How Did I Miss The Go-Betweens?

Seriously, though. I've been quite musically plugged-in to college radio and post-punk/indie-pop music over the decades. I suppose I had heard Cattle and Cane at some point, as the catchy droning melody is imprinted somewhere in the back of my mind. And yet somehow the band as a whole has escaped me until now. I've been reading Tim Blanchard's Like Magic in the Streets, and it's delightful journey of five bands making one of their seminal albums during a time when something new was flourishing in the indie music scene. I knew Orange Juice and The Smiths fairly well. I had some exposure to Aztec Camera and The Blue Nile, too. But the Australian band The Go-Betweens slipped through the cracks for me. I'm not fully to blame here, as their exposure in the states was very limited. It seems they couldn't even muster a hit single in their ancestral land ("Streets of Your Town" only made it to 68 on the Aussie charts). So now as I explore their catalog, my ears are giddy with joy. Beautifully crafted songs of simplicity and innocence, never falling into maudlin familiarity, cover much of their early work. Their albums Before Hollywood, Spring Hill Fair, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, Tallulah, and 16 Lovers Lane are full of romantic and spirited gems! 

Here I share a few of their tracks that particularly draw me in...

Gaining Traction in Existential Realities

I am amazed how there are individuals whom can diagnosis the problem of the age so accurately, and yet still come up with such poor half-assed solutions. Perhaps the solutions don't exist materially as much as they do spiritually. The chasm between Truth and existence will always be there as we can only approximate the Real in our lives. But often that chasm goes grand canyon on you! It's as if the lens we see things is a bit too fuzzy and there are huge blind spots that prevent the knower from seeing the known. I am speaking for myself here too. God is always gently reminding me to see Reality as it is, instead of the projections I am manifesting onto others. I want to see so-and-so and such, and kaboom!—I am thrown into a test once again to accept what is. But initially, I often find myself humbly duped!

It seems the mind likes to abstract and personalize everything at the same time. We massage our beliefs further away from the concrete, and then pride ourselves in our new mental parasitical attachment. It's only our deep intuition can discern Truth more adeptly without overlaying the desires, fears, and inadequacies of our human condition. “That is, true essence is gifted, partially, to our minds when they are in proper fellowship with the mind of God” (Tyson). This participatory ontology, when assumed, allows us to approach Truth actively, relationally, and with confidence (con fide means with faith).  

In a recent trip to Iceland, I was introduced to the country's first known sculptor Einar Jónsson. Jónsson was clearly spiritually attuned with a participatory orientation, and drawing from many influences like Christianity, Theosophy and Norse mythology.

His art does not live in abstraction, but in the existential realities of suffering and joy—and everything in between: the relational, the love, the sacral, the drama, and the tragic. With his art, we are overtaken with powerful symbols of beings enduring life's struggles while being guided by other Beings of a higher order. All great art is grounded in Truth.

Unlike the posture of Jónsson's work, we live today in a world that gets further removed from existential reality. Love is transactional. Currency is untethered to intrinsic value. Life choices are instrumental. Technology dehumanizes our relationships. Friendship is sparse and shallow. The sacred is obscured by the contingent busyness of ordinary life. Suffering is to be defeated or hidden from sight. And communication lacks nuance. 

As AI continues to evolve, it will become more apparent to understand what makes our existence unique from it. Not so much for practical purposes in that it will protect our livelihood from the encroaching functions it can do better, but to preserve what inherently makes us earn the dignity and significance from it. That can only come from virtue, character, and our relationship to Being. If we continue to be blinded by the Real, and allow our self-delusions to define who we are, we will become irrelevant to the point that our existential realities will be trivialized to a system made machine.

Random Signals #5

I loved the comedic persona of Norm Macdonald. I don't often feel saddened when a celebrity passes on, but Norm's passing nearly 3 years ago hit me viscerally. What drew me to him, beyond his quirky sensibility, was his ability to be reverent and irreverent at the same time. It appears Norm was moving closer to God in his later years, yet at the same time he could not discount the absurdity in His world. And he used humor to get at it the only way he knew how. Norm's off-beat witticisms and mischief smirk could get you to chuckle while pointing you back to a sweet sincerity he embodied. Truth and humor can come together in that way: the Real can sometimes be seen in the gaps that humor opens up through irreverent surprise; and it can be seen in the poking at the folly of false idols that take us away from what should be revered. Norm was definitely unusual in how he traversed these poles as a delightful oddity not from his time. 

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Feminism has often poses itself as a liberator for the empowerment of women. However, without a limiting principle it has corrupted its intent and disempowered women by suppressing their hearts over their will. Women are no longer celebrated to be who they inherently are: superior beings of strong affection. “A man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost for ever” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge).

