April 2014 – Page 54

Scaling A Magic Mountain

Tom Whipple finds himself making repeat visits to Mount Athos, home to 1,400 monks who tend the “vestal fire” of the Orthodox church:

Athos is a place where a bearded octogenarian who has not seen a woman in 60 years can venerate the bones of a two-millennia-dead saint, then pull out a mobile phone to speak to his abbot. Where a pilgrim with a wooden staff in one hand can have a digital camera in the other. And where, in the dim light of dawn matins, I can look on a church interior that would be instantly recognisable to a pilgrim from five centuries ago. …

To understand Athos you have to accept it is magic. Not in the sense that the supernatural actually occurs: at least, not so far as I am concerned. But here people really believe in magic. Every monastery, even the lowliest, has its “miracle icons”. In one there is an ancient painting of the Virgin, saved from the iconoclasm of early Orthodoxy, that reputedly screamed out in pain when the monastery was set on fire. Still blackened from the ordeal, she receives medallions and offerings from people who want her help.

Reflecting on a recent visit, he wonders what calls him to Athos:

Of one thing I am sure: my motives have nothing to do with spirituality, except in the very loosest sense. Why, then, do the monks let me come?

They are not stupid; they know that not all pilgrims are as pious as they pretend to be. But providing hospitality to guests is their calling. Besides, they would say that God knows why I am here better than I do. Other places are pretty, other places are unusual, yet like many I keep returning.

On my last night, I go to the shower. I drop my towel on the way to the cubicle. I bend to pick it up, and when I return there is a monk standing in front of me. “Do think”, he says, “about the true religion.”

Maybe I will, someday. But at the time I remember what a pilgrim called Marcellus told me the last time I was here, over the dregs of a bottle of ouzo. He too was a regular, but not especially holy, visitor. He, however, knew why he came: “We have lion reserves, elephant reserves, monkey reserves,” he said. “Why not monk reserves? Why not let monks live in their natural habitat, an endangered species preserved for the world?” He smiled, pleased with the analogy, and poured another glass.

(Photo of monastery at Athos by Svetlana Grechkina)

“Both in the substance and the parabolic method of his teaching about love, Jesus never asks anyone to accept anything except on the basis of their personal experience of human love. In using the terms Father and Son to express the relation of the divine and the human, rather than, say King and subject, he makes the relation a physical not an intellectual one, for it is precisely because in the relation of parent and child the physical material relation is so impossible to deny, that it is so difficult for a human parent not to love their children irrespective of moral judgment. They can do so, but it is very much more difficult for them than for those who have not such an obvious physical connection.

Jesus in fact is asserting what the psychologists have confirmed: that one does in fact always conceive of one’s relations with life in terms of one’s relations with one’s parents, and in proportion as these were bad, one’s attitude to life is distorted. But though parental love is often imperfect, it is good enough and often enough for us to have no doubt about what it should be like. We expect parents to love their children whether they act well or badly because it is our experience that they usually do: we expect a physical relation to override morals. In speaking of the fatherhood of God, Jesus is teaching that God does not love us because we are ‘good’ or because he is very ‘good’ and merciful but because he has to, because we are part of him, and he can no more hate us if we act badly than a man can hate one of its fingers when it aches: he can only want it to get well,” – W.H. Auden, The Prolific and the Devourer.

The View From Your Window

Omaha, Nebraska, 12.30 pm.

PS: I am enjoying the book club selection and look forward to the discussion!

Dying, One Step At A Time

The literary critic D.G. Myers, who has prostate cancer, reflects on how he’s preparing for the end:

Dying is the problem, not death. As an Orthodox Jew, I believe with perfect faith in the resurrection of the dead, but until that happens, death is the termination of consciousness. No peeking back into life. I won’t get to keep a scorecard of who is crying at my funeral, who is dry-eyed, who never bothered to show up. If I want someone to cry at my funeral, I need to patch things up with him before the last weak images flicker out.

In the past few weeks I have been approaching ex-friends whom I have damaged to ask their forgiveness. I’ve been behaving, in short, as if dying were a twelve-step program. Step 8: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.” Step 9: “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” Not that I mind having enemies. One person whom I approached recently accused me of “basking in self-importance,” which is one possible way, I suppose, of describing the tireless knowledge that death is near. But there are other persons, including some with whom I have had very public fallings-out, whom I don’t want as enemies when I pass away. To die without accepting responsibility for the damage I have done to relationships that were once meaningful to me would be shameful and undeniably self-important.

“A Second St. Augustine”

Timothy George explains why 17th century poet and priest John Donne “continues to attract readers, especially among Christians, and especially during the season of Lent”:

Above all, Donne is the poet of embodiment. He writes about things we can see and feel: fleas, ants, bearbaiting, the sudden blush of a young girl, a long voyage at sea, theatres that “are filled with emptiness,” and wartime in an “age of rusty iron.” He also writes a lot about himself and his torturous relationship with God. After he died, Donne was called “a second St. Augustine.” The Doctor of Grace is quoted more than seven hundred times in Donne’s surviving sermons. There is no doubt that he read and lived out the Confessions over and over again. The Augustinian themes of restlessness, original sin, repentance, forgiveness, pilgrimage, predestination, the resurrection of the body, and the overarching hope of salvation born of pain—these are all present in a language that still dazzles in both poetry and prose.

