She is five years old and I do what every parent is expected to do. I register my child for kindergarten. But I am wanting a half-day option, so I visit the school to see if I can work some magic in my daughter’s favor. I’m willing to pick her up at the half-day point. It will be no extra work on their part.

Scientists think they have pinpointed the problem: neonicotinoids. This is why the bees are dying.

I am greeted at the office door by the tall, young principal whose name I cannot remember now. His skin is pale, his hair an even light brown. I remember his smile. The kind that says, “You and I will come to terms.” But they will not be my terms. “All parents have these difficulties separating, Mrs. Barkat. You need to give your child to us and trust us.” It has the ring of truth to it. I will go observe the classrooms, one of which my daughter will end up in just two months from this moment.

It was not just the bees, Donna. Truth be told, it was my friend who I just met a few short years ago. Her father once found her playing, instead of cleaning her room like she’d been told to do. She was five years old and deep in play-thought. She did not hear her father enter the room. He spanked her, and in her surprise and confusion she wet herself. She began to cry. He spanked her again for crying. She learned, Donna. She learned.

The classroom is orderly and clean. The children have learned to keep it so. It is the model setting, and the principal is beaming as he introduces me to the teacher. The wall is hung with a long string of identical apples. Each apple holds a child’s name.

They say that some bees will engage in suicidal risk rather than bring disease back to the hive. The disease they are dying from is because of the neonicotinoids. Not directly, though. It’s complicated.

At age two, my daughter can write all her letters and is already creating little “books” that are incomprehensible to anyone but her. At age three, she will surely learn to read. She doesn’t. Not at three. Or four. Or five. Not until age seven—“late” by many people’s standards. She spends her time on things that interest her, like making a web out of the dining room—string to chair rung to table leg to thermostat to chair rung to chair rung to chair rung. She hangs everything she can possibly find onto the tangle of string. A white teddy bear, bouncing on air. Red yarn. Blue plastic hangers. What a mess. This is what happens when I get lost in thought, cook dinner for an hour and trust that my daughter is at predictable play.

It was my friend, yes. Or it was the bees. It might have been Picasso.

Five years before my daughter was born, I visited the Picasso museum in France. I tried to take my daughter there a few years ago, but it was closed for renovations. The French are always doing this to me. I think it is their scheme to make me return every decade, so I can find one set of doors reopened only to find another set newly closed. Picasso was closed. I could have cried. I wanted to show my girl the incredible range of Picasso’s work. The black period surprised me most. No one had ever showed me Picasso’s black period.

Neonicotinoids are a class of chemicals found in agricultural pesticides. We use it to narrow the possibilities of what can live where. It has spiraled outwards into the environment, where even small amounts of it can weaken the immune systems of the bees. The bees are dying, Donna. And with this death will come the death of honey and almonds and pears and plums. I don’t know if the apples are at risk.

When I see all the five- and six-year-olds raising their hands, waiting quietly for their teacher to come and check their lower-case letter ‘l’s, I know I have come to terms. It is late June. The children have spent the first year of their education here in this room. They are writing the lower-case letter l over and over again on their worksheets. Filling the pages with single files of the body of a stick figure without arms or legs, head or eyes or mouth. At age five, my daughter is drawing aerial views, figures half on half off the page, dimensions. I call her my little Picasso.

My friend is nearly fifty now. In many ways, she is just coming into her own. Characters are appearing in her writing, bursting out from hidden places. Yesterday it was circus clowns. Playful things deep in the psyche seem to be gradually dancing into view.

My daughter Sara is a sophomore in high school. I came to terms when she was five and I canceled her registration with the school. For years she has been home educated. For years, my house has been filling up with her artwork. She is currently in a distance-learning school. It was something I did to transition her to something schoolish before college. She is “behind” right now. Ten lessons in English, eight in Chemistry and History, a few in Spanish. Ashley from student services wants to talk to me this week because of “future concerns.” I am not sure what to tell Ashley. My daughter’s grades are mostly As, but she goes at her own pace. She prefers to go deep instead of wide; it slows her down. And there is the matter of her exams, which she never excels at because she refuses to study. “I’ll remember what’s important to me,” she says. “If I don’t remember it, that’s because I didn’t care.”

There are some who care about the bees, Donna. They are suggesting that we introduce Russian bees into our colonies to recreate diversity. If my friend were the one doing the introducing, the bees might be wearing babushkas and dancing the mazurka. My daughter would laugh and dance at the magic of it, I’m almost sure.

