How Language Matters

[Warning: this post about cursing contains cursing]

I wanted to like Derek Webb's "What Matters More." I really did. I find myself in agreement with a lot of Derek's premises: Christians are sinning when they ignore the effect of their speech on those they consider sinners (especially those self-identifying as homosexuals); Christians need to be marked by a profound care for the poor; the call of Christ is one that doesn't fit neatly into the culture-war mentality; "Christian" art should not necessarily mean "sanitized" art. And Derek Webb has, occasionally, managed lyrics that blow me away with their intelligence, wit, and (above all) sincere passion.

But listening to "What Matters More," I found myself profoundly underwhelmed.

The offending passage comes from the end of the song:

If I can tell what's in your heart by what comes out of your mouth
Then it sure looks to me like being straight is all it's about
It looks like being hated for all the wrong things
Like chasin' the wind while the pendulum swings
'Cause we can talk and debate until we're blue in the face
About the language and tradition that he's comin' to save
Meanwhile we sit just like we don't give a shit
About 50,000 people who are dyin' today
Tell me, brother, what matters more to you?
Tell me, sister, what matters more to you?

Provocative lyrics are well and good; but Derek's line seems to come out of nowhere. One can be, for instance, a culture warrior with no curiosity about the plight of homosexuals, and give 90% of one's income to those areas of the world where 50,000 people are dying. The line seems (and certainly there are people who have said this) to be there simply for shock value. But more to the point, it draws the wrong sort of battle lines. If you aren't with Webb on this, you're with the terrorists--oops, I mean the Pharisees who don't care about anything but the appearance of piety.

In this villainization of his audience, of course, Webb the folk singer has a long tradition. Tom Lehrer mocked it quite wittily and succinctly: "We're joining the folk song army / Everyone of us cares / We hate poverty, war and injustice / Unlike the rest of you squares." His point is, I think, valid. For all the real issues music can engage with, it has a great potential to merely redefine hip; people who buy Organic Fair Trade simply because that's what the cool people do.

But the tradition Webb claimed isn't that of folk-rock counterculture, but of the equally antagonistic Old Testament prophecy. "Israel is a whore, a pillager, a nation so far from its roots that God cannot stand it," the Old Testament prophets say. Mostly because they no longer worship God, and don't give a shit about the poor and foreigners. And, of course, they have delusions of holiness.

If one accepts a prophetic voice, however, one has to tell the truth. Yes, the term "whore" is a strong word, but it accurately describes Israel's foolish departure from godliness towards whatever shiny new cult their neighbors share.

If Webb wants to write a song about how we "don't give a shit" about poverty, that's fine. More than fine, we need such voices. But he starts sticking a line in the middle of his song on sexual identity. "If you're a conservative, you hate the poor," he seems to say. Kind of like how "if you're a liberal, you love terrorism."

Why, I wonder, couldn't he have put in something that actually made sense? How about giving his Evangelical audience a taste of its own medicine? Show it what its words really sound like? I'm no Derek Webb, but how about this as an improvement:

...Cause we can talk and debate until we're blue in the face
About the language and tradition that he's comin' to save
And all the lost Jesus Christs who are neighbors down the street
Hear just how holy we are, and how we think that they're shit
Tell me, brother, what matters more ...

At least he'd be on topic; if you take the words of Christ seriously, his is the only way to life. And if that message is being perverted to a message of hate for sinners, then great should be our judgment.

It seems a clear misstep of artistry, but it irritates me more than that. And perhaps Derek's culture-war-in-reverse language is indicative of something more. On the latest trends in Webb's music, Michael Spencer has perhaps the best summary:

..And make no mistake about it, on the “law-Gospel” continuum, this is law and prophetic denunciation, delivered with relentless consistency. No one else is saying this stuff and Webb doesn’t miss his punches. His pleasant voice betrays his very unpleasant message. We are a captive church that is now identifying with the values of our cultural captors, and it’s not pretty. Our treatment of the gay community provides a painful example. [...]

Webb is an artist, and I respect his freedom to create and I encourage you to get and listen to Stockholm Syndrome. As a Christian, I want to give Webb all the artistic room possible, and my soul needs to be jolted as much as anyone. But I’d like to pray that Webb has a Lutheran turn in the near future, and finds that speaking of law and Gospel, prophetic intensity and Christ’s love are things that can go together in art and must go together in life.

