Taking Off and Landing

This week, I spent three days down in Bryan/College Station with a few guys that I love and respect a great deal. I’ve known Kevin and Sean for 11 and 9 years respectively; when I think of a nice vacation, it generally involves sitting around with beer, dominoes, and these two guys. And maybe some Totinos and Cars records. Seriously–I hadn’t seen Sean in a year and a half, so my mini-vacay started by sitting on Kevin’s back patio with him, Kevin, and Mark Douglass, drinking good beer, and talking for five hours.

I realized it the week before when Kevin and his wife Latonya came to stay the night, but the thought came to full fruition this week that one of the reasons I jones for time with these people in particular is that they are masters in the art of conversation. True masters, doubly-educated, tenured professor with Nobel Prizes under their belts masters in the subtle art of talking and keeping a conversation alive and nurtured. Too often, communications between myself and the people I care about turns into sheer pragmatics: who’s buying the groceries, who’s taking out the trash, where are we meeting? And to be sure, there is a good deal of that which keeps relationships alive. But when I’m with these guys, nothing turns into something for five hours.

Case in point: over a game of dominoes, Sean, Kevin, and I wrote a chain poem which is completely inappropriate for public consumption.

Case in point: conversations about Kurt Vonnegut morphed into conversations about women which morphed into conversations about God seamlessly. No awkward reset buttons or pauses.

Part of this, I think, is knowing people over a long time, and in a variety of circumstances. The three of us first met in Missouri while entertaining mentally handicapped children, and I have no doubt this has colored our conversations since; when your first encounter with a person is seeing them at their deepest level, beyond the niceties and breakfast talk, the shape of the friendship is profoundly altered. It’s as if you’ve done this backwards: first you find out their character and their ability to care for another human being, and then you find out they like Steinbeck too.

I miss celebrating this art, born by the copulation of time and space, hours to spend and confined areas. I miss sitting my butt on the couch and Sean pacing outside for a smoke and Kevin picking out a record. I’ll think about it from now until the next time, I suppose.

The best example I have for my relationship with God from Scripture is that of Jacob wrestling the angel in the dark. At some point during the match, both parties realize what’s going on, and yet, they keep struggling, and striving, until eventually, day starts to break, and both of them know the jig is up. Jacob comes away limping and blessed. And thus, the paradoxical life with God continues: the one you love is the one that can kill you.

God, what was once a fight to the death turned into a playful tussle between friends. Why then the need for silence? Why all the quiet and elusiveness? Why this comedy of timing and spaces? You wrestle with me for….what? Submission? To make me stronger? To capsize me? I need some words here, some hope and future.

Time will tell. But, sweet Lord, do not sink me now. My arms are weak; my heart is tired; my legs are low. And I have many, many days left to hang on.

Today walking to the library, I decided to experiment.

With hardcore drugs. Just kidding.

There’s a straightaway connecting campus, as there are is on most campuses, I suppose, where you can walk for a good quarter mile or so and be doing something completely mindless before you actually get anywhere. At OBU, it was between the Bible building and the student center; at Baylor, it’s between the library and the middle of campus. So, on this exceedingly dull piece of real estate, I’m tromping along towards another marathon stretch of rifling through dusty books, and decided, I was tired. So, I closed my eyes while walking.

15, 16, 17, 18…open. It became a game to see how far I could walk on this completely straight, complete desolate piece of concrete with my eyes shut before opening them again. On one attempt, I nearly went to sleep, I think.

18, 19, 20, 21….open. This was as far as I’d let myself walk: a 21-count with no idea what was in front of me. When your sight goes out, you become keenly aware of every little sound; every sense heightens with the anticipation of running into something. The slightest bump in the concrete became an excuse to open my eyes and carefully dart them around to see if perhaps I’d run over a small child in mid-game.

Any excuse to look around, any excuse to open the eyes up and take in what was going around me, to remind me that I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t going to fall off a path that was big and straight and devoid of trees. As I walked with my eyes closed, I wondered about how Bono could have written an album like Joshua Tree at age 27, or how it feels like my sister is taking on the role of the oldest child, or why my beard has gotten so much coarser in the last two years. I let my mind roam everywhere, and then with the slightest provocation from my feet, things snapped back into focus with the one purpose:

Don’t fall down.

