Nick Turpin photographed London bus commuters for his series Through a Glass Darkly:
The combination of rainswept windows and lamplight make for images that are like oil paintings – stunning flashes of colour that belie the sticky hell they portray. There’s both a detachment and an intimacy to the works that form the series, entitled Through a Glass Darkly (the title borrows from Corinthians). Nick describes the project as taking the approach of a street photographer, continuing his interest in “recording the way that we live and making as close to a document as photography is capable of”.
Turpin elaborates:
“I photograph people without interaction and the pictures are un-retouched apart from colour and contrast corrections”, he explains. “It’s amazing how much variety there can be in the pictures, the people, the weather, the age and type of bus all play a part, I even have a shot with blue light in the background from a passing police vehicle. The pictures are intimate glimpses of people during that strange time between leaving the office and arriving home when you are almost between two identities. The project also raises questions about voyeurism and public and private space.”
Remarking on Bono’s recent faux-contrition over his band’s deal with Apple to push their new Songs of Innocence onto iPhone 6s and iTunes playlists everywhere, Paul Elie finds “the spirituality of U2” is to blame for the debacle just as much as any desire for relevancy:
Well before Nirvana perfected the soft-loud-soft song approach, U2 perfected the already classic secular-spiritual approach that might be called you-You-you – in songs addressed to a lover in the verses and to the crowd and/or a divinity in the chorus. (“Song for Someone” on the new record is the most recent example.) Bono sings to “someone” — his wife, or his friend, or his son, or to the listener; at the same time, he sings to everyone – everybody on the planet, in his own estimation – and to God or God’s surrogate, too.
That’s the essence of the spirituality of U2: the notion that we are, in the end, one people, one audience, with a common humanity and shared aspirations, which U2 has evoked for a third of a century in its frankly aspirational music.
But just as the aspiration to address everybody, speaking to us and for us all, is intermittently the hubris of various world religions, so it is intermittently the hubris of U2. “You know, they’re not punks – they want to play Madison Square Garden,” I said cleverly to a college DJ I knew after that spring-weekend gig [in 1983]. “Are you kidding? They want to be on up on a f—-in’ satellite playing to the f——in’ planet,” he retorted.
In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher chronicles his decision to return to the small town where he grew up following his sister’s death from cancer. In an interview about the book, he reveals the Catholic saint who inspired the book’s title:
St. Therese, for your readers who don’t know her, was a Catholic saint, who died at age 24. Died young of tuberculosis in a convent in France in the late nineteenth century. She was a nobody. Came from a faithful family, but she was a nobody. Kind of a flibbertigibbet within the convent. After she died, the Mother Superior sent one of the nuns into her room to collect her things, and they found her writings there. They started reading them, and the scales fell from their eyes. They’d realized they had something extraordinary there within their own community.
Within thirty years, Therese was declared a saint and not just a saint. Pope John Paul II on her 100th anniversary of her death declared her a Doctor of the Church, which for Catholics means she was one of the rare saints that has the power to teach the essence of Christianity. She’s recognized as a great teacher. What did she teach? She was just a 24-year-old girl. She taught simplicity. She taught holiness through simplicity. She called it her little way. My sister was not a Catholic. She was a Methodist and not a particularly well-informed Methodist at that, but I think she was a saint because she showed how the simple life in an out of the way place can lead to greatness and to holiness.
That’s the encouragement I want to bring to people who read the book: don’t think your life doesn’t mean anything. God sees, and the people around you see. You never know what God is going to do with that. We’re all part of the great chain. That’s what Dante says too. You see over and over in El Purgatorio about the meaning of community, how Dante has to relearn this about how the chains of connection between the living and the dead, between the people in the community pray for us. What can I do for you? That’s something I’ve had to learn, not because I consciously rejected community, but it’s so easy to forget.
“The desert world accepts my homage with its customary silence. The grand indifference. As any man of sense would want it. If a voice from the clouds suddenly addressed me, speaking my name in trombone tones, or some angel in an aura of blue flame came floating toward me along the canyon rim, I think I would be more embarrassed than frightened – embarrassed by the vulgarity of such display. That is what depresses me in the mysticism of Carlos Castaneda and his like: their poverty of imagination. As any honest magician knows, true magic inheres in the ordinary, the common place, the everyday, the mystery of the obvious. Only petty minds and trivial souls year for supernatural events, incapable of perceiving that everything – everything! – within and around them is pure miracle,” – Edward Abbey, Abbey’s Road.
This week, Dissent unlocked three classic pieces by Irving Howe. In “Strangers” (1977), he explored how American Jews came to find a place in national literature, writing that “with time we discovered something strange about the writing of Americans: that even as we came to it feeling ourselves to be strangers, a number of the most notable writers, especially Whitman and Melville, had also regarded themselves as strangers”:
[T]he Melville book that we knew was, of course, Moby Dick, quite enough to convince us of a true kinship. Melville was a man who had worked—perhaps the only authentic proletarian writer this country has ever known—and who had identified himself consciously with the downtrodden plebs. Melville was a writer who took Whitman’s democratic affirmations and made them into a wonderfully concrete and fraternal poetry. If he had been willing to welcome Indians, South Sea cannibals, Africans, and Parsees (we were not quite sure who Parsees were!), he might have been prepared to admit a Jew or two onto the Pequod if he had happened to think of it.