[Literary critic Stanley] Fish considers Donne a self-aggrandizing poet, one who feigns devotion to God as a pretext for abusing and lording it over others, especially women—his mother, his many lovers, his poor wife Ann. Donne is a spiritual sado-masochist, Fish thinks, in verba if not in res. Such a gendered, ultramodernist reading, however, ignores the much more subtle dialectic between religion and sex (Augustine again) that pervades Donne’s work—both his earlier “secular” love poems and his post-conversion sermons and devotional verse.

David L. Edwards, in his superb study, John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit, gets it right: “Here is a man who is thoroughly human, and energetically masculine, as well as being highly intelligent, yet he cannot stop talking about religion when he is supposed to be talking about sex, anymore than he can stop talking about sex when we expect him to be pious.”

Previous Dish on Donne here and here.

(Image of Donne in his shroud, c. 1631, via Wikimedia Commons. Donne commissioned the portrait shortly before his death and hung it on his wall as a reminder of the transience of life.)

Can Reading Dante Save Your Life?

Rod Dreher claims that’s what it did for him:

[K]illing time in a Barnes & Noble one hot south Louisiana afternoon, I opened a copy of Dante’s Inferno, the first of his Divine Comedy trilogy, and read these words (the translation I cite in this essay is by Robert and Jean Hollander):

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
For the straight way was lost.

I read on in that first canto, or chapter, and stood with Dante the pilgrim as wild beasts—allegories of sin—cut off all routes out of the terrifying wood. Then, to the frightened Dante’s aid, comes the Roman poet Virgil:

‘It is another path that you must follow,’
he answered, when he saw me weeping,
‘if you would flee this wild and savage place.’

So Dante follows Virgil—and I followed Dante. I did not know it in that moment, but those were the first steps of a journey that would lead me through this incomparable 14th-century poem—all 14,233 lines in 100 cantos—through the pits of Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, beyond space and time to the zenith of Paradise—and out of my own dark wood of depression.

Dreher describes how that journey begins with a tour of Hell – and how we can learn to see ourselves in Dante’s vivid depictions of sin:

The Inferno is not an exhaustive taxonomy of sins (though it sometimes feels like it), but rather an allegory of the condition of sinfulness. For Dante, the worst sins are not those of the appetite—Lust and Gluttony, for example—but sins against the things that make us most human. In Dante’s spiritual geography, Hell is like a vast pit mine, with least corrupt sins punished near the top, the middling sins—sins of Violence and sins of Fraud—punished in the central regions—and the foulest sin of all—Treason—punished at the bottom, where Lucifer dwells.

Dante uses this categorization as a method of exploring the nature of sin as a perversion of the Good. To give oneself over wholly to lust, gluttony, or greed is damnable, but not as damnable as the higher—or rather, lower—sins, which involve not only the disordered bodily passions but also disordered passions of the mind.

The pilgrim Dante comes slowly to recognize elements of each sinner’s fault in his own character. The purpose of this tour of the infernal regions is to awaken the pilgrim to the reality of sin—how it separates men from God, from their better natures, and from each other—and of his own responsibility for the disorder in the world and in his own soul.

I’m Really Dating Myself Here …

Jeffrey Bloomer considers what Boyfriend Twin, a tumblr dedicated to gay couples who look alike, tells us about human sexuality:

Straight couples who are confused for siblings have been ticklish fodder for lifestyle stories for years, but the boyfriend twins take that a step further, suggesting that what we’re really searching for is our own romantic clone.

This anxiety, of course, long predates the Tumblr, as its anonymous creator has acknowledged, telling BuzzFeed loftily that the photos are intended to spark a conversation about “narcissism, exhibitionism, and sexuality.” For every gay guy who laughs it off, the boyfriend twin is another one’s worst fear realized. One Slate colleague told me his partner will demand a wardrobe change if the two men so much as wear the same fabric on the same day. His fear? “It confirms the whole dumb Freudian model of homosexuality as a kind of narcissism.” Is that really it? Is the lookalike lover a symptom of excessive self-regard, or is it something more elusive?

The answer depends on whom you ask, and there’s plenty of disagreement, even among people who make a living studying such things. But two things are clear: This phenomenon is not particular to gay men, and people do tend to be drawn sexually to people who look similar to them. The real question is why and how that works.

(Image from Boyfriend Twin)

Bottoms Up

Maureen O’Connor, who is quickly carving out the TMI beat, declares that “butt stuff” is officially in:

What [my friend and I] were talking about was heterosexual anal play—not treating the anus like the vagina’s pervier cousin, useful merely for penile penetration, but actually pleasuring it.

