Month: April 2011

Consciousness, Idling

Frank Wilson considers the quieter moments:

[O]ften, in the morning, while I’m waiting for the coffee to brew, I’ll stare blankly out my kitchen window and, in a bit, I’ll be aware of the sparrows chirping, and the wind chimes, the flowers, the light, while I myself seem to have been reduced to just a point around which all these other things are happening. It is as if I had dissolved into a state or process of awareness. And yet, at such times, I feel intensely alive. Or maybe it is simply that life at such times seems more intensely real. Either way, my ordinary everyday me seems absent.

Faith After A Miscarriage, Ctd

A reader writes:

My wife and I recently had a miscarriage after our first attempt at pregnancy. We're both Christians but don't use Christian-y language to explain away things. On the day that it happened, my brain was parsing out the biological from the logical. We humans are so quick to assign meaning to everything. I think it helps us cope with the highly emotional and illogical. We think: I am a good person = nothing bad should happen to me. Except, some things just … are. A terminated embryo can be just as cold as a mismatch of genetic material. No soul tormented to death. No cosmic master plan of torture for good creatures. Just human biology in all of its terrible agony.

Another writes:

About six years ago, after having one healthy boy a few years earlier, my wife and I were expecting baby #2. 

The first time around was very easy.  Not a lot of effort to get pregnant.  Baby #2 was the same way.  First try.  And we figured it was smooth sailing from there.  Just about a week after we told everyone that we were expecting again, the pregnancy was in jeopardy.  Why, we will never know, but in the end, my wife had a D&C.  The hospital we used is Catholic (we are ex-Catholics, now Episcopalians) and they had a nun come speak to us about our feelings and burial arrangements. 

That last part was weird for us.  We just wanted it to be over and to move on.  Yet the hospital insisted that the fetus be buried.  We could handle it ourselves or it could be buried on the hospital grounds where others were buried.  This really freaked me out.  I am pro-choice and to me, it seemed silly. 

But I must say, after having two more children, I still think  of that fourth child that we lost from time to time.  And this post brought it all back.  I feel a sense of loss today that back then, I never thought I would experience.  Strange, this thing called life.

Another:

Thanks for posting this. My wife and I have been dealing with the same struggle in our faith community. How do we make sense of miscarriage? And how do we love others who don't have the slightest clue how to love and care for us? For that matter, how do others love and care for us? How do I love my wife, for whom miscarriage is a physical reality, while for me the whole thing feels removed?

I do want to mention a great resource, a new book by a Methodist minister who had a miscarriage early in her marriage – What Was Lost, by Elise Erikson Barrett. It's a theological reflection on miscarriage that calls us into community to deal with miscarriage. It's been helpful for us.

Coming Undone

Aaron Bady is awed by Judith Butler’s essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics”:

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact.

One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so, when we speak about “my sexuality” or “my gender,” as we do and as we must, we nevertheless mean something complicated that is partially concealed by our usage. As a mode of relation, neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another.

Reagan’s Chat Room

Richard Fisher interviews one of the artists behind The ARPANET Dialogues, an archive of imaginary conversations between politicians, academics and artists "as they could have taken place over ARPANET, the US military computer network that led to the modern internet":

Each of us – and invited guests when necessary – played the part of one of the characters. Without rehearsing, we simply met in an instant messaging chat and had a conversation, letting the discussion go where it may. We trust that the structure of the project is strong enough; we need only capture the flavour of the characters in order for it work. The dialogues are published verbatim without any editing.

Movie Time

Zadie Smith reviews Christian Marclay's The Clock, a "twenty-four-hour movie that tells the time […] by editing together clips of movies in which clocks appear." Smith notes the telltale consistencies:

Staged time obeys certain conventions. Afternoon sex is the sexiest, probably because it often involves prostitutes. Between four and five o’clock transport is significant: trains, cars, and airplanes. If the phone rings after one in the morning do not expect good news. Cuckoo clocks, no matter when they chime, are almost always ominous. When Orson Welles says what time it is, it lends the hour an epic sound. At twoAM everyone’s lonely.

… Marclay has made, in essence, a sort of homemade Web engine that collates and cross-references an extraordinary amount of different kinds of information: scenes that have clocks, scenes with clocks in classrooms, with clocks in bars, Johnny Depp films with clocks, women with clocks, children with clocks, clocks on planes, and so on, and so on, and so on. You’re never bored—you haven’t time to be.

All The Lonely Playlists

Anna North soaks up a new study:

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied 106 teens, 46 of whom were clinically depressed, over five weekends, and surveyed them repeatedly on their media use. The kids who listened to the most music were the most likely to be depressed; kids who read the most were the least likely. …

I don't think art's highest goal is to make us happy — my music library is so dripping with misery that it sounds like a party mix for a funeral. But I do think that for people who feel confused by and isolated from humanity — that is, teenagers — there's something to be said for reading. David Foster Wallace famously said that writing should make people "become less alone inside." And while sometimes you want to revel in your alienation, sometimes a little literary companionship is exactly what you need.