The Turning of the Wheel

2024 was a year of major events with ramifications we will only come to know after it has gone. We know that events of great consequence have happened, but what exactly the consequences of the election, the fall of Assad, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the planet as a whole nearing or perhaps reaching the peak of its population growth, the instability of democratic governments around the world – these are portents we cannot yet read.

Setting all of that aside, 2024 was a very good year for me, personally. I got to spend far more time with my family than I had expected, explored more of Alaska than I thought I would get to, grew to sincerely enjoy more and more of my work, developed routines and habits I didn’t think I would ever get around to, and made a number of friends.

My hope for 2025 is that I will continue to grow closer to others, and that it will snow very soon so that I can actually practice with my new skis.

The Answer to Fear & Hope

Once our present moment and its real problems slips past, and it is always passing, two great problems of soul remain: fear, including what causes might warrant it, and hope – or rather, the need for more than the absence of pain, but for true fulfillment without expiry. Or at least that is how it feels to me.  Almost anything, perhaps in fact anything, can be borne for a time if the problem is temporary and the solution permanent, and this is exactly what I struggle with. I fear anticipated future pain, reasonable and unreasonable; I fear decline; I fear missing out on anything and everything; I fear being lost, and being self-deceived about that, and this last sum of all fears makes me struggle also to have hope for a future beyond whatever I might fear. I’m not writing this to worry anyone who might see this as a cause for sympathetic alarm – these are not new problems, and I have made a great deal of progress with them over the years. But they are persistent anxieties, perhaps because they are ultimate ones, or perhaps it is simply because of a fault in myself, a weakness. As I have grown older and have in fact developed far greater self-control in practice, I have paradoxically come to feel less and less willing to accept a commitment to any sort of prospective suffering or austerity, less able to cope with the idea of life getting worse – or perhaps defensively inflexible about the definition of ‘worse.’ Any uncertainty that leaves open the possibility of any pain or decline that does not resolve in joy eventually seems an unacceptable risk, inimical to mental peace. And I am more conscious than ever of my unwillingness to sacrifice in the present enough that I could ever believe the future secure. And security is not enough to live on; we must have a future to hope for, not some negation of suffering. Living merely toward oblivion or the release from samsara is not Life.

I’ve talked a fair amount about my Christianity, and I have no hidden agenda in bringing it up – it is the great preoccupation of my mind, which I could not sincerely avoid when discussing my feelings, if I even wanted to. The promise of Christ was never simply security and salvation, but for us to have Life, to the full – but I struggle with what that means, and in turn I consequently struggle with the fear of missing whatever it does mean. Theology in practice, passed down through the Church, doesn’t always feel like it speaks with equal eagerness or satisfying clarity to all human anxiety and desire. Milk and honey, fellowship, feasting, and song are easy to place in the Eschaton – and as a metaphor, it should seem broad enough to encompass all our hopes and dreams. But what if our desires are transitory and temporal, or are bad? Where does one locate the particular, nonfungible aesthetics of sexuality in the Eschaton, and what about the negative feelings which are still a component of heartfelt desire – the anger one feels, usually some mixture of rightly and wrongly all at once, or simple pride, the desire to make oneself great. It is difficult to imagine on an emotionally comprehensible level how these things can be either replaced or redeemed without becoming unrecognizable. And out of this anxiety about what exactly we have to hope for, comes both the fear of missing out, and the fear that if it is possible to reject a perfect future, it must be because one refuses to accept it as satisfying, which seems to suggest both fears as reasonably possible.

I’m very open about all of this all year round, but I bring it up on Christmas because, at the risk of narrating theology into a shape I can more easily accept, I believe the Incarnation has to be the answer to both the fear of loss & the uncertainty of what to hope for. I don’t want to go too far into making God’s promises neatly match my feelings about the good, the bad, and the beautiful, nor do I dare to get into the tortured question of whether or not anyone will ultimately miss out on Life.  But in becoming a human, who clearly had every feeling and desire and pain that is natural to our species, God exposed Himself to all that we fear – including disunion with Himself – and left Himself everything to hope for in a future, anticipated now that He had stepped into time. I haven’t resolved this issue of fear and hope in my life in a way I find satisfying, but I am trying to choose to believe that when Christ promises that “all these things shall be added unto you,” there is a way for that to be true, even if our dark glass is too dim to perceive how. I think it is necessary for there to be a way to know that we have no cause to fear, and that beyond whatever passing cause exists is a future in which all our hopes can find purchase. Perhaps I am downplaying the extent to which we must be transformed – I struggle with this because I do not think a better thing can necessarily replace a worse thing if there are differences, because there is something of life in the differences – so it is possible I am veering off course. I haven’t arrived. But by becoming a human, and going through ultimate loss, and then demonstrating the promise of hope, for a human, I believe Christ’s incarnation is a seal on the promise that all shall indeed be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Normalization & Neighborliness

“I felt I was incomprehensibly in radical opposition to all my friends, that my views of matters were taking me more and more into isolation, although I was and remained in the closest personal relationship with these men – and all that made me anxious, made me uncertain. . . . and I saw no reason why I should see things more correctly, better than so many able and good pastors, to whom I looked up –and so I thought that it was probably time to go into the wilderness for a while.”