 
 
Ancient black dotted nose. Bear face. Unbothered by ants
scaling the map of your body. Domed resting place for the fly.
Algae growing on the spires of your tail. How your dexterous claws
pull in dirt to staunch the nest and replant grass
above your treasure. Balancing your back weight on your pivot tail
as your muscular hind feet work in turns, pulling and stuffing, kneading
down the earth, while you stare off at the pines and the sky,
doing what no one has taught you.

 
 
What a strange notion: to bring forth by burying.
You who lull your enemies through stillness.
With hidden mouth. Distant and ominous inhalations,
as if the entirety of your shell encases only a large mysterious
lung. Something resembling sweat surrounds your eyes.
You close them with sheaths of white lid and take what seems a moment
of silence, a prayer, as you recover from the hunching, the digging,
the burying, and start off in a cramped walk.

Fortunately for us, Ezra Koenig and Rostam Batmanglij, the primary songwriters for the band Vampire Weekend, are no Ralph Nickelbys. Their latest album, Modern Vampires of the City, is no nihilistic gutter crawl through a world devoid of meaning. It is, in fact, frequently joyous and relentlessly buoyant. But neither has the band “found religion,” despite the spiritual imagery and themes in their latest. Instead, the lyrical thrust of the album captures the experience of many college-educated, twentysomethings in the city emblazoned on the cover: a smoggy, slightly-retro, slightly-futuristic New York. Heaped upon itself, only partially visible through a mist made of humanity’s greed and ambition, the city becomes us: an existential muddle, alive to ironies, unsure about dogma, unsure even about our unsure-ity, possessing an aversion to strict dichotomies yet full of longing, full, at times, even of faith, drawn by turns to the old and new. It’s the skull and the girl, all in one, but without the assurance that anybody knows what either of those facts really mean.

First, the skull. Death and the inevitable passing of time infuse nearly every track on the album. “Diane Young” elaborates on the homophonous pun in its title by managing to reference both the Bruce and Dylan Thomas (“So grab the wheel, keep on holding it tight / ‘Til you’re tottering off into that good night”). Koenig plaintively asks on “Don’t Lie” if “the low click of a ticking clock” bothers you, since “there’s a headstone right in front of you / and everyone I know.” (“Bother” puts it mildly, one might say.) The ambitious “Step” dons the mantle of elderly wisdom to intone: “We know the true death—the true way of all flesh / Everyone’s dying.” Absent are the wispy impressionistic vignettes of earlier albums in favor of a more direct lyricism that somehow manages to traffic compellingly in ideas and less in recounted experiences.

Not that direct means unambiguous or simplistic. Koenig and Batmanglij are too subtle a pair of lyricists to allow their songs to be straightjacketed into singular readings. Lines are undoubtedly chosen for their multiplicity of understandings. Take, for example, “I was made to live without you,” from “Everlasting Arms.” If the “you” is understood as God—which the title suggests, referring to the 19^th century hymn—then this could be a simple expression of evolutionary logic: no divine intelligence, no “you” to live for. Or perhaps, more cannily, “made” here follows the secondary meaning of “forced” or “led,” as though society has (wrongly?) influenced the narrator into discarding the idea of a divine being as a meaningful premise for existence. But let’s be honest: it’s just as likely about a really, really bad breakup.

Such purposeful ambiguity speaks to a sense of craft and intentionality that is missing in the earlier two albums. In the press, members of the band have cultivated the notion of the three albums as a trilogy, with themes developing and maturing as the artists have aged. A bildungsroman for our time—from the carefree college days of their self-titled debut, to the worldly travels of Contra, to the purposeful and denser Modern Vampires of the City. It’s a neat narrative, but it’s also one without any real resolution. Fittingly, the album was first announced in The New York Times’ Lost and Found section—as unresolvable an existential conundrum as any, if taken literally. Many press outlets have noted an evasiveness from the band when asked what it means. Pitchfork says Koenig and Batmanglij are “scrupulous and cautious” as though “each Vampire Weekend song and artifact comes along with its own little puzzle”; The Guardian’s interviewer calls them “pretty circumspect” and “suspicious…second-guess[ing] our queries.” Meaning always hides, it would appear, just like our lads from the Upper West Side.

Instead, we get longing. That great and terrible longing—the soul-thirst that poses questions to divine beings only half-believed-in, that sees the possibility of something beyond the world in the world. It’s the pretty girl that is no less than a grinning skull but is possibly something much more.

Koenig implores so sweetly in the aforementioned “Everlasting Arms” to be held in “your everlasting arms,” even as death like a chandelier comes crashing down. He sings of the Dies Irae used in the Funeral Mass, and pleads, in words similar to C.S. Lewis’ concept of discipleship as a kind of dying to live a truer version of the self, “Lead me to myself / Don’t leave me in myself.” He asks, in various tracks, “Who will guide us through the end?” and “Who’s going to say a little grace for me?” He speaks of “never-ending visions” and of Milton’s “red right hand” of the Lord. And in “Unbelievers” he sees holy waters everywhere yet wonders if any “contain a little drop for me.”