The closeness one felt toward Melville I can only suggest by saying that when he begins with those utterly thrilling words, “Call me Ishmael,” we knew immediately that this meant he was not Ishmael, he was really Isaac.
He was the son who had taken the blessing and then, in order to set out for the forbidden world, had also taken his brother’s unblessed name. We knew that this Isaac-cum-Ishmael was a mama’s boy trying to slide or swagger into the world of power; that he took the job because he had to earn a living, because he wanted to fraternize with workers, and because he needed to prove himself in the chill of the world. When he had told mother Sarah that he was leaving, oh, what a tearful scene that was! “Isaac,” she had said, “Isaac, be careful,” and so careful did he turn out to be that in order to pass in the Gentile world he said, “Call me Ishmael.” And we too would ask the world to call us Ishmael, both the political world and the literary world, in whose chill we also wanted to prove ourselves while expecting that finally we would still be recognized as Isaacs.
Mike Rugnetta offers a clear, if slightly frenetic, guide to metacognition – and explains how to avoid misusing famous quotes by Decartes, Sartre, and Wittgenstein:
Chris Mooney flags a new study that suggests “there is a kind of geography of human religiosity – one in which beliefs map onto the climates and ecology of different regions”:
[I]t’s one thing to postulate that religion is a way to bind us together in threatening environments – and quite another to demonstrate it. To do so, [researcher Carlos] Botero and his colleagues turned to a classic anthropological source, the Ethnographic Atlas, a compilation of research on a large variety of traditional societies across the world compiled in the earlier part of the 20th century. The study examined the religious beliefs recorded for 583 of these societies, and correlated these beliefs with a host of ecological factors specific to the regions in which the groups live or lived, with a particular emphasis on environmental factors affecting climatic stability (the regularity of rainfall, for instance, or predictable temperatures) and the availability of resources (such as the abundance of plants, amphibians, and mammals).
Sure enough, they authors found that cultures who believed in a moralizing god or gods – supreme beings who were believed to be involved in the fate of humans and who offered moral prescriptions on how to behave – tended to be located in environments that were harsher to deal with and less climatically stable. “The bottom line is that we find both resource scarcity and the propensity to be exposed to ecological duress tends to be associated with these beliefs,” says Botero – presumably because in harsh environments, groups need to cohere and cooperate, and a shared belief in a moralizing god helps them to do that.
Megan Garber nods in agreement with Forrest Wickman’s declaration that, for the first time, with Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan’s “universe has a God, or something like one.” She remarks on the film’s echoes of Milton’s Paradise Lost and its organ-driven score, among other details:
There’s … a lot of talk of good and evil. There’s a lot of talk of faith. There’s a lot of talk of love—love that is explicitly not romantic (Interstellar is as asexual a blockbuster as you’ll find), but that is, in its best manifestation, selfless. None of which is to say that Interstellar is a Christian—or even a religious—film. It is not, and this is the point. The “they” is not necessarily a metaphysical being; Zimmer’s organ was chosen, he has said, for “its significance to science.” Good and evil, faith and love—these ideas, of course, extend far beyond religion.
What it is to say, though, is that Interstellar, like so many space movies before it, has adopted the themes of religious inquiry. The scope of space as a setting—the story that takes place within the context of the universe itself, across dimensions—has allowed Nolan, like so many filmmakers before him, the permission of implication. Nolan has said that one of his primary artistic influences is the postmodern author Jorge Luis Borges; you can, indeed, read Interstellar, in the most generous interpretation, as you would any complex piece of literature.
To me it seems that Interstellar, perhaps more than any of Nolan’s films to date, positively resounds with religious—even Christian—stuff that might not ring as loudly if you weren’t steeped in it to begin with.
To wit: Cooper promises Murph he’ll return to earth, and she despairs of his return, then realizes he’s been talking to her and guiding her all along, which rings awfully sharply of the early Christian church’s assumption that Jesus would return within their lifetimes. And Cooper communicates with Murph through books (hello). He has “become” one of those beings who exists on more than three planes—you know, for a while at least, he’s omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent. There’s the somewhat unavoidable new-Adam-and-Eve imagery near the end. And did anyone hear echoes of Lewis’s Space Trilogy?
But there’s also the biggest of big religious questions, like these: who are we? What are we made to be? (And should that be determined by others?) Are we worth saving? Can we save ourselves? And should we?
Brett McCracken adds some nuance to this view, noting that Interstellar “feels a bit like a three-hour church service set in the cathedral of space … yet God is not worshipped here or even discussed”:
Unlike similar films like last year’s Gravity or 1997’s Contact, which engaged questions of God and faith (Matthew McConaughey played a Christian leader in the latter), Interstellar exists in a world where God seems to have gone extinct alongside wheat and okra. Despite God’s absence in Interstellar, the film nevertheless feels “church-like” in its artistic grandeur, intellectual curiosity, and probing of big questions about life, death, sacrifice and love (“the only thing that transcends space and time”).
There is also a decidedly eschatological undercurrent to the film, with its themes of a doomed, burning planet and a hoped-for “escape” to a better place beyond the stars. In contrast to a film like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which accepts earth’s demise and humanity’s extinction with a sort of nihilistic relief, Interstellar sees it as an opportunity for rebirth and renewal. Though equally as secular as von Trier’s film, Nolan’s film is at least informed and haunted by a religious sense that believes in hope: new life out of the ashes, Lazarus-like resurrection.
The Dish 