It would be a turn as well, I think, away from the culture war rhetoric (both left and right) that requires one's enemy to be caricatured and hated, and towards the love, peace and grace of Christ.

McKinley and the Poetry of Coziness

There are two authors who have earned a place, literally, next to Tolkien on my bookshelf: Ursula K. LeGuin and Robin McKinley. (LeGuin is to the left and McKinley to the right, if you must know, but any political significance is purely accidental.)

My choice of the two authors is somewhat intentionally subversive. Both are women, first of all, whereas Tolkien famously included just about three female characters (out of about 17 leads) in the entire Lord of the Rings and virtually none in The Hobbit. (Galadriel and co. get somewhat better treatment in the Silmarillion, but that is neither here nor there.) Moreover, both are authors who in different ways have actively asserted their femininity; most notably neither is the Hawk that Tolkien was, and if they celebrate courage it is far more likely to be an introspective, Frodo-like pacifistic persistance than the Norse courage-at-life's-end of an Aragorn or Gimli or Theoden or Beren or Turin.

But mostly, they both simply understand (and deploy) the power of words and legends to make life, ease pain, and build imagined communities. There is a richness in the best moments of stories that doesn't simply represent life, but re-awakens us to the wonder of existence. If Oscar Wilde preferred the beautiful lie to the ugly truth, both books seem to tie the two inextribly together.

While LeGuin ranges far and wide in search for her inspiration, covering seemingly every possible culture and perspective in an attempt to embrace all in her liberal-minded poetry, McKinley consistently stays determinedly at home. Her books are, without exception, about coziness.

This doesn't mean that they are always feel-good, or that they ever fit into the Hallmark-sentiment mode. She manages to frankly and explicitly deal with topics ranging from purely soulless vampires and dystopian regimes to the trauma of early-life incest and rape, and she has no problem leaving characters with continual emotional and physical wounds. Yet the center of each story is not the physical or spiritual war and anguish that forms the heart of the revenge tales and world-saving adventures that form the bulk of post-Tolkien fantasy. It is, instead, the quiet desire for peace and home and family and, above all, the comfort of being a human in a world that miraculously contains other humans.

And so it makes sense that her first and tenth books would both be reworkings of Beauty and the Beast, a fairy tale about being separated from the home you love, about cultivating something safe and beautiful and living in the midst of a dead, monstrous, masculine domain. And while historians and literary critics can (and, I would argue, should) talk until they're blue in the face about how the story represents the psychological experience (and idealized) of medieval marriage, which after all sent very young women into strange castles to live under the alien rule and control of strange men, McKinley finds something that seems much more primal in the story. It becomes an allegory not for some lives but for all life, lived in the cozy corners between the harsh inhumanities of war or taxes or job markets or statistics. It is the wonder of community, and affection, and things that don't go as poorly as they maybe should for someone who has the persistence to keep hope and love alive.

But really McKinley puts it best herself, when Rose Daughter's protagonist, Beauty, finds herself encountering for the first time an enormous glittering mural on the roof of the insubstantial and alien mansion of the Beast:

"But--no--splendid is not the right word. They are splendid, but they are--they are so friendly. Oh dear!" she said, and looked up at him, half laughing, half embarrassed. "How childish that sounds! But so many of the beautiful things in the rooms beneath us--push you away--tell you to stand back--order you to admire and be abashed. These--these draw you in. They make you want to stay and--and have them for company. Yes, that's right. But I--I am still making them sound like a--like--sort of comfortable, though, am I not? Like a bowl of warm bread and milk and an extra pillow, and that's not it at all. They are not comfortable. Indeed, I feel that if I lived with them for long, I should have to learn to be ... better, or greater, myself. If this Queen of the Heavenly Mountain looked down at me from my bedroom wall every day, soon I should have to go looking for that path to her domain. I wouldn't be able to help myself."

It isn't the poetry of arrival, nor of anguished and fevered search. But it is the poetry of life, and of the coziness that comes when the world is harsh and one has found a nook in which is shelter and fire to keep off the chill and rain--and a human to help out and offer company. It is pure escapism, if you will, but it is escapism in the best sense of the word. It is escapism that offers but a rest and a gentle stop, and that (like Tolkien's Shire) also asks to be used as a stopping off point for the greater tasks of living. And a reminder, that every day we encounter far more than we will ever dream of in our philosophies, and that the cozy details of life are not unworthy of serious celebration.