But the biggest thrill, for the religious listener, is the dubby “Ya Hey,” with its direct references to Exodus 3 and its implicit sympathy for a God who has love for everyone even if it’s mostly unrequited. A marvel of referential compression, the chorus puns off the unpronounceable personal name of the Lord and Outkast’s famous song (you know the one) with swinging confidence, evoking wistfulness for a God “who won’t even say your name / Only I am that I am.” It’s hard not to get a sense of respect for Jewish tradition here, and I suspect those who see this song as an attempt to knock the Big Guy down a notch are badly mistaken. (Note that the Steve Buscemi-directed videos for the album tend to put the lyrics to the fore by pasting them in large letters in front of moving images of New York City. Yet the mutant chirping that sings the name of God demurely gets but a single question mark.)

The concept of a God who won’t even say his name seems to fit the album’s millennial unease. After all, an unknowable God is one that makes no demands. It’s an empty signifier to be filled with whatever passions hold us in their grip. But such a situation soon grows intolerable. Contradictions and questions inevitably assert themselves. And indeed the sense of being mistaken about the holy, even with its demands and humiliations, leads to what may be Vampire Weekend’s circa-2013 version of the prayer in Mark 9:24: “ I don’t wanna live like this but I don’t wanna die.”

“I can’t relate to any ways of thinking that divide the world into two distinct parts,” Koenig tells the music magazine NME. “There’s all these false dichotomies in the world that can be very confusing…I’ve always had an extreme dislike of these false choices you’re presented with.” Rather than the skull or the pretty girl, Modern Vampires of the City’s reasonable impulse is to see the two together as one. Listening to it all, one wonders if Koenig and Batmanglij finally show their hand for a moment by lifting the album title from the opening lines of Junior Reed’s reggae track “One Blood.” Do the boys from Columbia agree with the singer from Kingston that red blood, the common mark of our humanity, can really cover over the “false dichotomies” which plague and divide us? (See the patois-chant of “blood” on “Finger Back.”) Ever referential, it would be supremely fitting if Vampire Weekend’s latest located a balm for the metaphysical incongruities of modern life in the same place—a vein.

For my part, I’m not so sure if the skull and the pretty girl, if alienation and transcendence, can be reconciled so easily. A stronger tonic may be needed. But blood!—they’re on to something there. In fact, it reminds me of another sanguinary song I heard somewhere: “O precious is the flow / That makes me white as snow…”

—————————————————————————————————————————

There are three kinds of doubt and two are constantly at work in you.

The first kind of doubt is conscious-linguistic, and is the least pervasive. This is the kind of doubt involved in reflexive, conscious decisions over such issues as whether to believe in God, or if Santa is really the one eating your cookies, such that you can verbalize your opinion.

The second kind of doubt is similarly intellectual, but less conscious, and more pervasive. As Marilynn Robinson explains: “Every higher act of the mind, intellectual, aesthetic, or moral, is, paradoxically, also an exercise in self-doubt, self-scrutiny. We continuously stand apart from ourselves, appraising.”(1) This doubt is the existential expression of this continuous appraisal—the expression of the possibility of opposites. It is the endless dialectic of the mind, intangible and unseen. It is always happening and naturally encourages a forward motion, a synthesis of the known into the next. It liberates the human imagination, like the invitation found in various moments of “not knowing” that marks a break with your ingrained habits of thought. It opens up novel possibilities of meaning, piercing the illusion that you see the world directly.

The third kind of doubt is experiential. It is “ontologically prior” to the former two, meaning it happens first and is far more pervasive in everyday life. This is the doubt involved in the most basic, bodily levels of human experience. It is the doubt of craft and poiesis, of the artisan and the athlete whose every move is made against countless other possibilities. But it is also the everyday doubt of choosing between different pairs of socks or cereals, and is the doubt that guides you through traffic in a car or on a sidewalk. This doubt is the expression of inculcated practices, your “primordial familiarity” or way of doing things without having to think about them. Everything you do stands in relief against what you don’t do and is a function of this experiential, embodied doubt.

None of these forms of doubt are an enemy to faith, at least not of themselves, nor are they faith’s parasitic appendage. They are faith’s quiet conversation partners—preludes to genuine faith, preceding all the characteristics of Christian living that express themselves as humility. “I’m sorry” begins in doubt, as does repentance, or any change of mind. It creates a disposition in you to give and receive. It opens up conceptual space, giving you the chance to nullify old conceptual maps, propelling you into uncharted regions, outlandish and bracing, where you must create coordinates more capacious than the ones you already knew.