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This brings me to the issue of power and authority; too many conflate the two. I have known many people with an anti-authoritarian streak; however, if I pressed them they would probably acquiesce that they are mostly against power than authority. Authority does not rely on coercion; but instead draws you in voluntarily to its depth. It is rooted in tradition and all things sacred, and unlike power, is also subject to Authority. As the ultimate Authority will always be the source of all authority. Power can only corrupt Authority as a fleeting force, but reverence for something Real can always be recovered. Power without authority ultimately falls victim to domineering hierarchies (i.e. totalitarianism). Such hierarchies will attempt to equalize or flatten out real Authority, therefore creating a vacuum for false idols to rise up with shallow power. When we can see through this imminent charade, and be inspired by a transcendent awe, wonder, and gratitude of existence, then we will understand an inherent hierarchy which we are all led by.

Here's to Hope for Hopeful Things

Tisk, tisk on me. I could write more, but I ought to spare my reader more details. At least I have a “plan”, and that's God's plan also. It goes something like this: to embody the manifestation of human existence in its fullest form. Or you may say grow in Christ. Or to realize Buddha nature. And then what?!

Well, the what can't just be the bring more hope in this world. I look around and get more pessimistic by the day. And yet, I see the absurdity in it all too which brings some degree of joy and laughter. As the Aphorist said: With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.

I am definitely not bored, despite the seeking mind keeps me more busy that I should allow. And I am always open to embracing what is unexpected and ironic about the ride. I recently spent over 3 weeks in Kenya, and I found most of the people there quite delightful. Despite their dire circumstances in many aspects of life, they embody a gentle humored lightness about it all. They intuitively understand that hope can't be limited by a life, but needs to reach into some nether region or what's the point.

The problem with the western elites and their indoctrinated sycophants is that they keep trying to get us to reach for something in the corrupting system they've embraced. Should I get my kicks over the technocratic future of AI infused transhumanism, or perhaps the globalist regulated panopticon that keeps us safe and comfortable, and then there's the micro-dosed happy zombie world where suffering and struggle is defeated (or just avoided)? None of the above.

This explains something of the strange barbarity of so much of modernity. Despite its sophistication, its gilded rhetoric and high hopes for good things, it has a destructive core. It promises a social and personal paradise, but saddled with a false understanding of humanity and its ills and thinking that the desired utopia will arrive as a matter of course once the requisite restraints have been demolished, it too often leaves behind not a lush garden but a howling wasteland. (—from Christendom to Apostolic Mission.)

The wasteland of a fragmented modernity obscured by radical nominalism, now fully formed as postmodernity, has done secular hope in. It has led to senseless activism, false idols, or dead-end despair. I don't think there is much we can do in the way of this world that will inspire great hope. It's not that we shouldn't do anything. I would prefer that we could do things again that are sensible (note: common sense is needed), workable (in a concrete way, not so abstractly), moral (yes, objective right and wrong exists), and decent (requires standards and judgement which are a bit out of fashion). Moreover, this sort of quality to life would ultimately require us to love God again firstly.

Perhaps that is why hope is one of the theological virtues; not just a cardinal virtue—according to Catholicism. It is not a subjective disposition that falls into a worldly optimism. That sort of hope can easily turn into hopelessness once you've been beaten up by the futility of it all. How many times do we need to see our idols or passions fall from grace or fashion to get the message?

Instead, the bar needs to be raised to see hope as vividly NOW and substantively ETERNAL.

Hope is not a human accomplishment in the making—it is a gift given as grace. It perfects nature. It places us beyond the source and the end of action and offers a proof of things not seen.

We are not anticipating the kingdom, but instead infused with it. It is regenerative and renews us with a substantive hope of the direct reality of God and the friendly cosmos that He has manifested for us to discover and co-create with Him. 

We don't know how things may turn out, but it does not so much matter. As St. Paisios of Mount Athos said, “What I see around me would drive me insane if I did not know that no matter what happens, God will have the last word.”

If there is a point to life, if there is a point even beyond this life, suffering can be understood as mystery and not simply as a problem, to use the terms of Gabriel Marcel. Problems are to be solved, and the problem disappears in its solution. Not so a mystery, because we are caught up into the issue, perhaps even are the issue. Once the test is finished, I relax and move on to the next task or to rest. But I can never move on from myself, for I am a mystery to myself and my attempts to wrestle with myself involve me as my own opponent, and there is no obvious way of putting the challenge to rest. The mystery of suffering is not resolvable, for even if we were able to end all pain from this day forward, the unpalatable fact of past suffering remains a challenge to our vision of the world and God as good. Suffering cannot simply be solved; it must, somehow, be redeemed, incorporated into meaning, into purpose. Suffering can be resolved, ultimately, only if all things, even the shattering and awful, are incorporated or recapitulated into goodness. (—from R.J. Snell's terrific book, Lost in the Chaos.)