-      Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Something has happened to my feelings around politics, which I feel compelled to discuss because I find it worrying – and yet I fear this is another case of writing about a fault in myself in order to air out my moral discomfort with it, without any willingness to actually change. Deflection by articulation, so often rewarded by people who compliment or encourage me based on things I say, which I both believe, but which I feel I know I am saying out of wrong motives. The crux of the problem is the intersection between indignation and arrogance. There is certainly good reason for righteous anger at the burgeoning injustice and simple pointless foolishness of our society, and I think there is perhaps even an obligation, if we are able, to say so. There’s no need to catalogue the reasons for this here; you can probably bring a whole list straight to mind with no prompting, and if you disagree with my fundamental position on the situation, I lack the ability to make such a rehearsal more persuasive than what can be seen with one’s own eyes. So I don’t have much insecurity about the actual views I espouse, other than the normal insecurity of a person with an over-scrupulous and threat-hedging mind that will always be second-guessing in all things.

What I do feel troubled by is the spirit in which I say things, and the motive energy behind that. I do feel guilty that I am being too sharp or mean, even indirectly, to friends and neighbors, and that I am exercising a kind of selective hypocrisy, whereby I chart a Rubicon on the timeline the day Trump came down the escalator, and turn my sincerely shocked and dismissive reaction to that into a litmus test, a kind of Great Sorting, despite the fact that my own views have changed dramatically over time, and despite the fact that people live in markedly different worldviews, both in terms of the information they acquire, the heuristics they use to assess and prioritize it, and the things they value. Of course I realize that the majority of people who support the President-Elect simply do not see the same thing as me when we look at him (though there is a very loud contingent who do, and who like it – and continual engagement on the internet stokes and exaggerates this spectre in my mind as a windmill to tilt against. Except it is no longer just a windmill, because this loudmouth trollish tail is wagging the dog of state, its sails actually sprouting gigantic legs and coming down off the tower to goose-step across La Mancha). So I do think that I have frequent bad motivations – finding a legitimate field in which to cultivate anger, to give vent to snobbishness, to stunt on people who haven’t had time or wherewithal to be more informed (while of course not applying the same lens to myself for all the things I don’t yet know).

The tension is that I want to be open about that, and self-critical, but I also do not want to give any oxygen to the fire that is burning through our political culture. Writing this paragraph there is present at once the feeling that I am engaging in self-deception by continuing to focus on the external political evil I wish to castigate, rather than beginning with the logjam in my own eyes, because I am too proud to give up a position, and also the feeling that I want to be certain that nothing I say is read as a retreat from any position. I’m not certain how to parse out the truth from my own words in my own mind, even if the audience were only myself. That is also part of the issue – a desire to work against the scrupulous second-guessing of all my own feelings or views, to move toward what might be a healthier ability to be direct and honest and take a side or fully commit to a feeling; but of course, that also seems like a way to excuse all manner of sin. These are live, unresolved epistemological problems that befoul everything I think, and at a certain point I have to note them and move on.

Normalization

What I want to defy is the cultural normalization of a kind of illiberal, far-right nationalist/crypto-fascist creep, and the entire apparatus of Trumpism, and the mainstreaming of dangerous unfounded myths that just ten years ago would have been laughed at by both sides of the aisle. I may have wrong motives for exposing myself to anger, and I don’t want to be hurtful to people and relationships, yet at the same time I am angry, and I think that is justified even if my reasons are not all just, and I want people to understand that. Yes, there is a pride issue at work when I exaggerate how obvious certain truths should be, implying a level of education I know isn’t universal, and also assuming I’m right when I may learn new information tomorrow and change my mind (which, after all, is how I ended up where I am in the first place). But I also want to continue to treat what used to be outrageous with outrage, and to decline to certify conspiracy theories by treating them with a respect they do not deserve, not when they may get people killed for no good reason at all. The more society shifts to act as though what just a few years ago they thought was unthinkable is now normal, simply because it has succeeded electorally, the more I will dig in and decline to validate that “new normal”.  I don’t want to be the immature, irascible crank at the party who people are quietly embarrassed by, but I am just insisting on what most of us believed five historical minutes ago.