Your faith has a different kind of enemy.

If irony is doubt’s playful cousin, and skepticism its cautious older brother, cynicism is doubt’s evil twin.

Cynicism is paralyzing doubt. It is doubt for the sake of doubt, a dysfunctional endless regression that will eat you up whole. Cynicism identifies everything by reference to the framework of total skepticism. By seeing through everything, it sees nothing at all. It’s over-enhanced doubt, folding in on itself like a nightmare version of Martin Luther’s “inward turn.” But—crucially—cynicism is not something that happens at the conscious-linguistic level, like the first kind of doubt. Rather, it’s more like an “affective orientation” operating at the same unconscious level as the second and third kinds of doubt—like a pre-reflective hardening of your guts.

Cynicism expresses itself as wisdom, a better-than, a way above the unholy canards of certitude, but it is an epistemic and experiential straightjacket. It’s built like doubt, but tangled in itself, and refuses any forward motion. It’s sexier than radical certainty but no less myopic.

When the one thing you want is a complete shadowless grasp of every aspect of even just one simple thing in this life, when you have dug down to the deepest stratum of your understanding and are confronted by mystery—deep impenetrable mystery—and come to realize that you do not understand, cynicism will be calling to you like a siren. If you accept the call, that cynicism will treat the darkness (which is the mystery at the core of your existence) as if comically inconsequential. It will detach itself from all meaningful possibilities, and perpetuate its fundamental drive to preserve itself and itself only.

Real faith, on the other hand, acknowledges this mystery and allows doubt to do its work—to scrutinize, interrogate, and rail against the parameters of understanding. It will employ doubt to bring future possibilities to the foreground, and use wisdom to press toward those possibilities and displace the undesirable ones to the background. In other words, “faith digs down to the deepest stratum and finds trust. Practical trust.”(2) Hope is that trust directed toward the future.

So long as doubt is viewed as a blemish on your life as a believer, so long as the strange momentary abandonment of accredited certainties is a pockmark on your “truly believing,” you will remain inattentive to advents, the birth of the new, to liberating changes of mind. When it is made an enemy, when doubt becomes a proverbial no-no, you will be robbed of that crucial moment of disorientation, that split-second of dispossessive bewilderment that can deliver you from the loss of perspective.

So, if you are faithless today, it may be because you are doubtless.

1. Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind.
2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology

I had not written a single poem in six months.  Maybe I didn’t need a creative outlet anymore?

Before the six-month gap, I had written often—pushed by my need for release from tedium or boredom. Poetry became a habit, a response to an innate need to do something remotely purposeful. Poetry was a grasping response to the drudgery of my desk job. Just finished a mind-numbing task with no redeeming value? Redeem the day with a poem.

There was also a drive to succeed, to do something more: to get published, to get noticed, to move beyond the confines of a desk. The diligence of writing had as much to do with redeeming time I had wasted producing nothing of much value in order to get paid as it did with trying to create a new means of living. My spreadsheet and analysis work was a job, producing money. Poetry was work as vocation, producing no money, but delight, joy, craftsmanship and value instead.

What had happened in those six months is that I had taken a leap into a new position at a new organization in a new place in the country, and my work switched from job to vocation. Just like the flick of a light switch, my work was suddenly being driven from a foundation of delight, joy, and value. And without noticing, poetry just disappeared.

I should have noticed when three months in to the poetry drought I was asked to review a book of poetry for a publication and as I read it there was no desire. I yawned at it. There was no connection. After missing the deadline by a few weeks, I wrote to the editor that I was just not relating to the work. I did not think I could review it. The book sits on a shelf now, three quarters read and never reviewed.

So too sat my poetry journal, until the day I found it. One quarter filled, three quarters blank, not picked up for six months. Out of necessity? Forgetfulness? Was I too busy? Or did I just no longer need poetry in my life.

Staring at the pages, I sensed a need for deep reflection. What was the telos of my drive to write poetry? There were a host of possible answers that would be wrong if I blurted them out to my inner interlocutor: fame, approval, recognition. There were the good answers in there too, ruminating: beauty, truth, meaning, delight, hope, love. Then there was the answer I stumbled onto: therapy.

I had been writing poetry for therapy. It got me through boredom and tedium, lack of value and fleeting purpose, and now that my work satisfied those needs poetry disappeared, riding off alone into the sunset: the town saved, the lawless criminals dead, all in its proper place again.

