Samsara is not the first film of its kind. Director Fricke and producer Mark Magidson also collaborated to create Baraka (1992), and Fricke helped write and create Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Similarly, others have sought to present non-fictional stories in a visually striking fashion: director Thomas Riedelsheimer (Touch the Sound [2004], Rivers and Tides [2001]) is just one example. But what’s uniquely problematic about Samsara is its misleading, Westernized presentation of “the exotic” in image and particularly in music.

Magidson says, “The hope is that [Samsara] is a profound interpersonal experience for the viewer, but an experience that they are bringing, to some extent, from within. And not a strong point of view from us about what’s right and wrong or good and bad; it’s really just showing the essence of things the way they are, and stringing those together with amazing music that creates a personal journey.”[2]

I certainly cannot deny the visual splendor of Samsara. However, it’s a stretch—at the least—to say that Fricke and Magidson refrain from articulating right and wrong in this film. For instance, the juxtaposition of images of meat processing plants (staffed by thin Asian employees) with images of husky Westerners devouring fast food leaves little room for the viewer’s “personal journey.” Instead, this sequence is a straightforward attempt to criticize mass consumerism, non-local food sourcing, and Western gluttony. Another sequence shows Ethiopian Mursi women wearing traditional tribal garb and holding machine guns, followed by an American family (including an early-teenaged daughter) bearing rifles. Here, too, the viewer is left with little interpretive freedom: Fricke and Magidson are clearly commenting on the intrusion of modern weaponry on traditional, peaceful ways of life.

But whereas it’s relatively easy to spot the subtext behind the film’s visual content, Samsara’s music is far more deceptive. The song underlying the abovementioned gun sequence is “Kothbiro,” by Kenyan singer Ayub Ogada. The use of a Kenyan musician’s work to comment on violence in Ethiopia is troubling, to say the least. While it’s true that violence in sub-Saharan Africa has sent waves of people from their homelands to neighboring countries (both Ethiopia and Kenya received many Sudanese refugees in recent decades, for instance), the fact remains that Kenya and Ethiopia are distinct countries. Equating them through music only propagates Western ignorance. (And in any case, The Constant Gardener [2005], a film based on political violence in Nigeria, had already used and credited “Kothbiro” in its soundtrack. Why didn’t Samsara simply find an Ethiopian song to comment on Ethiopian violence?)

Unfortunately, Samsara also fails to include Ogada in its soundtrack, giving him only a perfunctory mention in the concluding credits. Instead, Samsara chooses to present its music as an almost wholly unified creation by a trio of white artists: Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard (of “Now We Are Free”/Gladiator fame), and Marcello de Francisci. These three take nearly 80% of the artist credits on the Samsara soundtrack. Given Samsara’s visual diversity, why neglect Ogada and instead present, racially speaking, such a white soundtrack?

The answer to this question has at least two parts. In the first place, Stearns, Gerrard, and de Francisci seem to lack any qualms about co-opting the (apparent) musical practices of other cultures. The behind-the-scenes video “SAMSARA: The Musical Journey”[3] emphasizes the musicians’ desire to use live musical recordings—rather than canned software instruments—to create the soundtrack, and in fact to make these recordings themselves. “Musical Journey” underscores the musicians’ essential performative contributions to the soundtrack by including shots of Stearns playing crystal singing bowls, de Francisci playing what appear to be small conga drums and ukulele, and Gerrard singing. It’s highly unlikely that these three are experts in all the instruments they played for the soundtrack, but no matter. (With limitless takes and some basic audio mixing software, you, too, can make exotic music—no actual musicians from other cultures required!)

Yet the musicians’ overprivilege in cultural borrowing is not their only problem; ignorance also prevents them from doing justice to the musical traditions they draw from. Here’s an experiment: Listen to “Modern Life,” the third item on the Samsara soundtrack. Does it sound “ethnic” to you? Now check out “Musical Journey” at 4:43. That percussion is not the product of, say, a tribal drummer trained extensively in their own culture’s music, but of a white guy surrounded by expensive recording equipment, trying to pass off his music as “exotic.” In fact, I’d argue that, accustomed as we Westerners are to hearing a few common instruments, it’s only the relatively unusual timbre of the congas and the vaguely polyrhythmic character of the drumming that make this music sound “ethnic.”