Of course, I know I am infected with hypocrisy; I have used and relied on shifting cultural norms in my arguments from fear about theology, trying to address the real problem of religious anxiety in part by implicitly invoking the norms of the secular culture circa 2015. Of course, I still value what I value and believe what I believe. About theology and the state of my own heart, I harbor plenty of self-doubt and anxiety that my values may be discordant and wrong, even if I still value them; about actual policy, I am much more confident. Even if events do not ultimately progress to a worst-case scenario, the experience of all we have seen and heard over the last ten years ought to leave no room for excuse not to treat the situation as a five-alarm Reichstag fire.

Neighborliness

 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii[c] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

-  Luke 10:25-37

I do wonder if I am the Expert in the Law, or the Priest, or the Levite, in this story, and not the Samaritan. Let’s set aside the question of policies and political values – I think the ones I support are beneficial and kinder to the downtrodden, and those of Trump I know to be vengeful and oppressive. Outside of the reality of the actual positions, I wonder if perhaps I am right, in the way that the Expert in the Law was probably more right about theology than the Samaritan, but I am wrong in the more important question of treating others as neighbors. In a sense, it shouldn’t matter if the people I take issue with mistreat their neighbors even to an extreme – that shouldn’t alter the way in which I regard them. But at the same time, there is a place for Jeremiads against injustice.

So I want to affirm that we are all, in the end, neighbors, and that the one thing which we owe to each other is unconditional love. And I don’t want anything I’ve written here to be construed as me implying any sort of high ground – difficult, because I am frankly admitting I suspect myself of all sorts of pride as a motive in everything I say and do, even down to self-criticism, so it is hard to see how that isn’t just another attempt to assume a position of superiority. If it helps, I’ve done plenty of bad things I am not going to get into here, and I don’t expect anyone who disagrees with my politics to think well of me or see me as anything but an obnoxious scold. I just want to talk openly about the conflicts at the core of even strongly held positions, and the dangers involved, and acknowledge the ultimate reality that we are all neighbors, even as I continue to affirm that our present political situation is not normal, that the sides are not equivalent, and that some now-common positions are unacceptable, evil, and foolish. Somehow these things all have to coexist. Lincoln was able to welcome back the South “with charity toward all, with malice toward none,” after an actual civil war in which the army had taken to singing moral hymns about the crusading righteousness of their cause. But I feel like Lincoln was actually humble and generous; I don’t know how to engage with that without it becoming a prideful way of claiming the high ground, which I don’t deserve to have.

I want to continue to treat what has happened to the country as what it is: abnormal, irrational, and evil. I want people to feel the extent to which what they have done is harming others, and to be pointedly aware of how others see their worldviews. I also want to be honest and open about my own sinful motives in doing so, the distortions in my own heart. And I want to remind us all, as someone who fails to live like it, that we are all, in the end, neighbors.

July 2024 in Music

I didn’t think I was a ska person. Apparently I was wrong. Clueless ambushed me with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and I went off down a brassy rabbit-hole back to the ‘90s. For me, this is head-banging, get-up-and-dance stuff. Old favorites ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION and Asobi Seksu are here as always to join the fun.

And then of course there’s Kate Bush, too flighty and weird (complimentary) to be pinned down and described. Jessica Pratt is new to me, an artist who sounds as if she’s dislodged in the timestream, with a voice like no other. Blood Bank is melancholic even for The Mountain Goats, and at the same time hopeful, like the secret it alludes to – the one we don’t know how to tell, but perhaps, if we could just get it out –

Frances Quinlan’s 2020 album Likewise has a sort of wryly ambivalent resignation to circumstance about it, which is a posture I often struggle with. Bright Eyes voices a kind of wounded sentimentality packaged in the resentful bitterness of punk, and their repurposed Beethoven riles me up as a sort of war cry. Angelo De Augustine and Elliott Smith, by contrast, both seem to whisper.

Vig Mihály’s score to Almanac of the Fall, Colin Stetson’s horn composition, and Sufjan create a meditative bridge into Big Thief’s album Two Hands, a eulogy for ourselves spending itself in negation. But Yuji Nomi’s violin arrangement of Take Me Home, Country Roads restores a sense of a future in hope.

Kaneyorimasaru and HOLYCHILD both rock out in quite different modes, the former as summery J-rock, the latter as the advance guard from 2015 for this last year’s Brat-pop summer. Appropriate for July, John Williams’ 1996 ode to America, An American Journey, functions almost as a score to the Spielbergian version of America’s self-image, and makes for great Independence Day listening for all patriots. Summon the Heroes, his theme for that year’s Atlanta Olympics, has perched atop the pantheon of beloved trumpet pieces for me. By the final act of the song, the highest chairs reach auroral altitudes.

Thymia is another warm-sad piece, like much of what I enjoy. I actually included the real Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on my June playlist, and the cover of it recorded for the film Rocketman is not trying to compete with its immaculate original, but I liked the way in which it deconstructed the song for story purposes, and then exploded the final crescendo with a kitchen sink orchestra. Have All The Songs Been Written? hits directly at the inner doubt most artists feel about their ability to actually create anything worthwhile; but it is also speaking to the core anxiety of every person who has ever wondered if they are perhaps wasting their life, missing their shot; and it speaks to the aching moment of trepidation on the threshold of risking it all to try to reach someone when you aren’t quite sure whether or not they will take your hand.