When it comes to work and poetry I thought of myself as aligned with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. I know, that’s tall company to put yourself in, but I gravitated toward them because they were working poets like me: Eliot was the bad luck Ph.D. candidate that did a long stint at Lloyds Bank of London and spent his career at Faber and Faber while Stevens was an insurance executive at Hartford Accident and Indemnity (the company with the rugged deer commercials). I have never been a fan of Stevens’ poetry (sorry for any offense), but I was deeply inspired by his biography. Here was a man who could conquer his desk job with poetry, who had an outlet and seized it, and rose above crunching numbers and pushing papers to produce something meaningful for the world. I treated Eliot and Stevens’ biographies like hagiographies.

So I looked back onto my own poetry and wondered where it had gone. Therapy seemed like the only answer. Put nicely, poetry had been my outlet to reflect on my work and try to redeem it. More bluntly, and perhaps more honestly, poetry had been a crutch, a kick-stand, a means to cope with something I did not want to deal with directly.

In the clinical terms of an article in the Journal of Poetry Therapy, poetry, and writing in general, “makes events and emotions more manageable when put into words; it provides an element of control to the writer….Writing can lead to greater self-understanding, clarification, resolution and closure.”

With the events of my life—tedium, boredom, dissatisfaction, lack of vocation—suddenly rectified, the need to make events more manageable disappeared. I know longer needed to feel like I was in control of something, so the need to control through writing disappeared. For me, writing was not the path to resolution and closure, it was a symptom of resolution and closure: when I had closed the book on a restless chapter of my life, the writing closed up too.

There had been times when poetry had slowed to a drip, like the remnant drops from a spigot descending rhythmically to the earth. In those times I waited, knowing it would return. I even wrote a poem about the situation, entitled “Poetry comes in fits.” There was a trust that words would come, that a block would not last long—the need for control was ever present.

I no longer control the poetry. I write every once in a while, but the desire to prove, to master, to bend words to my every whim is no longer there. Poetry is more like a game now, a form of recreation, a delight. It will always be there, waiting, yet I no longer need it to fill a void. A proper sense of vocation, a self-knowledge that I now enjoy the daily work of my hands, is enough for me now. Eliot probably said it best:

We will build with new speech
There is work together
……………………….

And a job for each
Every man to his work.

You tiny Apache,
lethal little prick–
keep your distance.
Poke me,
and I’ll hose you down
with Raid
from fifteen feet away.
You’ll suffocate.
I’ll go inside to sweat
and swell,
to think about violence
and imagine I’m you,
dying a hexagonal death
a thousand times over
inside those glycerin eyes.

Not paying attention means not catching the setup and payoff of events in your life. I know people who can make a story out of picking up a pizza, just because they’re attuned to setup and payoff at every moment. I can pretty much only catch setup and payoff in jokes or movies or novels. The events of my life dangle like drawstrings on racks of sweatpants in an Old Navy. The floor manager of my will cannot master the wandering sales clerks of my attention to get them to tie up the loose ends of the sweatpants in my life.

There’s a movie called Almost an Angel with Paul Hogan (the actor who so movingly portrayed Crocodile Dundee). I watched it when I was 10 and it impressed me in the way that only very mediocre art can.

I remember these things about it, without the aid of internet resources:

(1)  Paul Hogan robbed banks dressed as Rod Stewart

(2)  He somehow thought that he’d died and become an angel and now had to do good works to redeem himself

(3)  There’s a scene in a church where I think he’s trying to give some of the money away

(4)  A guy in a wheelchair gets stabbed or shot in the leg and bleeds to death in 15 minutes

(5)  Somehow he’s trapped under an elderly couple’s bed and almost has to listen to them have sex

I’m sure that everyone with an intact sense of shame has experienced those moments where a movie veers into territory that the room views as taboo. When I say room I mean the broader, larger collective consciousness governing the room.

Sometimes the attitude of the room can be a specific person’s presence during the offending content that makes the difference, but many times there’s just a prevailing sense of the moral climate of the room, and in these instances a corollary impression that this moment we’ve come to offers an affront to that climate. Paul Hogan cringed under the bed as the old woman proposed something obscene to the old man, and we all cringed in front of a 15 inch TV/VCR Combo in a sweltering Pennsylvania farmhouse living room. The frequency of the room changed, and we all became aware of the exact same frequency.

Several days later, a boy who was staying with us that summer, threw a Koosh ball at me. You should know what a Koosh ball is. It’s a ball made of a multitude of dangling rubber strings, all emanating out from a ball at the core. It looks like a headless porcupine, or one of those globes that generate static electricity. It is not painful in any special way to be hit by a Koosh ball. Koosh balls have never been implicated in a grisly murder, and only rarely in any event or instance not officially classified as “delightful.” But getting hit by a Koosh ball was a freighted moment.