Let’s try again. Consider “Geisha,” from Samsara’s soundtrack. Does it sound “exotic” to you? Now watch “Musical Journey” beginning at 5:20. Unfortunately, “Geisha” is not really “other” in any meaningful way – it’s simply an ersatz, a white lady (Gerrard) singing a wordless melody that includes augmented seconds and therefore meets Western criteria of the “foreign.” Yet, whereas geishas are a part of Japanese cultural tradition, augmented second intervals are not particularly closely associated with any East Asian musical traditions, but more with Middle-Eastern musical traditions. Lumping all non-white cultures together into a general “exotic” is heinous.[4]

To be blunt, it’s highly disappointing that Stearns, Gerrard, and de Francisci employ cheap Western stereotypes of the musically exotic to create their soundtrack. And unfortunately, the music of Ayub Ogada—perhaps the closest this film comes to musical authenticity—does not even make it to the soundtrack.

Indeed, this is no ethical music. It is the most Western and colonizing of do-it-yourself approaches. It is lack of awareness about other cultures’ musics. It is failure to not hire and credit people who actually are experts in these various musics and who thus can do it right.

I can recommend watching Samsara for its jawdropping cinematography, and as a thought experiment concerning Western depictions of other cultures and their musics. However, viewers should not expect to undertake a “personal journey” when watching this film, nor to draw much “from within” themselves. Fricke, Magidson, and especially the musicians Gerrard, Stearns, and de Francisci have already done all the interpretive work here.

He says,

The streets are the veins of a city. They gather, transport and transform our daily experiences and interactions.  We can read a city by its streets, the same as we can read a sample of blood from a body. … my role as an artist is that of a mediator.  My work subtly changes the city streets to create a dialogue and interactions between the environment and our experience of it. The artworks take ownership and manipulate city spaces, opening new relationships with daily familiarity. The end result carries conversations, becoming a fragment of the ever changing city’s history.

View more work here.

Western Christianity received the atheists it deserved. Better yet, Britain has the atheists American Christianity earned: Those for whom Christianity is a cloud of illusion composed of the collective rituals and fears of humanity’s childish past. Those meteorologists hope for a strong rational wind to clear our minds and lives. They are critics who only speak the language of caricature.

I’ve tried to avoid this conversation for the most part. Both sides seem invested in a project of systematic confusion. Then, from the clouds of the Internet comes a distant thunder. There is a book, and it is good. You see it excerpted on someone’s Tumblr. It slides by on your Amazon “Customers Who Bought This Also Bought” scroll. Next you see it on a friend’s bookshelf, and then someone praises it in a conversation. It announces its arrival with a thud at your front door, and you read it. This book is Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why Christianity Makes Surprising Emotional Sense, set to come out in the US this autumn.

More narrative than argument, Spufford’s account reflects its author’s lack of interest in tossing another stick into the standard anti-New Atheist bonfire. He uses their collective brood to establish the climate to which he writes, but then spends little time with their ideas. Instead of arguing the history, brandishing the philosophy or defending the ideas of Christianity, Spufford defends Christian emotions. The danger for such a book, as Wordsworth expressed it, is that, “we murder to dissect.” Spend an entire book on emotional navel-gazing and your feelings might lie cold and dead on the page, chopped to bits by over-analysis. Spufford’s emotions avoid such a fate. Think of Unapologetic as a virtual reality tour of the pathways of a heart, a guided exploration of his emotive geography—like explaining Christianity by starting with the Psalms. What does it feel like to trust, to forgive, to cry, to screw up, to hope, to love when one believes the God of Everything interrupted death and is mending the world in this flesh and blood man, Jesus Christ? Spufford invites the reader into the emotional language and landscape of Christianity, overthrowing the mini-tyrannies and traditions of the Christian/atheist “mud-wrestling match” in the process. [1]

The human race has come up with plenty of myths that are the theological equivalent of pornography, stories following the directorial instructions of wish fulfillment. The story of Christ—his ministry, death, resurrection—has become familiar in all the wrong ways, morphing into a clone of our petty and parasitic prejudices. For Christians, Spufford’s writing makes the familiar strange; for others it can make the strange intelligible. Humanity is an infinite onion of self-deception and distortion—or, as Spufford shorthands it, sin is the “human propensity to fuck things up,” or HPtFtU. Christianity is the “League of the Guilty” and Jesus is Yeshua. In this context Unapologetic includes perhaps the greatest midrash (a creative retelling that is also a commentary) on the gospel stories that I have ever encountered: stripping away the false layers of suburban sensibility, Spufford channels the directed lunacy of Christianity’s founder.

