The Idol of Community

Living as a hilltop hermit for three months has given me a lot of time to think about community. Perhaps it's the circles in which I run, but "community" is a buzzword I hear a lot. In college, my friends and I praised the intimacy which Hillsdale College's small size afforded. Whereas a lot of my peers who went to big schools (read "bigger than 2,000") drifted like life rafts and tethered together for a season or an evening before floating off, we were like shipwrecked sailors crawling up on desert islands: we stuck together. Within our castaway academic culture, off-campus houses developed a certain ethos and their cultures continued and evolved as they were sanctimoniously handed off from one generation to another. We took pride in our loyalty to friends and our intentional community. We made dinner together, read poetry on Friday evenings, fought, apologized, fought again, and then made cocktails. We argued about theology and philosophy, protected each other's reputations, and we always knew who never did dishes and who ate the last cookie every time.

That is all to say, I can't imagine a better place to have spent the past four years of my life and those memories of late-night pots of coffee and Easter jam sessions have helped sustain me through the past three months of solitude.

But I also have a bone to pick, if you'll pardon my cliche. (I've been working for the past ten days straight, so I'm tired.)

 I've lived in a lot of close communities--family, private school, summer stays with various families, college--and I'm trying to come to terms with the bitterness and disappointment which I see so often among people who have tried so hard to live well in community. Pardon me for somewhat limiting my audience here, but you recent alumni should know what I'm talking about: the feeling of loss, of being lost without that community for some, for others anger at the gossip, pettiness, and cowardice which tainted those last months and may have continued past graduation. When I talk to my college friends, one of the most common reactions I hear is disappointment with that community we tried so hard to foster.

I've seen it in churches, too--people who leave because they've been burned, people who get burned out trying to make it all work. As a guy I went hunting with last night said, "Church is great if you take the human element out of it."

I think the problem is with the ideal of community itself. We--and I have to speak specifically to my fellow graduates--have made it our idol.

I know I have. When I think back on the four years of blessing I experienced with the other Hillsdale College Anglicans (or whatever name we finally decided for ourselves), I remember with pain those times--embarrassingly frequent--when I made decisions with more a mind toward preserving our "good community" than the truth of our purpose which was (and is) glorifying God. I didn't want to rock the boat, so I didn't ask questions that needed to be asked and I avoided conversations that needed to be had.

How many times did we as friends just "take care" of each other on some of those excessive Friday nights instead of acting? How many times did we allow words and actions to continue just so long as we could maintain the status quo?

It's a fine line, I know. We want to act charitably towards the weaker member, we wanted to act with care and concern rather than judgement. Those are wonderful intentions, and we did have the best of intentions. I can honestly say that the best thing about Hillsdale is that you are surrounded by people who genuinely care about your soul.

But we also failed a lot. We set a lot of bones that needed to be broken.

I remember going to say goodbye to Dr. Whalen (the College provost for those of you unfamiliar with the school) and talking with him about the common problem of graduates who just want to continue the community they had in college.

As I said before, I think the problem is that we've made community our idol, as if it is the great telos of human life.

This is an easy mistake to make because in fact we aren't as human beings meant to be alone. We are made to live in communities with all their pleasures and pains. It is not good for man to be alone, as God said in the beginning.

But we can't stop there. A really wonderful man, Dr. John Seel, who I had the pleasure of meeting in high school and keeping up with sporadically through college, sent me a few readings about vocation last week which really made me start thinking about community in a new way. Communities, too, have vocations; they don't exist for themselves.

At Hillsdale, I think there's a tendency for us to think about our friend groups as ends in themselves, as part of the central purpose of college. But that's not true. We're in college for a specific purpose, and that's academic. To substitute growth in friendship for this academic goal is just to dress up the deplorable idea in the larger culture that college is a time to "find oneself."

No. College is not a time to find oneself, it's a time that prepares you to serve in the world. That is (was, for me and my fellow graduates) our purpose, and when we substitute "friendship" or "community" for the ends which they are supposed to serve, we will inevitably be disappointed.