The boy who hit me with the Koosh ball was from inner city Philadelphia, and his name was Jeremiah, and he was black. I knew that it was wrong for me to resent Jeremiah. He reacted poorly to dishwashing machines and rats. I understood that because he was poor he deserved my deference, and that his being black shouldn’t play into any of my considerations at all. I was annoyed with him because I believed that he had no place in my house, for reasons that I have no solid explanation for. I was annoyed at him for being in my house as soon as he got there. We could analyze this feeling and find, perhaps, its root in my being the oldest child and constantly having my territory invaded by a perpetual stream of younger siblings, but it’s not a fruitful investigation. My patience was like the rubber string of a Koosh ball, stretched thin until it broke.

I picked up the ball and chased him out the front door. He fled around the side of the house and into the back door. He locked the back door. I saw him do it through the glass of the door’s window. This kid who I’d let stay in my house had now locked me out of it. I felt a vibrating fury. I walked up to the door, raised my hand to knock on the glass—knocking was my intention—and instead broke through it, cutting my wrist bad.

The blood didn’t spray, but pulsed out. I remember thinking that the flesh under the skin, probably a layer of fat, looked like a pizza stripped of its cheese. Jeremiah stood stunned for a moment, spattered with glass, and then quickly unlocked the door for me. I ran inside. From the moment I saw the blood, I had one thought, which I now voiced. My mom was on the phone talking to a friend, and I said: “I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding. A person can bleed to death in 15 minutes.”

I’d gathered the information in the setup, and now it was paying off. The fact that a person can bleed to death in 15 minutes I’d accepted— without qualification. It seemed to me that the word “can” was more like a “will” or a “must.” “You will bleed to death in 15 minutes,” was more what the lesson sounded like to me.

That’s not the only thing that paid off. I now became sensitive to the frequency of the room. And the frequency of the room was not positive. I tried to combat the negative feeling. I said, “I’m going to be okay, right, mom?” My mom said, “I don’t know,” which yielded a horrible feeling.

And another element paid off, but inversely. In a mediocre story like Almost an Angel, the moral universe has a definite cause and effect. Paul Hogan commits crimes, he’s punished and must redeem himself. I was angry with Jeremiah, who was fatherless and poor. I was angry and resented him for invading my home. I paid for it. But I did not, to my knowledge, ever redeem myself, unless it happened sometime when I wasn’t paying attention.

Something there is in the Creator that doesn’t love a straight line. He framed boughs of trees with crooks and angles. He crafted winding rivers and undulating landscapes. His cathedrals are formed in groves of trees, set out in imprecise circles and ovals, branches bumping into one another overhead. His curves are not regular; His arcs are not clean.

We created beings find loveliness in these things, but when it comes to drawing our own lines or sketching our own arcs, there’s a certain satisfaction we discover in clean lines and perfect angles. The Greeks aligned their pillars in parallel formation. The Byzantines built their rounded domes. The Golden Mean was the Renaissance measure of beauty. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim spirals. Our most daring architecture is still perfectly curved, our tables level, the pickets of our fences parallel. While there is a piquant charm in the bow of a sagging ridgepole or the meandering lumps of a fence built of native stone, there is also great beauty in the straight lines of a highway in the desert or the perfect arc of a flying buttress.

It is baseball season once more, and spread before us are the clean lines and perfect angles of a ballpark. The lights are held high on steel grids. The seats wrap around in even furrows. The grass has stripes and measured designs in it. Perhaps there’s a bit of the faerie in the groundskeepers, for they manage to make magical things out of a broad field using only shades of green. At each corner stands tall a straight, yellow foul pole. And inside the quasi-geometric shape that is the field, there is an arc, a diamond, and – perfectly centered within it – a circular mound. The ballpark’s lines are straight, its curves measured.

Upon the stretch of tawny dust and verdant grass we lay out our white lines and square bags. The umpire brushes stray dirt from the white pentagon before him. In his hand he holds the white sphere wrapped in neat, red stitches. Ninety feet for each baseline, sixty from the pitcher’s mound to home plate. A nine inch circumference and one hundred and eight double stitches. We strive for perfection as we map all this out. We erect our foul poles in parallel formation. We draw the chalk in perpendicular lines and anchor the bags at right angles. We order the stripes on the grass in even checkers. We endeavor for faultlessness. And we call it good.

To make our straight lines, our measured curves, our perfect spheres, we humans are forced to use tools. We cannot do it without them. The architect must have his drafting table and his protractor, his straight edge and his T-square. The builder needs his level and his measuring tape. The groundskeeper needs his mower and his roller. We need our compasses and rulers. In order to make such pristine beauty, we must remove ourselves a step from the act of creation.