His retelling makes the story of Christ peculiar for the right reasons—its foolish generosity, unsettling judgment of self-righteousness, the seemingly naïve and insane proclamation that, even though the world is mangled, there is no limit to what can be repaired. Spufford reminds us that the Christian God is the God who spent more time in gutters than he did in palaces.

The Christian community is just as subject to HPtFtU as the rest of humanity. Still, Spufford wisely sidesteps the kind of quantitative misery-counts we hear too often from evangelicals that sound something like “Christianity has caused less suffering than your worldview.” “The bad stuff,” says Spufford, “cannot be averaged. It can only be confessed.” [2] Truthful human self-narration only occurs in this context. God’s grace provides a painful reorientation, not a simple run through the divine dishwasher. Grace makes us “better readers of each other,” shaping and changing us, not necessarily into lives of virtue, but a sense of healing and forgiveness. [3]

Spufford’s experience and his Christianity prevent an easy satisfaction with easy answers and by the end he has outpaced his New Atheist opponents not through arguments but the telling of a story. The narrative of Christ is its own apologetic. No system of theodicy can withstand an honest look at the world. The sharp and spinning gears of history grind up every justification and explanation. We have no answer but “God with us.” Spufford is right: we don’t have a solution, we have a story and a person.

Spufford writes within earshot of both the cry of Calvary and the music of Mozart—recognizing that a Christianity that fails to “take suffering seriously” or fails to mourn is a Christianity without hope.[4] Scripture tells the story of a God whose arms are wide enough to embrace both. The world is more than tragic and to say otherwise is just self-deception. The world is hopelessly broken…and yet. I am hopelessly broken…and yet.[5]  The cross was our violence in response to God’s presence, to hearing the truth about ourselves…and yet. HPtFtU is the truth, but not the final truth. The cross is a sign and promise of God’s faithfulness amidst our failure, our HPtFtU. God does not ration forgiveness. Through Jesus, God loves us so we become God’s again. Jesus is the Triune God’s “and yet.” Christ is the conjunction that makes sure that death is not the final word of creation. He is the “and” that replaces the small dot following “death.”

Though Spufford writes with over-caffeinated agitation, his prose is hypnotic, full of stinging wit and perfect metaphors. It’s impressive that such a book emerges amidst the New Atheist gladiatorial clamor, taking a lead pipe to the theological and rhetorical knees of the current conversation. One could quibble with a number of passages—how Spufford lumps Islam and Judaism together, or the string of assertions that populate certain segments. But that would miss the point. The more I read, the more most theology books seem the equivalent of a police officer handing out parking tickets in the middle of a riot, or a professor giving a lecture after the class has left. Spufford stands apart: think the Psalms, think Augustine’s Confessions, think Edward’s Religious Affections. Francis Spufford has given us a gift, or better yet a counter-gift. The gift is his narrative; the gift of Christ’s story retold. It’s not a perfect gift, but it certainly is the right one. Christianity will be the better for it, and so will atheism.

JUE Festival comments:

Her way of creating photographic stories of the people around her by combining different image sources from the photographs taken by her throughout the country, has been the ‘hallmark’ of the artist.  … Consequently, the completion of each piece takes quite long time, and there the intervals between new creations are longer than those of other artists. However, this explains why her photographs, though digital ones, appear to be a result of detailed manual work. They look even like quilts which are made by sewing together different pieces of fabric.

Seoung Won Won has been hallmarked by her focused telling of the stories around her, but in “My Age of Seven” she shifts to speaking of herself. Perhaps her engagement with the stories of others caused a fresh consideration of her own.

“My Age of Seven” is sparkling clear fantasy. Rather than being disorienting or exclusive, its detailed presentation of memory is at once particular and universally inviting. The viewer is placed within the artist’s childhood and invited to revisit their own, perpetuating a legend in which we all participate.

To view more of Seoung Won Won’s work, check out her page at the Google Art Project: http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/entity/%2Fm%2F0t504sj?projectId=art-project&hl=en

 
Nice. But . . . who? The Chapel Hill-based band has been making music for over 20 years, but are on the musical fringe in a lot of ways, despite their football field-long resumes. Their brand of frenetic, loud pop rock – combined with singer/guitarist Mac Caughan’s still (at 42) squeaky voice – isn’t anything new. Why do they matter?

Some reasons, in no order:

1) You can call them “pop punk” without feeling ashamed.

Superchunk underline both words in “pop punk” with a Sharpie: their songs are fiercely hummable while remaining rooted in an equally fierce punk ethic and aesthetic (do-it-yourself record distribution, roaring buzzsaw guitars, the works). The four members – McCaughan, guitarist Jim Wilbur, bassist Laura Ballance, and drummer Jon Wurster – are all capable musicians, and can craft melodically complex and lyrically nuanced songs that sound nothing like the prefab mall punk wheezing from every Hot Topic in the United States.

2) Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance created, own, and run Merge Records.

And Merge Records is important. The two formed it in 1989 as a way to release Superchunk albums; now they’re releasing albums from Arcade Fire, Spoon, M. Ward, Dinosaur Jr., She & Him, Conor Oberst, and the list goes on and on. Plus, while overly corporate machinations are often hid behind an opaque “indie” skin, Merge are still quite independent. But more on that later.

3) Superchunk are both traditionalists and innovators.

Their first few albums in the early ’90s leaned heavily toward the second half of the “pop punk” label, but the band started branching out more with each release after realizing they needed to shake up the formula a bit. 1994′s Foolish debuted a slower, more introspectively dark side of the band’s sound, and 1995′s Here’s Where the Strings Come In added a few more cups of pop texture to the batter. By the late ’90s, the band was still playing energetic punk pop, but occasionally fusing it with avant-garde arrangements, vintage keyboards, and horn sections.

4) The four band members spend their extracurricular time wisely.

As I mentioned before, McCaughan and Ballance still run and operate Merge records, but there’s more. During Superchunk’s hiatus, McCaughlan recorded fairly prolifically under the Portastatic moniker, covering lots of ground that he normally wouldn’t: bossa nova, soundtrack scores, and baroque pop, to name a few. Most of Mac’s Portatstatic work is excellent, especially 2005-06′s back-to-back releases Bright Ideas and Be Still Please. Jim Wilbur has kept busy helping with Portastatic and a few of his own bands, but the real busybody is Jon Wurster – he’s half of a pretty popular comedy duo with Tom Scharlpling, having written for several TV shows (including Monk), and acts as session or touring drummer for a staggering number of artists, including R.E.M., Jay Farrar, Ryan Adams, The New Pornographers, Charlie Daniels, and Katy Perry.

5) They’re all really friendly, kind and funny people. And they make videos like this:

6) Superchunk can legitimately be called “indie rock.”

Forget the trend to lump everything not easily pigeonholeable as “indie rock” (remember when everything was “alternative”?) – Superchunk actually are indie rock. No major labels own Merge Records, despite the amount of interest the label and its bands have garnered. They’ve done it their way, made mistakes and learned from them. As the music industry is imploding, Merge is actually succeeding – and they still have less than 15 employees and respond to e-mails personally. McCaughan, Ballance, and reporter John Cook told the label’s tale in Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records. It’s worth picking up.

7) Superchunk make great music.

Some of their albums are better than others, sure, and they’re certainly not for everyone. But Superchunk write well, play well, and have fun doing so – and have been doing this for around two decades. All of their releases could serve as formidable entry points for new listeners, even Cup of Sand; the band’s mammoth collection of left-over tracks spans their whole career and has plenty of examples how the band has grown over their career. Come Pick Me Up is my vote for their most consistent album, though. The songs balance between playful and pensive, and McCaughan sells his lyrics – no matter what he’s singing about – as if they’re the only thing in the world worth buying.

Over 20 years and still going strong. Long live Superchunk.

This critical liberation comes at a timely moment. The monstrous Collected Poems of Ted Hughes isn’t quite ten years old, and has given a freshened generation of critics the chance to evaluate his poetry by some means other than the biographical. But the results were disappointing. Case in point: Paul Batchelor’s 2005 review of Collected Poems in Tower Poetry, which divides Hughes’ work into various roles or personas, “The Nature Poet,” “The Mythographer,” etc., leveraging the convenience of those categories to organize its tepid distaste for Hughes’ style. In the “Nature Poet” section, Batchelor makes the excellent point that Hughes’s reiterative descriptions of his subjects “outstrip most people’s experience,” noting that through the overlapping phrases of poems like “Sketch of a Goddess,” which describes two orchids, we are made to feel the inadequacy of language:

That one’s past it. But this one’s in her prime.
She utters herself
Utterly into appeal. A surrender
Of torn mucous membranes, veined and purpled,
A translucence of internal organs
In a frisson,
Torn open,
The core debauched,
All loosely dangling helplessness
And enfolding claspers -

His apparent failure to settle on the right phrase for the orchids, to Hughes’ fans, is the fresh expression of an old and delicious problem: Romantic Irony, the brilliance of a physical world that both compels us to describe it and defies description. There’s a good argument to be made that this dilemma is at the core of poetry’s efficacy; that English poetry has always been playing this game that it can’t win, and always pleasing us as it does so. But Batchelor attacks Hughes precisely for his expression of that problem, arguing that in the famous collection Crow, the backload “ …of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying,” and concluding that Hughes “…appears to have exhausted nature as a means of negotiating his experience.”

But Batchelor’s analysis flips Hughes’ real dilemma on its head: With his long descriptive lists and huge volume of published work, Hughes wasn’t belaboring a natural world he had exhausted, but celebrating a beauty he couldn’t exhaust. What Batchelor really takes umption with isn’t Hughes’ subject, or style, but his volume. “Hughes was prolific,” he writes, but this does not work out to a compliment: “There are many weak, and some positively bad poems in Collected Poems…” the implication is that Hughes should have either curbed the writing impulse, or curated his collections better.

It is revealing to contrast this critical reaction to those of Elizabeth Bishop’s reviewers. In terms of volume, Bishop is Hughes’s opposite (her life’s work included only 101 published poems). The Poetry Foundation, with audible gaspiness, describes Bishop as “…a perfectionist who did not write prolifically, preferring instead to spend long periods of time polishing her work.” “Perfect” is an adjective that circles Bishop’s work like a moth, and for all her lack of volume, she frequently rivals or outperforms Hughes in anthologies. Ernie Hilbert, reviewing her volume Bold Type, wrote that Bishop’s is distinguished by “craft-like accuracy” and “a miniaturist’s discretion and attention” He celebrated her poems as “…balanced like Alexander Calder mobiles…every element…poised flawlessly against the next.” It is difficult to find a review which doesn’t share Hilbert’s awe. But are brevity and balance really such reliable aesthetic standards?

Education is preceded by canonization. The anthology is its roadmap, and the excerpt, as much teachers hate to admit it, is its currency. Our generation, whose scholars have been brow-beaten by political discourse into an ideological obsession with inclusiveness, has done a fervent job rewriting the book on who should be included in those anthologies and excerpts. But the nastier question has to do with what should be included. The what question is not solvable, because it is predicated on the notion that we can comb through and extract an author’s “representative works,” which are actually mythological beasts, about as discoverable as griffins.

With poets like Bishop, this dilemma seems easier to untangle, given her concentrated output. But with voluble poets, such as Hughes or Walt Whitman, the difficulty is compounded. Someone once wrote of Whitman that “only a genius could have made his mistakes,” and that aphorism sums up the anthologist’s, and ultimately our culture’s, dilemma as we attempt to convey Whitman’s importance: Even his mistakes are genius, so how can decide what is most brilliant, moving, worth discoursing about? We can’t, but critics like Bachelor reveal that smart people are still allowing the anthologist’s impulse to steer their aesthetic judgement. Bachelor dislikes Hughes not because what he wrote wasn’t poetic, but because he wrote too much of it.

Yet volume can be just as profitable as refinement. The endurance of writers like Whitman and Hughes is undeniable, but we’ll be forced to deny it if we accept Paul Batchelor’s critical criteria. To an artistic mind that is already well-trained, expansion can be a form of revision: Left together on the page, multiple phrasings can assume an atmospheric weight equivalent to one of Basho’s Haikus, which get their gravity from brevity. Poems like Hughes’ “Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days,” which are flooded with descriptive language, might lose their power if the author had scratched all the repetitious phrasings. In this poem, economy would be a vice:

…And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach

With a single wire

She gives him his teeth, tying the the roots to the centrepin of his body

He sets the little circlets on her fingertips

She stiches his body here and there with steely purple silk

He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth

She inlays with deep cut scrolls the nape of his neck

He sinks into place the inside of her thighs

So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment…

They bring each other to perfection.