"Community" as an ideal easily becomes its own Baal and real communities quickly kindle on their own idolatrous altar.

The purpose of communities is to forward the kingdom of Christ. God put Adam in the garden to work, and it is through work, whether the work of study, family, or occupation, that fulfill our purpose in the world. Communities and individuals must both see this work as their purposes or they will be profoundly unsatisfied. A brotherhood of knights does not exist to "be a community" and "support one another;" they fight for queen and country. We must angle ourselves toward service daily and in all that we do and only that way will we, as a dear friend once told me, make all our work a prayer instead of an idol.

P.S. Jason Peters of Front Porch Republic (a thoughtful blog with many contributors writing about place, limits, and liberty, as it describes itself) wrote an article about the promiscuous use of the word "community" three years ago which, I believe, is still one of the site's top hits because of Peters' humor and the article's poignancy. It's a great read and I recommend it to anyone thinking about this problem.

Prose Means You're Crazy

I'm re-reading Hamlet right now (pregaming Infinite Jest) and the introduction of my edition made a fascinating point that everybody else (especially Serena) probably already knows: apparently in Elizabethan English drama, characters only spoke in prose to indicate a formal proclamation, a low conversation, or insanity.

Let me say that again: when a character in Shakespeare speaks in discursive prose, it usually means s/he's nuts. Joshua Mehigan points this out about King Lear (in an essay I'll dig up and link to because it and him are both great), but I didn't realize that that's standard.

So this raises a few questions: What would Shakespeare think about contemporary theater, where things tend to be a bit, um, prosaic? Would he assume everyone was crazy? And would he be a little bit right?

Other question, for people who paid more attention in school than I did: when and why did we decide that human speech doesn't sound like poetry? And can we trace the decline and fall of contemporary poetry to that shift?



*Disclaimer: I don't actually feel that gloom-and-doomy about contemporary poetry, but let's be a little bleak about its current state for the sake of the conversation.

Cloggers, haunted houses, and cowboy hats

"When you're waiting, you're not doing nothing. You're doing the most important thing there is. You're allowing your soul to grow up. If you can't be still and wait, you can't become what God created you to be." --Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits (thanks to Marieke van der Vaart)

I named my car Gabor after the Hungarian mechanic I bought him from, and he and I have had a delightful time jetting around Floyd County in the last two weeks. I'm pretending that he doesn't get as good of gas mileage as he should because I'm in denial that I've put over 400 miles on him. Gas, folks, is expensive even here in rural Virginia.

But anti-depressents are expensive, too, and the car makes an excellent substitute (I jest). I was without a phone for the first month on the farm, and without transportation for three months, and while I've enjoyed the solitude and contemplation immensely, sometimes I get lonely. Actually I get lonely a lot. But as my priest back home reminds me, that's probably good for me. As my time on the farm draws to a close, I'm thankful for the time I've had to be present with myself. I am thankful.

But enough introspection. It's time for pictures!

Flounced young cloggers at the Floyd Jubilee last Sunday dancing to "You don't know that you're beautiful" or whatever that travesty of a pop song is called.  

Bluebird Road

On Sunday, I explored some little gravel roads and came across this dude. Yes, that hat is camo. He bounded over the fence to stop my car and give a friendly holler. He's a Floydian, born and raised.

 ---

Marieke van der Vaart popped by for a quick visit this week. It so lovely to share my new life here with an old friend. One night, while we waited for my stone oven to heat up so that we could make pizza (which never worked out.... the fire we built was too small), we wandered a bit down the road to trespass private property and explore this old farm house:

Oh, look. It's poison ivy.  

If I were going to shoot a horror movie, it would be here.

I show my arms to the poison ivy to prove that I've already offered my body up as an oblation. 

This shot is straight; the house isn't.

You can view more photos in my consistently updated Google web album. 

A machete, an African, and a whole lot of meat

Today I helped butcher a fawn with a machete.

