Mood

"What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you'd turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you'd turn brown, and if you were blue you'd turn blue.

Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you'd never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you're angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, "Congratulations!"

Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and thing, I'm happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief!"

-Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer

Learning

I've been learning a lot of late, or at least relearning and reprocessing things that I have known, but have not yet known into action. Slowly I'm beginning to realize that I do not have to be good at everything, that I don't have to be constantly proving myself. This desire, the urge to be superior, I am learning, cheapens the things I love. Paint, poetry, music and, well, existence, if merely done to be the best, or even to be better takes away a lot of the joy and most of the reason for doing these things at all. Yes, I want to be better, but I want to be better because I love these things and want to be able to communicate something through these mediums truthfully and meaningfully (and yes, I mean through the medium of existence as well) and not simply to be the best.

As I write this out it seems such an obvious statement, such a simple concept, but something that I find highly difficult to keep in my brain, one that keeps slipping out as I slip into the day to day and yet it also seems quite significant for living and enjoying that whole endeavor of existence.

"Oh to grace how great a debtor" keeps circling round my head of late and with these kinds of realizations. How simple things get twisted and obscured worries me, but the fact that it isn't so horribly and desperately terrible to forget because I know I am given grace abundantly and constantly is a very happy thought.

A short rave on books.

I must just state that I love books. A lot. I love the elegance of words well formed, the sentences that grab hold and run through your life forever after, the deeper resonances that cannot be put into words but that still fill you with a sense of meaning and an awe of the world around. I love books because it has so often been books that have made me desire to live and live fuller, because books often (or at least the good ones) never claim to be the end all, but merely a pointing finger.

There is also something about the ink, the smell of the pages, the weight of all those words in one's hand.

I have recently been taking more advantage of the Zaventem library's rather impressive English section, have shaken off the guilt of reading in English while I desperately try to cram French into my brain and have accepted again that I need these distant teachers. I realize that this is a rather ridiculous post, but there it is.

I am in intense gratitude for books and language and people like Madeleine L'Engle, Nicole Krauss, C.S. Lewis, Nabokov, Milosz, Wilbur, Marilyn Robinson J.R.R. Tolkien, and many many more.

I've already shared this many times, but I was re-watching it again tonight and had to share it again. Thanks Jeff!

Encounter 10: Jeffrey Overstreet on the how of storytelling from International Arts Movement on Vimeo.

I Am in Need of Music

"I am in need of music that would flow Over my fretful, feeling fingertips, Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips, With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow. Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low, Of some song sung to rest the tired dead, A song to fall like water on my head, And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow! There is a magic made by melody: A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep To the subaqueous stillness of the sea, And floats forever in a moon-green pool, Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep. " Elizabeth Bishop

Art. (?)

I've been thinking A LOT about art and faith recently. How does art function in proclaiming the beauty of faith? How can I tangibly wrap my brain around these things? How does one judge good art from bad art, art as propaganda from art as proclamation? How does one judge the integrity of a piece of art? I struggle with a lot of "Christian art." I will admit that I to often judge a lot of it without appropriate thought, because a lot seems simply propaganda or simply, well, bad (I've been convicted that this is far less the case than I think).

I believe so strongly in the merit of art. It has been used to call me back to truth so often (as Milosz might say). It's often beauty in some form of art that reminds me of the intense beauty of the creator and creation, that makes me see how impossible it is for there not to be a God. I need these reminders. I need Monet and Kandinksy, Milosz, Wilbur and Kenyon, Lewis, Nabokov, Tolkien and Mckillip, Satie, Debussy, Over the Rhine and Radiohead. (to name but a few of the million of artists that have influenced my life.)

In these random thoughts I've been missing my books and missing the easy access to English books. I particularly want to re-read Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water. I've been searching for some sneaky way to read it online, but to no avail. Instead I ended up with a plethora of quotes from her that I felt compelled to share. So, instead of rambling on I will merely paste these quotes below. They may appear random, but I swear they all fit together quite nicely in my head.

"Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth."

"To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, not even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist."

"It isn't easy, it does take an incredible amount of discipline, you don't just write just when you feel like it or you're not going to build up much of a body of work. Inspiration comes to you while you're writing rather than before....For me the discipline of writing and the discipline of prayer are identical, in that I have to let myself be got out of the way because that's not a do-it-yourself activity, and listen....When you write, don't think, write. You think before, you think after, you don't think during. When I'm praying, when I'm truly praying, I'm not thinking, I'm not speaking, I'm shutting up, so perhaps if God has something to say I can hear it. So writing too is an act of listening, listening to what has to be said."

"In art . . . we are helped to remember some of the glorious things that we have forgotten and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure . . . ."

-Madeleine L'engle from various and sundry works.

Waiting

I feel as though my life thus far has only been a preparing, a laying out of instruments, sterilizing scalpels and stethoscopes and lathering my chapped and waiting hands in the sudsy water of the maybe while the world pins me onto its surface and time bends to enfold us mere mortals. And I hope that these gatherings, the collections of facts and figures, my acquired, though feeble movements, will be used.