People most likely remember Billy Joel’s 1989 album Storm Front for We Didn’t Start the Fire, but I wanted to highlight how many other great tracks it has, from the New England elegy The Downeaster ‘Alexa’, through the driving, sincere vulnerability of I Go to Extremes, to the epic send-off of the Cold War, Leningrad, and the reverent epilogue, And So It Goes, which in one line perfectly captures the essence of self-giving love: “…and you can have this heart to break.”

Then it’s a detour through the late ‘70s, a very silly time in music which I sincerely enjoy. Much more recently, The Arcadian Wild released Lara, a rock-skipping dance of neo-folk.

The next few tracks take a very different tone, a sort of muffled, rhythmic dread, from Jim Williams’ score to the cannibal film Raw, to Marcus Fjellström’s library music which was used to accompany the Erebus and Terror into the maw of the Arctic in the show The Terror, to Adam Janota Bzowki’s atavistic score for Out of Darkness, a film set 45,000 years in the past that actually feels its age.

Then it’s a couple of Beatles songs that feel more sentimental to me than most of their output (and I am above all a sentimentalist); Aaron Copland’s American masterpiece, Rodeo; and of course, to sing us out, As Time Goes By.

June 2024 in Music

It is December 1, and I am fully five months behind on my monthly playlists, as is tradition. Anyway, here is June.

Beginning with quiet introductions from three Japanese composers, we shift into the plaintive work of The Mountain Goats and Loch Lomond. This is followed by a couple of lush pop songs with an implacable undercurrent, and then by Junkie XL’s runaway score to Furiosa, one of 2024’s most fun deranged movies, and then by Bobby Krlic’s glass-sharpening score to Beau Is Afraid, one of 2023’s most bafflingly upsetting deranged movies.

Any of the tracks from clammbon’s 2007 album Musical or Asobi Seksu’s 2009 album Hush could easily have been included in this list – both albums are delightful buttermilk crepes of warmth. Sing Tomorrow’s Praise stands out as a pearl of a song, doing so many different complicated things which all redound to the same end of joy.

Like all of America this last summer, I spent some of June with Charli xcx’s BRAT, which remains a fun album even if it couldn’t meme Kamala into the Presidency. It’s interesting that it has room for both an extremely frank admission of anxiety about one’s future and purpose in life and also for momentary-hedonist club pop.

I Saw Cinnamon is another nonsensically fun song from Dressy Bessy, followed by a couple of other lighthearted tracks from WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA and Regal Lily. Black Math’s 2019 EP New Game has a more threatening tone, especially their spaced-out cover of Strangelove, already an ominous song. Used to the Darkness strikes a similar tone.

Big Thief has been one of my favorite purveyors of strange sentimentality for a few years, but I think their 2022 album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You may be even better than their earlier work which originally hooked me. Change strikes directly at our great terror of accepting and making peace with the inevitable passing of what we cannot hold onto; Sparrow is a meditation on our fallen and cursed humanity; Time Escaping has the cadence of a pot lid dancing on its rim under the motile power of steam left on the burner overlong; Spud Infinity is at once profound and silly in a way that feels like a philosophical ray of light simply in its incongruence.

Another interlude of gentle instrumental pieces, including a calming track written for one of the major Japanese booksellers, and culminating in World’s End Girlfriend’s discordant harmony. Minnie Riperton’s Les Fleurs is an old song I only just came upon this year, yet I feel I have been missing it for a long time. And of course Any Day Now is a classic.

Let’s Eat Grandma & Sky Ferreira are both exponents of a kind of driven thickly-produced pop, while Japanese Breakfast is more abstract, and Million Eyes feels like a complex counter-eddy of warm oil. Wolf Alice’s 2021 album Blue Weekend is aggressive, cutting, and precise – which is why it’s so easy to replay over and over again. First Aid Kit’s The Lion’s Roar is a twangy-rock elegy box of delightful regrets.   

I don’t really have any praise for Sir Elton beyond what others have said, but as I was dancing my way around my apartment to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I realized that this is easily the best piece of art inspired or connected to the entire Wizard of Oz IP (and yes that is a dig at the entire franchise). I naturally segued into Billy Joel, who feels like an American cousin of Elton John, musically.

Both Fleet Foxes and Sufjan Stevens are marked by a similar so of expectancy for a coming cathartic storm. Enya’s 1995 classic The Memory of Trees provides an answer of soft dappled sundrops raining on the summer grass. Then we end with two tracks which each are a sort of coda, bidding farewell to the zenith of sunlight as we exit June.