After my escapade with the groundhog, I had kind of sworn off slaughtering things. The groundhog just smelled really bad, and it tasted bad, too. Yes, I know I said otherwise at the time, but after the fun of being a tough girl wore off, I admitted to myself (you begin to talk to yourself a lot when you live alone, I've found) that I didn't really enjoy it at all.

Well, today as I finished up a light lunch of salad and a cheap chardonney (my favorite summer beverage right now), I heard gunshot down the hill. Dane (one of the day employees at the products business) has been trying to get a deer for the last, oh, month, ever since they reached plague-like levels of destruction, munching the delicate centers out of ever single head of lettuce we had and mowing down the bean patch. And yes, we do have deer fencing--which is about the animal equivalent of the child safety lock on medication. Meaning that it's only us human beings and adults which the darn thing frustrates.

It's not hunting season, but we got a permit from the game warden and last week our hunters took out two old does.

An orphaned fawn haunted the pond all weekend with its cries, like a little child.

Fortunately, that little fawn has now found its mother in the celestial fields where, I'm sure, God provides them with unlimited lettuce and tender bean tops. She's certainly not chowing down on ours anymore.

So back to the afternoon: I finish lunch and wander down the hill toward the gunshots to see what all the fuss is about, and the guys are doing a sort of absurd masculine war dance over the poor little corpse. It was too small to justify running it over to Willis for processing that afternoon, and obviously you have to gut and drain them as quickly as possible, so Nii'Anung and I hung it by its hocks over by the backhoe and went to work with a machete and a cleaver. By "we went to work" I mean Nii'Anung was the pro with the blade and I assisted--though I did my share of yanking internal organs free of fascia and cutting the skin loose, pulling it over the fawn's thin shoulders where it caught like a child pulling off a sweater.

Along with the bottle-green flies, a little orange butterfly daintily sipped the spattered blood from an old log.

Perhaps I'm getting used to death, but it was a lot better than that disgusting groundhog. For one thing, fawns smell nice and clean and groundhogs smell like...hairy gym socks.

So now my freezer is full of the most tender, lean meat, free of charge. I think I'll make stew tonight.

[Full disclosure: this actually happened last week; I only just finished the post.]

"Poetry" Magazine Provides Insight Into Why Nobody Reads Poetry

-Requisite explanation for why I haven't posted here in so long, something about being busy at work and moving, bla bla bla nobody cares-


Hey guys, here's a fun fact: "No one, other than poets themselves, really gives a damn about poetry." That's Michael Corbin writing for City Paper in 2001, and he's pretty close to the truth. Although I stopped writing poetry around the time I stopped being an angsty 15-year-old, I think it's safe to say that 80-90% of people who regularly read poetry also regularly write it. That's terrible news. Can you imagine if only moviemakers watched movies, or only chefs liked good food? We'd assume that either A) something was wrong with the creators of this narrowly appealing product, B) something was wrong with the target audience, or C) Both. 

I posit C, but for the purposes of this little rant, I'm going to focus on the people pumping out poetry that only appeals to like 1% of the population. 

Seriously, guys, just stop. 

I understand that Eliot wanted to reclaim poetry for the elites. I understand that maybe Frost watered it down a bit and made it too pop-culturey. I understand that college professors get grants for being cutting edge/avant garde/innovative (read:inaccessible). I understand that America's sad little education system does a pretty lousy job of cultivating ears for artful language. And I understand that the Facebook generation might not have the attention span for oblique, insightful, subtle verbal stylings. 

But whatever. No excuses. If the only people who want to read what you write (poetry geeks) are just like you, you're doing something wrong. 

The July/August issue of Poetry gives us a great example of this. It has a section pretentiously titled "The Poetry of Other Things" (which actually has a bunch of really great essays; highly recommended), prefaced by a short paragraph starting with this sentence:

"We thought it might be interesting to ask a few poets to write on subjects other than poetry that are close to their hearts."