A Paranthetical Non-Review of Gilead

(Alas, I have yet to write a review of Gilead. Hopefully I will; probably after I get a new copy so I can look at quotes. Suffice it to say that the book lived up to its promises; intelligent and thoughtful and quietly engaging. Also, very Chestertonian in its celebration of "existence" without ever sacrificing nuance or contemplative serenity. I found myself most often meditating on my tendency to idolize books; for some reason (possibly because the novel is not my natural habitat) the book seemed almost incapable of being idolized. The peace of the book (when it shows up; few beauties or sorrows of earthbound humanity are omitted) is one I wanted to pursue in reality rather than savor in fiction.

My one criticism is sometimes it felt that the fiction was unnecessary, if not somehow forced. Why read the musings of a fictitious pastor, however iconic and thoughtful and realistically human, when I have yet to crack open Merton's Seven Storey Mountain? It's not a question that I ask much; but this time I was compelled to ask.)

And yet another random quote

(Presumably, at some point I will get back to actual blogging.)

(Background: A "sheep unit" was (and remains) the measure for amount of grass eaten by animals; horses, at the expensive cost of four "sheep units," were determined too expensive for the Najavo to maintain and ordered to be sold or destroyed. This upset the Navajo; but Chamberlain argues that the term "sheep unit" may have been even more offensive than the order itself.)

"Thus held they the funeral for Hector, tamer of horses." These are the final words of Homer's epic The Illiad, a story from the crossroads of Europe and Asia and Africa, where misunderstandings between civilians and barbarians were the order of the day. They hold out a promise of dignity in the face of defeat and death. Not "Hector, worth five hundred sheep units," but "Hector, tamer of horses."

Oh, but that all happened such a long time ago, we say. And such a long way off. But of course it didn't. Hector the Homeric hero is the Indian cowboy who just arrived in the pickup truck. Long before I knew about Homer's Hector, I wanted to be like him, a tamer of horses. And I even knew a cowboy named Hector, riding the rodeo circuit in the Kootenay and Columbia River basins. Like his namesake, he got into a nasty fight over someone else's woman, and he got dragged about in the dirt a lot. When a Brahma bull he rode for all of two and a half seconds caught him from behind and tossed him back up over the chute in Coeur d'Alene, the rodeo announcer had a far-fetched figure of speech ready, just like Homer. He said that he'd gotten his oil checked.

Yet Collier and his colleagues [in the reorganization of Navajo lands] didn't see all this. Maybe they were mesmerized by their colleague Will Durant, teaching across town at the Labor Temple and insisting that civilization begins when chaos and insecurity end, with the equivalent of sheep units. In any case, they could not see the parallels between the Navajo saga and the story told over twenty-five hundred years ago, which also celebrated the irrational and the unreasonable and the inexplicable as central parts of our lives; while the Navajo themselves, who did not know Homer but had their own scholars and storytellers drawing on tales remarkably like The Illiad, understood that horses count for something more than sheep. They recognized that the choice they were being offered--between useless horses and useful sheep--was a false one, like the choice between being marooned on an island and drowning in the sea. They insisted that while their horses might well be worthless--to claim otherwise was to risk falling into the cost-accounting of sheep units--they were also priceless.

--J. Edward Chamberlin, from If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories

Random Chesterton Quote

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candor. If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail. A man can get use to getting up at five o'clock in the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue.

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (like journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.

-from On Lying in Bed

And....a bonus quote

Because the first may have inaccurately reflected the book...

T

hey had a particular way of addressing each other when the old bitterness was about to flare up.

"Have I offended you in some way, Reverend?" my father would ask.

And his father would say, "No, Reverend, you have not offended me in any way at all. Not at all."

And my mother would say, "Now, don't you two get started."

Quote of the Day

Lately, I've been reading my way through Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Amazing book, but I'm not sure how to talk about it. Instead here's a quote. I'll probably put up more later.

When I was a child I actually believed that the purpose of steeples was to attract lightning. I thought they must be meant to protect all the other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me. Then I read some history, and I realized after a while that not every church was on the ragged edge of the Great Plains, and not every pulpit had my father in it. The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe.