Photographer Sally Peterson took her grandmother’s portrait at 101 years old:
After taking photographs of Cecil, Peterson asked around at the nursing home and realized there were other centenarians living there. This inspired Peterson to begin her project, and she continues to do so with great passion, her grandmother always on her mind. Recently she traveled to the Yucatan where she photographed centenarian Mayans to include in the project.
“The problem of faith is the problem for me. It preoccupies me far more now than it did when I was a believer, perhaps because it wasn’t a problem then but merely a fact. And a fact it was: I wasn’t merely ‘raised’ Catholic in a default sense; I was a believing Catholic, and it was important to me. It seems to me that the big thing that people who don’t understand religious devotion get wrong about it is the assumption that it is grounded in fear or in a desire for certainty. I’m sure this is true in some cases, but my own religious feelings were grounded in a sense of wonder at the mysteries of human existence. I would say that Catholicism trained me to have a particular set of emotional needs — in particular, the need to feel aligned in some way with these mysteries — that at a certain point the Church itself stopped fulfilling for me. An awful lot of my writing emerges from those needs. And I remain suspicious of scientific materialists who insist that there is no underlying mystery, that the sense of mystery is some kind of cognitive holdover from a time when science had not yet explained human existence. If any viewpoint comes from the desire for certainty, it would seem to be that one.
I could say much more on this topic, but I’ll just make one related point. It can be a difficult experience to abandon a strongly held belief. Very often the result is that whatever belief arrives in its place is held on to all the more strongly — the zeal of the convert, etc. What I’ve tried to gain from the process is some negative capability — the talent identified by Keats, ‘of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ It’s not easy. But it’s a skill that can be quite valuable to a novelist or a critic. Or to a human being, for that matter. Whatever label applies,” – Christopher Beha.
[W]hile he sets aside an entire chapter for his advice to “Share God’s Word,” Robertson isn’t your typical evangelist; or rather, he’s a square peg unfit for the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell round hole in which unfamiliar viewers would likely try to shove him. He’s a keen student of the Bible, often discussing the text’s application to his life and prescribing a calm faith of love and inclusion fundamentally opposed to dogma of difference and damnation. “[N]o matter how sorry and low-down something might be, everybody’s worth something. But you’re never going to turn them if you’re as evil as they are,” writes Robertson.
Perhaps a better analogy for his theology is that of Will Campbell, who died last month after famously counseling both the Ku Klux Klan and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Campbell was known for his tagline, “We are all bastards, but God loves us anyway,” and like Robertson, he frequently called himself a redneck and disliked the title of “preacher.” One of Robertson’s tales, in fact, sounds like it could come from a page in Campbell’s award-winning book Brother to a Dragonfly:
“I’m standing here under a sign that says, ‘Budweiser is the king of beers,’ and everybody’s got their beers here today,” I told them. “But I’m here to talk about the King of Kings. I know I might look like a preacher, but I’m not. Here’s how you can tell whether someone’s a preacher or not: if he gets up and says some words and passes a hat for you to put money in, that’s a preacher. This is free. This is free of charge, which proves I’m not a preacher.”
After grappling for years with the meaning of prayer, Jan Vallone realized the simplicity of what a priest described to her as “conversation with God”:
I knew, absolutely, that I had felt God’s presence in my life. I’d catch my breath at a tangerine sunrise and whisper, “Thank you, God,” then be moved to smile at everyone I passed along the street. Or I’d be startled by an ambulance siren and think, God, please let that person live, then be prompted to write to my aunt who’d had a heart condition for years. Or I’d shriek when my daughter burned a skillet and wince thinking, God, why am I so testy?, then be spurred to take my daughter out to lunch.
So while I can’t sense Divine presence beyond the clouds or within me, I feel God close, and clearly, in unexpected moments like these—moments of awe, joy, fear, sorrow, or contrition. God captures my attention in these moments. I cry in recognition, feel a surge of heart. I respond with acts of love, often in spite of myself.
Are these exchanges conversations? I’d like to think yes. Thus, they’re no less prayers than the kinds I struggle with.
Ethan Richardson riffs on Marilynne Robinson’s essay from The Death of Adam, “Facing Reality,” a meditation on modern anxiety and the insights of traditional religion:
Robinson thinks…we have lost what the Bible calls “sin.” If every malady can be answered with a palliative, we have lost the depth and seriousness of our condition. By “medicalizing” a condition, we distance ourselves from the meaning of our suffering, as well as any real responsibility we might have in the matter. We do not feel the inner-pangs of Eden–we cotton them off with smaller doses of smaller problems. This makes us all the more anxious. I am reminded here of John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s phrase in his Michael Jackson essay, that we are inheritors of the “pathology of pathologization.” We, the Knowers, must call our sin small, long Latin names, and seek meliorative means to soothe the twitch. As Robinson says, we do need medicine for our anxiety–but we need more. “It may be necessary to offer ourselves palliatives, but is drastically wrong to offer or to accept a palliative as if it were a cure.”