Wow!! Neato!! What a crazy idea!! Golly gee willikers, I would love to know what my favorite contemporary poet thinks about something besides my favorite contemporary poetry!

Just kidding. As long as we're surprised to hear poets' thoughts on the non-poetic, nobody besides poets will want to read it. Let me say that another way: If poets only write about poetry, they make their entire craft a sort of intellectual Rotary Club -- super super interesting to the tiny fraction of the population that cares, and totally worthless to everyone else. 

In one of the only good poems about why poetry matters, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," W. H. Auden writes that poetry is "[a] way of happening, a mouth." (Heads up, poets! Auden already explained why poetry matters, so you don't have to! Please stop it!) In other words, poetry is a means to an end. It's a lens; it helps us see other things, other people. If the only role of poetry is to help us value poetry, it's a stupid waste of time, and it's no great tragedy that only 8% of Americans read a poem in 2007. 

Now, granted, this poetry-about-poetry house-of-cards garbage isn't the only thing contemporary poets are doing wrong. And not all contemporary poets do it (Thank you, Averill Curdy, A. E. Stallings, Steve Gehrke, Roddie Lumsden, et al; may you live for a thousand years). But here's the point: As long as we expect our poets to only have insight on poetry, we're wasting our time on them. I don't know what the solution is (probably not ranting on the Internet), but for now, all I can think to do is praise the poets who get it right and say snarky things about the ones who get it wrong. Our culture is on the line. 

Jury's Out: Steve Gehrke is Brilliant

After a phone call to the disgruntled office of the Poetry Foundation, I finally got my July/August issue in the mail. I swear, the woman who runs the phones at that place has a beehive hairdo and butterfly glasses. She probably chainsmokes. She is not helpful at all (I've had to call a couple times), but I can deal with her if I think of her as being a poetic Marge Simpson or something.

Anyway, I'm not all the way through with it, being a slow reader, but let me put in a little plug for Poetry: if you don't subscribe, you should. It's a fantastic publication. It has something for everyone in almost every issue. Also the layout is fantastic, so even if you didn't think you liked modern poetry, the pure splendor of typface and expansive margins will spell love for you.

If you read nothing else, I'm going to put in my vote with Betsy and say that Steve Gehrke's "The New Self" is totally a must-read. It's phenomenal, and don't let its length put you off: the work's cadence and rhyme pulls you along the ripples in the spring rush of a river. You'll find yourself tapping your foot like a swimmer's strokes.

The poem's musicality--never overwhelming--belies its anguish. I won't tell you what it's about; that would spoil the fun, but this is introspection at it's best. (Speaking of introspection, have you read Wislawa Szymborska's "In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself"? I'll paste it at the end of this. Consider this a teaser to get you to read the whole post.) The poem is about guilt, or as my pal Jung might say (I've been reading a lot of him this summer) "being at variance with oneself." Introspection easily implodes into self-pity, and the brilliance of this poem is the way Gehrke unmasks the games of blame and self-victimization with which we try to absolve ourselves from responsibility for this strange other which is none other than us. "And it is funny, isn't it," he writes--and here the poem turns itself inside out and exposes itself, leading to its phenomenal second half,

the way that which starts as confession ends
     in blame, this constant search
for the marionettist of your brain, the ghost
     who stole the controls to your soul.

I read once that the key to a great poem is a great line, that most of the celebrated poems in history have that one razor sharp edge that cuts all the way to the end of brilliance into the sublime. Okay, so I'm not going to get carried away with myself--I'm trying, really--but I will say that this poem is stuffed with great lines which are both aweful in their insight and masterful in their language. He writes, "...the self / I am keeps evading the curses of the self / I meant to be...." Darn you, Steve Gehrke. Why couldn't I have written that? How dare you.