 

There is certainly an infinite care in even Hughes’ most apparently off-hand poems, a fact which reveals one last truth about the dilemma between concentrated and voluble poetry: It dissolves under examination. Bishop’s perfection is as voluble in its depth as Whitman’s is in its breadth, just as Hughes’ descriptive panegyrics are every bit as crafted as Stephen Spender’s shoe-polished stanzas. Our preference for one over the other is not a question of quality, but of stylistic preference; a preference we should never make into a principle. The flaw that causes college reading packets to favor Bishop is systemic: A consequence of our need to anthologize. The virtue that will save Hughes from undeserved anonymity must be begun in the criticism. Experience, poetry’s subject, is not exhaustible, and we should not accuse the poets who attempt to emphasize this inexhaustibly of absurdity. In fact, the apparent looseness of voluble poetry accounts for that expansive quality taken on by the examined life. Fitting easily into the museum is an excellent criterion for the curator, but a poisonous one for the artist, and Hughes, who was a genius, should be allowed to make his genius mistakes. The delight of his sort of poetry is that it lies close to life, which cannot be summed properly up any more then he can be satisfyingly anthologized.

Why does the poet suffer? Watch, look, see her longwinded thoughts transform into laconic, saturated fragments of earth and sky. The elements of wonder can so easily transform themselves into the elements of pain. Is that opal hanging majestically in the night sky a friend, a portent of the daylight? Or is that crescent dagger a Cheshire Cat smile, appearing and disappearing into a deeper—the deepest—night? Either way the poet must shape the silences one gives and the other takes away. The silence of light and the silence of night; these are the elements that make up the kaleidoscope of Christian Wiman’s newest book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.

Like Augustine’s Confessions, Abyss isn’t really “about” anything so much as it is “to” everything: God, family, self, humanity, all of creation. It belongs to those kinds of books that are movements of life, tideways of prayer. “A confession,” Wittgenstein wrote, “must be part of your new life.” And like Dante’s La Vita Nuova, Wiman begins within the book of his memory, writing of his conversion in youth: “Maybe it happened—and goes on happening—at the cellular level and means not nothing but everything to me. Maybe, like an atavistic impulse, I don’t remember it, but it remembers me.”

If there is a form to Wiman’s fragments, it is the dance of call and response as they spiral and twist and torque into the crevices of “every riven thing” that blossoms in existence. He begins with a tenebrous call of dereliction:

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this:

Significantly, in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s “repetition” within a different disposition, the book ends with the same stanza. The only difference is that the last line ends with a period rather than a colon:

and believing nothing believe in this.

Wiman begins like Job, the dark terrors of silence and absence are responded to in the open lostness, the waiting, that the colon evokes. He begins in a Dantean dark wood, the selva oscura, knowing only one thing: the journey to and through the land of God-forsakenness has become a necessity.

But the colon mark takes part in a metamorphosis, it becomes a period. This period, however, is not a triumphal faith, a “full stop” of certainty. It is, rather, a movement from the thorn of silence into its rose. It is the eventide absence of God transformed into the whirlwind morning of God, both equally mysterious yet so infinitely different as to separate light from darkness. Wiman dwells neither in pure darkness nor in pure light; he sees through a glass darkly. Yet he does see, somewhere within the abyssal interval between Christ’s call “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and the empty sepulcher of paschal beauty.

I even wonder if, in this subtle movement of punctuation, Wiman has not created a cryptic punctuation of Christ. A recurring line throughout the book is “Christ is contingency.” Christ roams the earth as a man of sorrows; he who is the pure joy of existence itself becomes existence groaning, as St. Paul described it. Christ is open, like the colon mark, to the fleeting winds of time as they give, without rhyme or reason, the tragedies and joys of this life. Wiman writes, “No. Life is not an error, even when it is.” There is a prodigality of life that inheres in the colon that is mirrored in Christ. One could even say that Christ embodies the word “colon” in a double sense, as the punctuation of contingency and as the scatological “shit” or “scum” of the world. St. Paul wrote that “we have become, and still are, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.” Yet what follows the colon of Christ’s being forsaken is the cry, the “period,” of Christ’s “it is finished” from the cross. This is the period as portent; the period that is already-but-not-yet; it bespeaks of the whirlwind in Job becoming the grammar of resurrection, the grammar of Christ.

Within the abyss, the interval, between broken images and resurrection, rests, in restlessness, the movement of faith. Faith burgeons within “sorrow’s flower,” “Experience lives in the transitions” and “We feel ourselves alive in the anxiety of being alive. We feel God in the coming and going of God—or no, the coming and going of consciousness (God is constant).” What is faith? What is love? They come and go, ebb and flow, upon eventides of days gone by. What is this love that sustains us? That knits these frangible petals of our existence together like some cosmic warp and woof?