Andrew Brown asked the rockstar and writer Patti Smith what makes music sacred:
[S]he replied that it was an entirely subjective process, and for her encompassed everything from a song her mother had sung to Jimi Hendrix singing “Are you experienced” and the noise of the swifts wheeling above the courtyard of her hotel. Her signature tune, Van Morrison’s Gloria, is a song about a girl that she sings as if it were about the glory of God, and incorporates the wonderful chilling howl: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”…
She talks a great deal about prayer, and about spirituality. But although I am sure I have read an interview in which she described herself as Christian once, what really sets her against conventional Christianity is not just her trampling blasphemy, but the optimism and democracy of her views and her cheerful pantheism. … When she’s playing it is only the power of her feelings that comes across. The context is so determinedly one of passionate transcendence that nothing else matters.
Recently, Maria Popova highlighted “Remembering Robert,” a spiritually-inflected poem from Smith’s collection, The Coral Sea, written in the aftermath of photographer Robert Maplethorpe’s death. It begins this way:
Blessedness is within us all
It lies upon the long scaffold
Patrols the vaporous hall
In our pursuits, though still, we venture forth
Hoping to grasp a handful of cloud and return
Unscathed, cloud in hand. We encounter
Space, fist, violin, or this — an immaculate face
Of a boy, somewhat wild, smiling in the sun.
He raises his hand, as if in carefree salute
Shading eyes that contain the thread of God…
Read the rest, and listen to a recording of Smith reciting the poem, here.
As part of their 50th anniversary celebrations, The New York Review of Books has been digging into their archives, and recently showcased Hannah Arendt’s classic 1969 essay, “Reflections on Violence.” This passage seems especially relevant:
Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end which must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals…
[T]he danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
Recent Dish coverage of the new film about Arendt here and here.
Colin Marshall digs up Wes Anderson’s first short film, the 13-minute Bottle Rocket:
In the late nineties, Anderson and his collaborators found themselves in a position to make their beloved breakthrough Rushmore on the strength of its predecessor Bottle Rocket, their 1996 feature debut. But even that film, a now-appreciated but then little-seen story of three deeply amateur criminals on the run through the green open spaces of Texas starring now-famous acting brothers Owen and Luke Wilson, followed another. Four years earlier, Anderson and Owen Wilson, who’d met in a playwriting class at the University of Texas, Austin, put together the thirteen-minute short you see here. It tries out the concept of thieves in training, albeit in a very different style from the one we’ve come to regard, over twenty years later, as Andersonian.
Marshall adds:
Wes, if you read this, know that I’d like to see you do something in black-and-white again. With a jazz score.
Danielle King profiles “Frank,” a successful pot dealer in Florida, and wonders what will happen to him and his ilk as acceptance of cannabis spreads:
The statewide legalization now playing out in Colorado and Washington will present us with a fascinating case study, though it’s hard to tell how quickly or effectively this will scale to the rest of the country. Even if they’re not much on voters’ minds, it’s worth asking what decriminalization would do to reliable suppliers. What will become of the Franks of the world when they have to compete with folks who have business licenses and pay income taxes?
Though Frank has legions of loyal buyers, there’s a lot of vulnerability in his model. One day in the future, federal lawmakers and their state-level counterparts will vote to make smoking weed legal. Soon after comes the legalization (and aggressive regulation) of the sale of cannabis. …
What if government pot smokes the way that “government cheese” tastes?
Might we be required to present our driver’s licenses to purchase tightly restrained amounts of shake weed at higher prices to cover the sales tax? Given our track record with cigarettes and alcohol, and the way control over those markets is exerted by the Big Three tobacco companies or the Anheuser-Busch conglomerate, there’s a clear potential for monopolization. The enterprising, shirtless, teenaged stoner dealer only a text away could disappear entirely. And what then will happen to the culture of weed smoking, as it evolves from something wholly outside the law into something available at your local gas station?
But whether it’s bravado, experience, or the combination of the two, Frank isn’t worried: “Well, I guess it would kill a lot of the fun in getting a buzz if you could just buy it at a store. There’s something cool about your first pickup, meeting a guy in a parking lot and having him jump in your backseat. I don’t think I’m too worried, though. Good business won’t get run out by new business. You’re only in trouble if the new guy is better than you. And there’s not really a lot of business, at least here, that’s better than me. That’s not arrogance, it’s just the truth.”