I remember when Mom went missing nearly a year and a half ago for a day, and how everything snapped into focus. If that day had ended badly, that would have been the day I would have completely fallen off of the road, knees bleeding, having run over by a tree. I remember the days when love was unreturned, and how those felt more akin to being pushed off into the asphalt. I think about days when I was walking, in a straight line, eyes closed, and the slightest bump turned into a lion’s roar.

And how those days will come again. But not today. Today, I walk eyes closed, to the library, to the phone, to my car, to my life, mulling over conversations with youth, conversations with the East coast, conversations with family, and smell the grass. Some day, the lion will roar again, and I will be face down in the gravel, eyes blinking in the sun, knees bloody and sweat stinging.

But not today.

Do you ever get that feeling like something in you is about to give way? Every semester, I start off feeling fairly refreshed and ready to challenge myself one more time, and then within about two weeks, I wake up with something wrong. Tonight, it was the nagging combination of a spinning brain and an ingrown hair on my jawline that conspired to get me out of bed.

And so, here it is, 1 a.m., and I’m at the computer, five hours before my alarm will go off to start another week. At some point, this has got to stop. At some point, there has got to be a point at which I wake up, smile, yawn, and congratulate myself on a night well-slept.

Craig posted today on the spiritual value of sickness, which I have to confess, is awfully tempting some days: to say that a clear mind is not prerequisite for the encounter of God is often a relief. At what point does having a clear brain get in the way of what God is doing? At what point do paradigms and epistemologies become a loathsome burden and a frail companion better left to die of their wounds?

At 1 a.m., when you don’t have any other words than “God, give me a break here.”

I love coming home.

I could never live in Shreveport long term, but coming back is always a breath of air, breath that gets exhaled way too quickly. I got here on Monday, and already Thursday is upon me.

I don’t miss the humidity; I don’t miss the pollen. I do miss sitting down for coffee with my parents.

For time to slow down.

Or stop altogether.

In the last two days, two completely independent comments have gone as such:

“You’re different on your blog than you are in person.”

And I don’t quite yet know how to take that. These are two people who know me in the flesh, whose smiles and eyes I know. What does it say that what shows up here is different than that?

The comments were meant in the best of intentions, so here’s my shot at figuring out the difference:

1) I’m not a split personality. The things I write here, I really think. This is not an exercise in pontification. Or at least, I hope not. I have a friend who says that I do, and from time to time, the soapbox shows up. And for that, I apologize. I try not to give lectures or speeches. But when you’ve been reading most of the day and someone happens across the one topic that’s been tickling your brain all day…

2) I go back and read stuff I wrote from two years ago, and think, “Holy crap, that’s pretty funny. I wonder who wrote that?”

3) This is a whole lot cheaper than therapy.

4) I was an English major. This is what I do. If I’d been a speech major, I’d have learned how to talk. As it is, I learned how to write a whole lot better than I speak. This isn’t to say that I’m a Neanderthal or that I’ve reverted to grunts and whistles; I’m getting a lot better at the whole verbal self-disclosure thing. But writing comes to me like doing geometry does for others: it’s just what I know to do, and in some ways, have always known to do.

5) What a person writes and how a person is are two different things. One is the extension of the other, but they’re not polar opposites, or evil twins, or parasites. So, if you perchance to read this and think, “Man, this dude sounds interesting”, know that you’re getting the product of effectively a one-way conversation. The screen doesn’t give a whole lot of feedback. The blank page is the opportunity for a person to put down exactly what they want without consideration of the feelings; talking to someone like that, however, will get you drop-kicked.

6) If I die and this the only testimony I have to who I was, please Robert, erase the whole damn thing before someone gets the wrong idea. I’m being totally serious about that.

7) Deep down, there are things that I believe everyone wants to get off their chest and have someone else say, “Sho nuff.”
So, I guess in light of #7, blogging really does carry with a sense of narcissism. Rock, meet hard place.