Wiman gives one of the most beautiful responses to the question of faith I’ve ever heard:

“What does faith mean, finally, at this last date? I often feel that it means no more than, and no less than, faith in life—in the ongoingness of it, the indestructibility, some atom-by-atom intelligence that is and isn’t us, some day-by-day and death-by-death persistence insisting on a more-than-human hope, some tender and terrible energy that is, for those with eyes to see it, love.”

Faith is faith in life. St. Augustine called it the vita vitae in the Confessions, the Life of life. And what moves our lives within this infinite, life giving Life, is love. For Wiman, like the Bishop of Hippo, his love is his weight; it is the love that is moved by the Love that moves. This is the heart, the cosmic axis, of Christian faith: you shall love; which for the Christian also means: you shall exist.

But a nasty little virus has crept into the synapses of our modern psyches. We have turned faith and its reflection, love, into a soporific and ideal fideism cut off from the strong wine of doubt. Doubt, contrary to popular culture, is not the antithesis of faith (the antithesis is arrogant egoism), rather, doubt is faith’s lover in a quarrel, a wrestling with an angel. This is what the Scottish mystic, George MacDonald, meant by saying that “Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest.” Similarly Wiman writes that “no matter how severe its [faith's] draught, how thoroughly your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root.” Faith and doubt are the sun and moon, the latter a portent of the former: “Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.” Doubts may look as if they burn us in a fiery furnace. Yet there is one that looks as if he were the son of God in the Babylonian furnace, too. The Christian God is, after all, both a consuming fire and a fountain.

Life is a fugue, and faith its intervals, its transitions. There is always some counterpoint of dissonance straining our existence toward the future, giving us the nacre of the present from the past. The theme of life is a primordial wonder that anything, rather than simply nothing, should exist at all. It consists of elated fragments of awe, that we are here, now. And how rapturously strange that being has made some secret, subtle ligature and covenant with the abyss within the doors of our perception, our consciousness. Yet dissonance arises within the awareness of our fleeting contingency—memento mori—here today, gone tomorrow. As children of dust we return to our mother, the soil, the seed. The movement of these elations, wonders and sorrows, temper and define our experience of time. Time is defined by the sound of our lives, the crescendo of which is our love. This sound is our memory, the mother of our muses.

Sometime before the German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a heavy influence on Wiman), was murdered at the hands of the Nazis, he admonished his people to remember Jacob’s fearful awe when reunited face to face with his brother, Esau, years after the fateful birthright deception took place, Jacob says: “for therefore I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God.” To see our brother and sister—the one we’ve all deceived—is akin to seeing the face of God. Every human is an icon of the face of God. “Unto the least of these, you did it unto me,” a first century Jew is known to have said.

This theme, God’s face in our neighbor—the world seen, one could say, through the prism of Andrei Rublev’s Angels at Mamre icon—is the heart of Wiman’s book; it is what makes writing the book possible.

Somewhere along the corridors of life, Wiman fell in love with a girl. And joy’s face was mirrored back into his own. He prays with her, prays to the Face in every face. There is no other way to begin to pray but to pray to a human face; this is what it means to believe in Christ, to look into the eyes of a love that never changes in every contingent leaf of existence. Without this necessary dimension of Christian faith Wiman writes that “one’s solitary experiences of God wither into a form of withholding, spiritual stinginess, the light of Christ growing ever fainter in the glooms of self.” A potent sense of this truth is found, he relates, in Bonhoeffer’s insight that Christ is always stronger in our brother’s heart than in our own.

One of my favorite chapters of the book (no doubt because I’m fated with the nerves of William Cowper) is “Hive of Nerves.” The epigraph, from Paul Celan, goes like this: “It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming, / That unrest formed a heart.” If Augustine’s heart was restless in the fourth century, how much so ours? Ours is the age of distracted anxiety, the worst kind of anxiety I can imagine. Wiman writes, “And thus a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space for individuals to think.” How to slow down? No, slow…down. Slow. Down. To weep by the waters of Babylon, or Leman (nod to Eliot); to rejoice in the flow of the Jordan; to see with the eyes that are the lamp of the body; to stop long enough to find one’s self under the Rose of Dante’s Paradiso, or in the ichor of Angelus Silesius’s rose, the rose that “is without why, it blooms because it blooms, it pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen.” There is a happy forgetfulness in attending to the world, an attention to the other that gives the self back to itself in truth, in love. We give the world presence, and thereby receive the gift of being present ourselves. Amidst the flickering screens that makeup our wastelands, we are called, Wiman seems to say, to form a heart.

