment seems less than "real." Benedikt would likely call the Rainforest Cafe and similar venues "non-real," and insist that its architects address "the issue of authenticity by framing [displaying the inauthentic as inauthentic], by making fakery honest, as it were."Z3 To stage compelling esthetic experiences, designers must acknowledge that any environment designed to create an experience is not real (the Rainforest Cafe, for instance, is not the rain forest ). They should not try to fool their guests into believing it's something it is not. 

Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable makes a similar distinction when she says "it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake. All fakes are clearly not equal; there are good fakes and bad fakes. The standard is no longer real versus phony, but the relative merits of the imitation. What makes the good ones better is their improvement on reality. " To illustrate the difference, we'll consider two invented envi- ronments Huxtable spends considerable time critiquing: Universal City Walk and just about anyplace Disney.

 City Walk in Los Angeles is a collection of retail shops, restaurants, movie theatres, high-tech rides, and low-tech kiosks, each with a distinctive facade. Controlled exaggeration abounds, as in the four-story guitar adorning the Hard Rock Cafe. Visitors lazily stroll through a water fountain that shoots up at well-timed intervals. Guests pay an There's no such entrance fee for parking (nobody walks to anything in L.A., thing as do but here they pay admission to walk around) that's reim- artificial bursed only if they spend money at a dining or movie experience (purchases of goods merit no reimbursement). Part experience theme park and part public square, City Walk primarily imparts an esthetic experience, Huxtable confirms, as it "is being used for its own sake."" The realness of its fakery evidences itself from the very moment you park your car in the ungarnished lot. The back of the buildings greet arriving guests, who thus see the unadorned undersides of the facades as they walk in. Outside you see the inside of the mask; inside you see its outside. Adjacent buildings, unassociated with City Walk, remain visible through alleys and other off-shoots to the main drag. Its esthetic acknowledges its fakeness. Through framing, it's truly a real fake.

 The esthetic of most Disney experiences, on the other hand, seeks to hide all things fake: No one gets to see behind the curtain. Parking lots smoothly flow into shuttle buses, welcoming booths, and turnstiles. Facades seamlessly integrate into one another, lest some guest detect the trickery in the dimensional downsizing. Mickey Mouse never takes off his mask, lest we see the pimply faced kid inside. It's the fake fake that Huxtable and other critics decry, not being true to what they deem it really is. 

Or is it real fake fake? Other critics laud Disney for creating wholly immersive environments, consistent and engaging within themselves. One writes "that from whatever angle, nothing looks fake. Fabricated, yes- fake, no. Disneyland isn't the mimicry of a thing; it's a thing.... I'm convinced the genius of Disneyland isn't its fancifulness, but its literalism."" On the subject of Disney theme parks many people (including coauthors) disagree. But one thing remains clear: an esthetic experience must be true to itself and come off as real to its guests.  - pp 36-38 of   The Experience Economy