9) Any attempt to decipher who a person is based on what they write is like thinking that we’ve got God figured out because of Scripture. God is free and wild, and people are not reducible to a few lines of resume, or even their best attempts at witticism or pontification. At best, these words are my attempt to contribute what goes on between my ears and occasionally, in my heart.

10) A couple of times, I’ve had someone ask me to coffee as a result of this blog. In the words of one friend, you might be a little disappointed. I’m not as arresting or witty on the spot; I’m not the humor machine or Noam Chomsky mixed with Walt Whitman. Sometimes, I don’t brush my teeth; I rarely shave; I have bad allergies; I know at best a limited range of things, and pick up a lot of useless crap through a lot of people who are smarter than me. Sometimes, coffee works out. Sometimes, it’s really kind of odd. I don’t do it much for that reason. If it works the other way around, that a person knows me, and then reads the blog, well enough, but this is such a overblown first impresson. Like the guy who rents the car for a first date.

11) This all started here two and a half years back, mostly because I was working in retail and needing a place to scream without screaming at my roommates. Reference # 3. Let me reiterate that most writing is done for the writer first, and for an audience second. At least, that’s what I hear.

12) If you get something out of this blog, it’s as David Wilcox, ripping off the Police, pontificated once: “It has more to do with the sea than it does the bottle or the message in it.” You want a pontificator? Wilcox is king.

Thanks to my gatekeepers. You know who you are.

So, the summer’s shaping up like such:

July–work for Baylor Press, and slave over German for graduate students.
August–go back to classes, sleep as much as possible before hand, work through a few things that will make next Fall infinitely easier.

But wait Myles…that leaves May and June out…what are you doing then?

So glad you asked. May is most likely going to be travel month. I’ll be done with papers by May 1, at which time I’m hoping to skip out for a week or two and do some driving. All over creation: Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, the Carolinas, to see friends, visit this place, see this person get ordained, etc. In the meantime, I hope to just have a lot of time in the car during which I’ll listen to music, pray, and just breathe and hope the car makes it back to Texas in one piece.

In June, and possibly in May, I’ll be at World Hunger Relief, Inc., just north of town, living off the land.

I’ve had several friends who have lived here over the years, all of whom have had nothing but great things to say about it. The farm was started in the 1970s as a place to train international relief workers how to do agriculture in sustainable ways, without the benefit of big farm equipment or things that folks in the two-thirds world won’t have access to. In other words, how to grow food without cheating. They house anywhere from twenty to forty folks at a time, and the best part is if you volunteer twenty hours a week, you get free room and board.

I walked into the common dorm where the rotating cast of volunteers live, and immediately was on my grandparents farm in Montgomery, Louisiana. Growing up, I would spend a week in the summers there, helping them pick okra or tomatoes, fishing, and doing whatever you do in the country. As a kid from the city, about two days was enough. After that, I really started jonesing for something to do other than read a book or go swim at my aunt’s pool. But as an adult, I crave that quiet and silence. I crave hard work and rest as its own reward.

The days there run from early morning, before the coffee’s ready until the heat of the day. I’ll be digging and working with sweat and blood. I can’t wait. Walking around out there, even on a ridiculously murky day, I knew that participating in what this group is about is part of what Nietzsche refers to as the “master morality”. Mark, when I come back, I promise an entire post on how this is part of the Christian life. I swear. Working in something like this is a constructive response to things like consumerism and violence. Rather than standing on a street corner playing the game on the terms of the oppressor or asking for the world to stop so I can get a handle on its violence, places like the farm are working to do part of what the Gospel asks: that we help our neighbor, without demanding that the ones ignoring the neighbor pay attention.

Wendell Berry writes that technology is an excuse for us to not get to know one another. And while I can’t say that things like electricity and blogs and gasoline are terrible in and of themselves, I can say that life is full of dispensible material and delicious clutter. For one month, I’m going to try to do without. My reasons have almost nothing to do with some radical call to discipleship, a little more to do with free board, a little more than that to do with the exotic nature of the place, and a whole lot to do with the need to reconnect to that which God has already given us: the fruits of the earth and the sweat on our forehead.