In so doing, we succeed in our undertaking. We had to measure, but our curves are regular. We had to use tools, but all of our lines are straight. Yet upon these lines we build for ourselves, we live out lives of a more uncertain aesthetic. When the players stand on the diamond, they mar the white lines. The perfect sphere is thrown in imperfect arcs or lines that dip and break. Runners dodge tags, shifting from the direct path of the baseline. Outfielders scatter irregularly across the green. Batters wobble after missed pitches. There’s a collision at the base.

Using our hands alone, we cannot form perfect spheres. Something there is in these fingers that doesn’t love a straight line. Without the tools, our art – our living – is inexact. It comes out lopsided and knobby. The art we create to tell the story of being human is messy: dark shadows contrasting with shining rays of light. Uneven lines and haphazard moments. It has eccentric turns and curious corners. And perhaps this is precisely what it means to be human, shaped in the image of God: we find beauty in the measured curves and clean lines, but our lives look more like the winding rivers and the angled branches. We are forever caught in this, endowed by our Creator with a tendency toward irregular angles.

We’ve heightened the irregularity, twisted and broken even the undulating landscapes of our lives. Prodigal sons all, we do not by nature paint ourselves lives of clean lines and perfect angles.

But imago Dei can be redeemed. The prodigal can make it back home. The broken branch can be bound up and restored to its angled existence. And in this redemption, we are offered the chance to see the throne room of heaven, with its lovely straight lines and rounded pillars.² We glimpse the sixty cubit nave and the twenty cubit vestibule.³ We catch sight of the inner sanctuary, where once the ark of the covenant was set, now the dais upon which the King of Heaven’s throne is stationed. And we see perfection. And we see beauty.

We live a contradiction as we walk through our lives. We find ourselves reveling in the radiance of the forest cathedral, noting the way the light plays with the leaves, dappling the ground with shadow and light. And we feel at home, seeing our own irregularities in the uneven spacing of the trees around us. But at the same time we want to clear away that one bough that makes the tree look funny, and we build our ballparks and our skyscrapers – our cathedrals and our fence posts – with clean angles and straight lines, vaunted arches and measured curves, because we’ve glimpsed perfection. And for the redeemed imago Dei in this world, there may be no way out of this trouble. It is our state, and we must live in it.

Paint the straight lines upon the golden dust. Mow the stripes into the green. Stretch the arcs and measure the angles. Hold the red-stitched sphere and clear the plate. There is a beauty in these things. But upon the field, play the game as it is meant to be played, with its highs and lows, its shadows and glories. Set out as a prodigal but return home as a son. Throw the breaking ball or the knuckler. Be living art. For on the field, heaven and earth unite, and in this the Creator is glorified.

¹ Mitchel, David. “On Baseball.” http://morningatthebrownbrink.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/on-baseball/. 01 April 2013.

² Hebrews 8:1-2 indicate the Tabernacle and Temple, with their strict measurements and straight lines, were patterned after the throne room of heaven.

³ 1 Kings 6:2-3

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I was on a family vacation the first time I read this strange syllogism that famously begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Seventeen years old, laying out on the deck of a cruise ship, I witnessed Anna’s life unravel. Had you asked me to sum up its eight hundred and seventeen pages then, I would have told you that it’s a book about Anna, an unhappy woman and thus, according to Tolstoy’s opening line, a unique woman. A woman worth reading about. And there is this other character named Konstantin Levin, less unhappy and more boring. I breezed through Levin’s life, desperate to know Anna’s fate. Of those two protagonists, Levin and Anna, she was my protagonist. She was my friend. Perhaps the greatest testament I can give to Tolstoy’s genius is that he can make a teenager girl sailing around the Caribbean empathize with a suicidal Russian woman. He’s that good.

It’s funny how you the reader shape the books you read; how as you change, your reading of the book changes too. This spring I gave Anna a second go. Now a quarter way through the journey that is my life, I’ve come to the conclusion that Anna Karenina isn’t about Anna Karenina at all. I think it is a book about Konstantin Levin. (Next time I read it, I will probably think the main character is Laska the dog. Seriously though, has to be one of literature’s great dogs). When I read Anna this time, her plot lured me like a siren song, only to find Tolstoy saying that the passionate, violent, tragic weight of Anna’s story does not testify to the entirety of the human experience. For Tolstoy, what is important in history and in an individual life is what goes unnoticed. In the seemingly insignificant moments of our lives, we live. Critic Gary Saul Morson says it another way, speaking of Anna: “If we live only for critical moments and regard ordinary ones as mere intervals, we are sure to live badly.” (35). Perhaps his comment applies as well to reading as to living. To read for the big moments is to read badly. I’m learning to read Anna Karenina for Levin.