That kind of “butt stuff” does seem to have reached a tipping point in straight culture, at least to judge from magazines devoted to conventional gender roles. Playboy published an essay on rim jobs last year, and Cosmo followed suit with a how-to guide a few weeks ago. (“If you are performing anilingus on a hairy guy, just part the hair with your hands.”) And while we’re familiar with the idea that anal sex is getting more and more common, a less talked-about side effect is the rise of “anal messing around”: The CDC reports that 44 percent of straight men and 36 percent of straight women say they have had anal sex, and an academic study found that 51 percent of men and 43 percent of women who’ve had anal sex have also participated “in oral-anal sex, manual-anal sex, or anal sex toy use.” And once the ass is in play, it’s more likely to get played around with: Half of straight men who’ve had anal sex, and one in ten who haven’t, report having inserted a finger up a sex partner’s butt in the previous month. “Oral is the new sex, and rim jobs are the new oral,” a male friend proposed. …

But why? Transgressing a nasty boundary is, for some, part of the appeal. For those people, filth—symbolic and, yes, literal—is a plus. “Do you know why I’m doing this?” a man once asked as he reached for my butthole after sex. “Because you know I don’t like it?” I responded. “And for the smell on my hands,” he replied. My horrified reaction seemed only to delight him further.

Update from a reader:

Sex and the City handled this topic much more succinctly (and hilariously) more than a decade ago. The scene starting at :27 is where the good stuff starts:

Best. SATC scene. Ever.

Another:

*Sigh* Everyone who’s been reading Dan Savage since the very early days (His “Hey, Faggot” column in The Onion was essential reading when I was a college freshman in Milwaukee) already knows the pleasure of the Rim Job. And although I’ve forgotten names and faces and classes and everything else about my doomed first freshman year, I can still recite Dan’s sacred rules for ass-licking:

1. Shower, Shower, Shower

2. Look before you lick

3. Never give a rim job to somebody who won’t kiss you immediately afterward.

Another:

I’m mildly dyslexic, so I damn near did a spit-take when I read “Best. SCAT scene. Ever.” at the end of the reader comment.

Happy Monday!

Building Bigger Games

The Puzzle Facade project transformed a building in Linz, Austria into a giant, solvable Rubik’s cube:

In Puzzle Facade the player interacts with the specially designed interface-cube. The interface-cube holds electronic components to keep track of rotation and orientation. This data is sent over Bluetooth to a computer that runs the Puzzle Facade designed software. This software changes the lights and color of the large-scale Ars Electronica’s media facade in correlation to the handheld interface-cube. Due to the nature of this building and its surroundings, the player is only able to see two sides at the same time. This factor increases the difficulty of solving the puzzle, but as the player is able to rotate and flip the interface-cube, it is not a blocking factor.

In other large-scale gaming news, designers recently honored Philly Tech Week by repurposing a building to host a massive game of Tetris:

The Tetris building was designed by Frank Lee of Drexel University and forms a sequel of sorts to the game of Pong, which he set up on the face of the same building last year and which, until this point, held the Guinness record for Largest Architectural Video Game Display. Tetris works by lighting up coloured LEDs that are attached to the shadow box spandrels on the building. But where Pong only made use of one side of the building, Tetris covers both the north and south faces.

Teens Under The Influence

Paul Bisceglio relays a new study showing a “strong correlation” between underage drinking and musicians name-dropping specific alcohol brands:

During the interviews, [the 15- to 25-year-old] participants were told the titles of radio hits from 2005 to 2007 and asked if they liked the songs and could name any alcohol brands mentioned in them. After their responses were controlled for factors including sex, race, socioeconomic status, and friends’ and parents’ alcohol use, participants who liked the songs and remembered a number of brands were up to twice as likely as others to have binged at least once. Even simply liking alcohol-referencing songs was associated with more drinking.

Julie Beck elaborates:

The survey found that those who scored highest on the measures of “alcohol song receptivity” were three times as likely to have ever had a drink, and two times as likely to have binged than those who scored lowest. Those who were able to identify at least one brand mentioned in a song were at higher risk in both of those categories. “A surprising result of our analysis was that the association between recalling alcohol brands in popular music and alcohol drinking in adolescents was as strong as the influence of parental and peer drinking, and an adolescent’s tendency toward sensation-seeking,” Brian Primack, the study’s lead author, said in a press release.

The legal implications:

“In terms of policy,” said Primack, “it is worth considering whether or not payment to music stars by alcohol companies is in violation of current guidelines. For example, the Distilled Industries Council of the U.S., or DISCUS, states that ‘Alcohol advertising and marketing materials should portray alcohol products and drinkers in a responsible manner.’ This text is vague and challenging to interpret. However, if you watch a few music videos by stars who are spokespeople for alcohol companies, you would likely come away questioning whether these messages portray ‘alcohol products and drinkers in a responsible manner.’ Thus, it may not be a question of enacting new legislation, but rather one of simply enforcing current legislation.”