***

FYI–I’m out til Tuesday visiting friends in the Carolinas. The calm before the storm that is the final push for the semester. A much-needed trip to see people where their lives are lived.

It’s a Sunday, and thanks to a prompting by Jennifer, I got a huge slice of nap pie this afternoon, and woke up feeling better. Celina asks me in church today, with a questioning look on her face, “Are you getting enough sleep?”. The initial question took me back because it sounded like something my mom would ask me.

“Are you getting enough sleep? I mean, are you sleeping enough?”

“Well, like 6 to 7 hours. I’d love to get 8, but you know…”

“Because your eyes just look really tired.”

Now, both Celina and Jennifer aren’t going to just come out and say if they don’t like something, for the most part. Unless it’s for the other person’s own good. For example, Jen didn’t particularly care for my shoes this morning. They were on sale, and I needed a new pair of shoes that wouldn’t hurt my feet. But she wouldn’t say anything about them. But she did say, “Myles, go take a nap.” Later, she called to say, “Myles, go take a nap. Do you want me to call you at 3 to wake you up?” To which I gladly replied, “Twist my arm. I guess I’ll sleep”, as I gladly crawled under the covers, putting off tomorrow’s presentation for another couple of hours. So, for the record, let me say that Jennifer and Celina, you are wonderful friends. I love you both.

I had this crazy lucid dream about a post-apocalyptic world in which all these famous people and myself were in this bomb shelter, waiting for the air to clear. Bizarre stuff. We argued over bread, and the whole time, I wanted to kick Sean Connery in the face for always wanting to be the first person to check outside for clear air. I mean, it’s crowded in that bomb shelter, and I wanted my turn.

So, Mr. Connery, I don’t bear you any ill will. I just wanted to breathe the sweet air of freedom. If you want, I’ll save you a seat for tomorrow’s presentation over Pseudo-Dionysius’ Divine Names. You’ve got my number. Holla at me.

Myles

The weather outside is disgusting for a February day. If I were living in the Northeast, I’d expect for things to be dour and grey, but not when I live south of the Sandbelt, and in a place where summer goes from April to October. That, and I have about two hours of freedom left for the day, part of which I’m spending writing this blog.

And writing about Nietzsche.

And thinking about how I’m going to coordinate getting a rental car.

Did I mention that someone hit my car this week?

Did I mention that I’m prone to be on the melancholy side?

Did I mention that I’m not a real big fan of change, and that I take change kicking and fighting sometimes? And that I wish I could put things on pause for a few minutes and put a kibosh on the next two weeks, and buy myself an afternoon in the sunshine and breezes, with true love by my right hand?

It’s not that I hate my life. I love it.–I just don’t understand it.
**

Barth writes regarding the process of salvation that it’s impossible to say whether or not something is historical or not, because we ourselves are in the process of history, that we are actors in a drama that began before us, and that was begun without our consent. As such, with regards to the work of Jesus, we can believce it or not, say thanks or not, live into it, or not. It’s not so much a matter of saying whether it is or not, so much as it is accepting that to not accept it is ridiculous.

It’s on days like this that I wish what Nietzsche says is right, that life is truly about exerting our creative will into the world, and creating the world. But I know in my heart of hearts that’s not the case. I wish I could say that our lives were truly about being aesthetic works, that our actions are meant to be the deepest expressions of ourselves, and that was it.

But I don’t believe that.

I believe in a God of providence, one who cares, who guides, intersects, divides, seeks, and finds. I believe in a God who lets Neil Young write a few good songs. I believe in a God who knows that I’m frustrated and happy at the same time, and have no idea how to resolve those two things. I believe in a God who doesn’t want me to simply resign myself to fate, but asks me work with Him, who knows that I don’t get the big picture, and who gets a little antsy when things start to get nuts.

So, God, when I get pissed this week and start to freeze up, you know what’s going on, right?