Levin is one of the most likable characters you’ll ever meet. Stubborn and self-conscious, sheepish around women but hopelessly in love with Kitty Oblonsky. A man with mistakes in his past and lofty dreams of book writing and family in his sights for the future. We watch Levin get uncomfortable at nice parties, argue with his brothers, mow grass, pet his dog. When Levin returns home, reeling from the sting of Kitty’s rejection, he goes to his study. With his dreams dashed and the hope sucked out of him, Levin suddenly feels like all of his familiar possessions—books, ashtray, sofa—are whispering mockeries: “You’ll be the same as you were: with doubts, an eternal dissatisfaction with yourself, vain attempts to improve, and failures, and an eternal expectation of happiness that has eluded you and is not possible for you.” But another voice inside Levin insists that no, his dreams must not die, “it was possible to do anything with oneself.” In turmoil between the two voices, Levin does something so normal: he grabs two dumbbells out of the corner of his study and begins to lift them. How ordinary it is: taking out some dissatisfaction with yourself in desperate exercise. Trying to do something, anything, to bridge the gap between who you are and who you want to be.

Life does have extraordinary moments, and Levin experiences them: birth, love, marriage, and death. When Levin reflects on the eerie similarity between his feelings about his brother’s death and his feelings at the birth of his first child, he thinks: “But that grief and this joy were equally outside all ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed” (713). Such grief and joy come in life’s extraordinary moments, but they are not the norm. From such holes, Levin returns to the cohesive fabric of his existence. Levin, a totally hopeless romantic, finds that married life is not the breakfast in bed dream he thought it would be. “At every step it was not what he had imagined,” yet we read, “At every step he found disenchantment with his old dream and a new unexpected enchantment” (479). Levin, like Tolstoy, becomes enamored with seeing life’s ordinariness over its extraordinariness. That normal marriage, within his normal life, arrests him with its happiness.

In the novel’s final lines we see Levin’s sublimation of the extraordinary into the ordinary, his sense that his largest belief infiltrates even his smallest activities, his missteps, the things he does that he wishes he didn’t do:

“I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it.”

Wendell Berry writes in Jayber Crow: “The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have only been on the edge of it.” Story has the power to show us that we are much less important than we realize, as well as more important than we ever dreamed. Tolstoy’s novel acts like a microscope and a panorama; its pages elevate the most realistic, relatable details of our thoughts and emotions, while also placing such personal turmoil in a grander scheme. At least on this read, I see Anna Karenina in its panorama, its ability to subjugate an individual’s story into a broader one, as life itself does.

The book is about Anna, of course. I know that. Her experiences, albeit heartbreaking, are real. We bear witness to her journey towards death, a death born of the “eternal error” every single one of us makes in “imagining that happiness is the realization of desires” (465). Poor Anna, what begins as a manipulative “weapon,” the threat of self-destruction whispered to her lover, becomes a weapon outside her capacity to control. With nothing larger than herself to bear her up, the book of her life must end.

The thought of death many times threatens to consume Levin, too. But the real gift of Levin’s faith in the end is his sense of a “master,” an author larger than himself that offers to gracefully submerge his story and thus make sense of it all—the sweat, regret, fights, tears, the holes in the fabric but the fabric too. Thankfully, the book is not about Anna. Elusive happiness, faithfulness, and clarity can come to us, but only within this ironic way of reading: your story is not about you either, thank God. You are on the edge of something much larger.

of a seat. Shoulders slumped.
Sinking.

Watching a siskin on a Boxelder as upright as any siskin.
Same demeanor, same posture as every siskin I’ve ever seen.

And on a wire, a siskin, as upright as any siskin.
Same demeanor. Same posture.

Same as every other siskin ever on any Boxelder tree.
Neither bird with deference in display, nor

admiration of the other, nor appropriate inferiority
complex. Rather stood as equals.

As if neither siskin had ever read
Darwin’s notes from the H.M.S. Beagle, nor considered their genetic favorability quotient.

Didn’t know they were competitors, even.
For the early worm. For seed. For cloacal kisses.

Not a single siskin pointing an outstretched wing singing,
“Nanna nanna boo-boo,” or cheering itself, “Rah rah sis boom bah.”

Or giving one, or the other, the bird.
If so, the vantage from my lawn-chair might be something other than a backyard perch.

Might be the front-yard, where I got my ass kicked
the first time right before sprinting into the house all weepy-eyed

frantically rifling for something to level the odds—a baseball bat, perhaps.
Came out swinging an Encyclopedia Britannica before the wind

got knocked out of me. The slump.
The din of cackling cocks and hens disco dancing in a ring-around, a nosedive.