Betsy, I think the "jeweler's bluff" bit at the end is precisely about the ways in which Gehrke tries to use language--really excuses--to veil his own culpability, and the words reveal his bad faith. I have no idea what a "jeweler's bluff," is, though. I tried to Google it (a word, by the way, which somehow--again I say curse, you Steve--actually pulls off). No go. The internet failed me. Back to the point, Betsy, I think what he's doing here is basically what Tony Hoagland is saying in "There Is No Word" a few pages before: "how there are some holes [language] will not cover up; / how it will move, if not inside, then / around the circumference of almost anything", etc.

At any rate, I started to scan and try to get a handle on the rhym scheme (if there is a scheme) to delve deeper into analysis and whatnot, and then I realized I'm not in college any more and I just sat back and read the thing again. I humbly suggest you, dear reader, do the same. I don't think you'll regret it.

P.S. I know some of you are also subscribers to Poetry. Can we please get a conversation about this going? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

 by Wislawa Szymborska

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.
On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

Discovering Hungarian Literature in the Car Garage

I didn't sleep at all Friday night. I pretend that I'm really chill and that nothing bothers me, but really I'm a total stress ball (I know, I had you all fooled). Saturday, of course, I was going into Christiansburg to buy my car, and seeing as I find buying deodorant at Walmart completely overwhelming (so many varieties! I've actually just given up wearing it. Don't judge: I live on an organic farm.), the prospect of forking over more cash than I'd ever held in my life for a complex machine which I a) do not understand all and b) would cradle my life in the palm of its pleather seats, terrified me.

I woke up every hour on the half hour and finally gave up on the whole project of sleep.

After killing time by strolling uneasily around for 40 minutes after Mary Ellen (the apprentice at the meat farm next door who was on her way to the Blacksburg farmer's market) dropped me off, I finally ambled into Gabor's Import Auto Garage at 8am as we had arranged on a gray and humid morning. It's an old place, the paint is peeling a little and a number of cars in varying degree of repair, most of them Toyotas, settle in front in a kind of slightly disheveled order.

Backstory: a week and a half before, I had had Polly put a little ad in the note that goes out with the CSA bags with the news that I was looking for some cheap, reliable wheels. Kati Agostin answered my call. She and her husband Gabor, Polly told me, had eloped from Hungary in their mad youth and settled down in, of all places, Blacksburg and opened a car garage. They never left almost literally. Before their children became quite the intrepid explorers (the eldest son spend a couple tours doing drudge work for scientists in Antarctica and their youngest went to Humboldt State. Yes, that Humboldt. It's a small world, kids.), they apparently never strayed outside the bounds of south western Virginia.

Kati told me that they were selling their '99 Camry, and next thing I knew I had jetted over to Christiansburg to check the thing out. That was last Tuesday.

So news for those who don't know me: I'm not very, um, smooth in social situations. I lack a certain grace and panache at the best of times, and if you throw business into the mix, well, I fall basically apart. Which is to say when I showed up at the garage, pretending (badly) to know something about cars, I basically did everything except trip over my own feet.

Gabor did little to put me at ease. He's that kind of Eastern European stoic you see in the movies. A man of few words, he had given me terse answers in response to my questions over the phone, and when I drove up with Mary Ellen that first afternoon, he all but ignored me as he muttered to a man about a Volkswagen he had jacked up inside. He basically tossed me the keys and off I went to take the baby for a spin.

Chalk it up to either womanly intuition or lucky wishful thinking, but it was pretty clear to me as I wizzed down the interstate with the radio turned up that this car was a good buy. The stereo worked beautifully, it had a CD player, air-conditioning, and it didn't look too bad either. Kelly Blue Book listed it at $4,000ish, I think.

I offered him $2,200, three hundred less than the already-low price he was asking. He kind of gave me a shrewd look, shook his wiry gray head, and strolled away.

Had I lost it? Did I do something wrong? Shoot.

He showed me the Blue Book listing and gave some little dour pitch, and I said "Fine, whatever. I'll give you $2,400," and sort of stared him down.

"Oh fine," he said with a little grumble. "Kick me in the shins. Twist my arm."

So I came back on Saturday to give him the fat little envelope of hundreds, he sort of shrugged and twisted his mouth when I wished him a cheery good morning and tossed me the title.