If one has ever watched Robert Bresson’s magisterial film, Diary of a Country Priest—or read the classic novel it portrays by Georges Bernanos—the end of Wiman’s book will seem strangely familiar. They both culminate, in a somewhat melancholy adagio of expectation, in the kairos and fecundity of all Christian thought: Grace. All is Grace, that mysterious orchid of God’s mind that gives birth to the world. In the midst of being hellishly flayed by stomach cancer, the young country priest of Abricourt offers his last words: “It doesn’t matter. Grace is everywhere.” It doesn’t matter that Christian Wiman believes in nothing, so long as he believes in this: Grace is everywhere.

The cultural landscape is the same kind of boarding house. Crowded, vying for space and an audience, we artists brazenly put the pots and pans of our artistic creation wherever is most convenient at the moment. Our carelessness clutters up this communal place of cultural experience that is the arts. The resultant mess—of mediocre self-published novels and lackluster indie albums—is everyone’s, and no one’s.

What can we do? After a few well-meaning attempts at cleaning up after others, we find that the burden of our own survival is too heavy to allow us to bear a triple or quadruple load. We leave other people’s dirty dishes and try to focus on our own. We try to clean up after ourselves and do our part. But other people just keep on cluttering up the kitchen.

Making art is most assuredly a survival act. If the young child’s creative catharsis is not cut off by a derelict public education system hellbent on social control, if it is not cut off by parents who find strange paintings and invented worlds embarrassing, the young child will carry his personal window view on the fields of creativity with him into adulthood. He will find solace in the release of making. The act of creation will nourish him, and it will therefore become his own. It will become his personal medicine for his personal condition. This is wonderful.

However, the artist’s internal place of pleasure hides carries with it a great intrinsic danger. Endless indulgence of personal catharsis, with no consideration of how the community experiences that catharsis, is just as bad as leaving one’s dirty dishes in the kitchen. Everyone needs to eat, and cooking is the way to do it; but there is more than one cook in the kitchen—especially now, after the Internet and the indie revolution—and taking care of this limited space that we all share is more important than ever.

The artist must remain mindful of the size of her act. A complex meal requiring three pans, some spoons and spatulas, knives and cutting boards, not to mention plates and forks, requires an even more prompt cleanup than the simple leftover lunch eaten out of a bowl. The kitchen, like the collective cultural consciousness, is a limited space. It graciously hosts great cooking projects (and great art projects), but it can only bear so much at any given time. Recognizing the kitchen’s capacity for cooking (and the culture’s capacity for digesting) is critical; and that knowledge must be coupled with restraint.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t undertake gigantic creative projects. Rather, it’s to say that we should study our surroundings. We should only broadcast our projects when the time is right—and we must check ourselves to ensure that our projects are things with the culture really must see. But in times of crowding in the kitchen, we must settle for simple, economical cooking projects, or for no cooking at all.

Of course, we don’t have to cook for ourselves alone. We can make dinner for others. We can even make dinner with others. For some of us, this is not terribly natural. But why not pool our resources? I’m out of rice, and you’re out of vegetables. Why not put our fridges together and make something greater than the sum of its parts? In this kind of sharing, there is no offensive clutter, because the mess remains everyone’s, and no one can disown it. The food that results is everyone’s, too. There’s no measuring of portions to determine how much food matches a given contribution. There’s a big pot, and hungers of all sizes have equal rights to be satisfied.

While artists need to eat, just as everyone else does, the commercialization of creativity has wrought great damage to the creative process and even to our culture’s process of enjoying art. Cranking out the next novel to try and put bread on the table may or may not produce the best version of the novel that is possible; and while the fire of economic need gets us off our behinds to do something, it also easily moves us into a degenerate view of what art is and why we should seek an audience. It’s been said a million times, but art is not a commodity. Art does not participate in the laws of supply and demand in the same way that a can of beans does. While there may be times of famine and times of plenty in a culture’s creation and appreciation of art, artworks tend to last, when given the proper care. Indeed, the greatest works of art feed us again and again, as if that can of beans had turned bottomless.

An artist has bills to pay, same as everyone else; but you can’t put a price on that work of bottomless plenty. This is why society desperately needs great art—because it blows up the bottom line.

There’s no telling when the next great cooking project will spring up; but if it’s something that could feed our souls for generations to come, we need to keep the kitchen (and the marketplace of cultural experience) uncluttered so that we can recognize the genesis of great art and get out of its way.