We stood around for a second, him grumbling about the weather in his rough accent before he asked me why I'm here--at the farm, he meant. I won't exactly say he got excited, but something gleamed in his eyes, and I spent the next hour with a stunned smile on my face as he monologued about literature.

Turns out the man is fabulously well-read. In Hungary, he said, people are just expected to know these things. They read poetry before the evening news on TV. Children memorize scads of traditional verse--I had him recite some to me, and as he tilted his jowly, creased head toward the fluorescent shop lights he gave the closest thing to a real smile I ever saw from him. I wondered what he had been like as a school kid, how he and Kati met, why they had to elope. I didn't ask. Why didn't I? Because I wanted to get to the DMV on time? What a waste.

He told me about Sandor Marai's Embers, a somewhat melancholic novel by a man who always, as Gabor said, stood up for what was right in a country which always seemed to ally itself with the wrong man. He had been censored in his day, and the 1942 novel is just beginning to get the acclaim it deserves. Another book, Under the Frog, gets it's title from a Hungarian saying that if someone is completely down on his luck, he's "so low he's under the frog's ass." Apparently the ex-pat author, Tibor Fischer, was, in his youth, a friend of Gabor's cousin, and when the book achieved international acclaim and Gabor's son sent it to him from New Zealand (a pit stop on the way to Anarctica), the old mechanic in his shabby nowhersville, USA shop realized that the book was about his cousin's life. "He was quite a character," Gabor said, and rambled on about how Fischer had actually married one of his nieces ("I have not seen her since she was this high."), though they divorced "after he realized he was gay or something. I don't know how that happened that he decide he like little boys better than girls."

Finally, he recommended In Praise of Older Women, "if you're not a, you know, a little bit a prude, in which case you will not like it at all. It is very interesting, it gives a man's perspective on things, and I'm always wonder what the women think of it. But do you read French literature at all?"

I was beginning to be embarrassed. I'm the one with the college degree. This guy is covered in engine grease, and he's clearly read more than I'm likely to have done even when I'm his age.  Maupassant, he said, Maupessant's short stories are very good, very funny. He loves short stories because they are so much tighter than novels. Novelists get distracted by details, he said, and the things that don't matter.

"Don't bother with Zola, though. So depressing. You might as well get in bed and pull the sheets over your head. He's in Dickens' line--you know, poor people, suffering, the world not being right," he looks up to search for the word.

"Injustice?" I offer. He waves his hand.

"Don't read Zola unless you like that stuff. Same with Tolstoy."

"What about Dostoyevsky?"

"What's the English translation of that book? 'Sin and...'" He looks for the word.

"Crime and Punishment?"

"Yeah. So depressing, so long, just stuck in one man's head the whole time."

I ask him what he thinks of Marquez. "Oh my wife finished that book (One Hundred Years of Solitude). I read most of it, I think. What was that movie? Love in the Time of Cholera? It was just so confusing, the book, I mean--you never knew what was going on, at least not for my brain, but the movie was easier. And so depressing. The world is already bad enough, we need something funny to keep our minds off it. I read the news on the computer and my wife says, 'Why do you do that? It just makes you angry,'" he shrugs. "I just want to know what is going on. I love Mark Twain, though. He is hilarious."

And that's just a little sample of our conversation. When I came back a couple hours later to return his registration and plates after an irritating excursion to the DMV, he saw I had East of Eden tossed on the passenger's seat.

"I see you are reading depressing California literature. You should read Travels with Charlie instead. It is very funny."

"I'll get on that asap."

So I recommend A Confederacy of Dunces to him, scratch the name down on a greasy little pad by the phone, he smiles a little at the prospect of a new book. I assure him it's absolutely hysterical and that he'll love it.

I think I'll get the books he recommended with my new library card which dangles cheerily next to my car keys. Maybe I'll send him a postcard when I finish each one and tell them what I think.

I think he'd like that.