Non-Literally Speaking

“The student who comes to his teacher and subjected primed with what the modern university praises as the virtue of “critical intelligence” ruined by the shallow skepticism of Hume and Kant before he even starts, rejecting a priori anything which will not stand some superficial dialectical and arbitrary test to tickle his curiosity—such a student may acquire the technology of science and the humanities but he will not experience the reason for either. Such a critical intelligence, whatever its use in the marketplace, is prophylactic of the beautiful, the good, and the true.” — John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture

When it comes to the three transcendent virtues—the Beautiful, the Good, and the True—the modern approach of overly defining our terms or literal interpretations will rarely ever work getting us there there. Modern approaches will emphasize gross terminology over a place of wonder and subtlety, and attempt to foster motivations and concepts towards an imminent frame only. 

Oddly enough, the case for beauty can almost be stated the same way Justice Stewart said for pornography: I know it when I see it. Of course, not everyone's soul has been cultivated towards beauty to see it (or to see pornography is an evil distorted expression of it). I often come across people stating that beauty is all just subjective preference, and yet objectively noting collectively when something stands out. We are all hypocrites. Perhaps because we deny transcendent guideposts, we assume our views are just personal without realizing there is something intelligible beyond our preferences that comes online when struck by true beauty. We can note attributes of beauty—wholeness, harmony, and radiance—and yet still this doesn't get at the resonance, wonder, and awe that overtakes oneself when we can really be with it. We are not thinking about what it says or means, but just allowing it to wash over our soul. A beautiful song, person, or painting will touch in such ways. We begin to see the part from the whole, as well as the whole is in the part. 

When it comes to the good (or morality), you can claim to be a utilitarian, follow a Kantian deontology, or live out an existentialist ethos. All these things will fall short at times. The good can't be confined to a formal system, instrumental approaches, or life-limited narratives. Virtue ethics has the best approach in a sense because it calls for virtue appropriate to the circumstances cultivated through habit. In time, this can be spontaneous in our acts. In other words, we can only show the good through being good; through inhabiting the other as oneself and by acting in ways that are appropriate to the situation. Doing small things with great love, as St. Therese of Lisieux said. Models, like saints or sages, draw us in and inspire us to be better beyond our self-absorbed motivations. We aren't limited by the secular ethos of “being nice” that fails to strengthen our soul, surrender us to the good outside ourselves, and result in the best outcomes. We are made to be good for the sake of it; for its intrinsic value, and its potential to echo in Eternity.

There are relative truths, and some are better than others. But they are merely partial degrees of truth that can only explain the whole from the part. Even mathematics has principles outside of itself that can't be explained through math. Or as Robert Rosen says, “There is always a semantic residue, that cannot be accommodated by that syntactical scheme.” When allowed, what seeps in is ultimate Truth where symbols can at best point. There are two significant ways to present the Truth. One is to indirectly express what it is; such is the purpose of art, mysticism or myth or sacred scripture like the Gospels or the Tao Te Ching. The other approach to Truth is to break down our egoic or worldly distortions of it, and let the Truth speak for itself. Socrates was a master at this. So was the Buddha. The postmoderns went too far relatively and not far enough transcendentally. Again, beliefs through words will ultimately fall short of Truth, but that does not mean there is not an order to such views. There is a hierarchy to relative views, but the View (or Truth) is simply a lack of resistance to what is. It can only be intuited, realized, and embodied as gift.

Literalism cannot explain the cause of beauty, goodness, and truth. There is a mystery to the existence of these virtues that can't be easily compartimentalized in an imminent frame. Yet, we know it when we see it. Or at least a part of us knows—the part that is Whole!

Sojourn as a Foreigner

The award for shortest and profoundest book may go to Giorgio Agamben’s The Church and the Kingdom. If you take away the photos (which are quite effective at de-centering you as fragmented images), the text may only be 40 pages long. The gist of the book makes you come to grips with time and our relationship to it. The bigger critique is where the Church stands in relationship to it, and how it may have lost its vocation. 

Agamben says, “The Church has lost the messianic experience of time that defines it and is one with it. The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but, instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in how time is experienced.”

He contrasts the messianic notion of time with that of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic can only point to the end of times–which will certainly happen sooner or later depending on how much patience you have. I’m not so presumptuous to think it will happen in my lifetime, although I see challenges ahead. More likely, it may be when the sun burns out while a bunch of AI’s are running the show. The posture Agamben brings in is not to wait for a historical dialectic of progress, or for the Messiah to come and redeem. As such, the focus of the Church should not be on the imminent ultimate, but the transcendent penultimate: thus transforming the experience of time to live in the Eternal NOW!

He says, “To experience this time [in this way] implies an integral transformation of ourselves and of our ways of living.”

He even points to Paul’s position on this view,

It is with this in mind that Paul reminds the Thessalonians, 'About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night' (1 Thess5.l-2; 262).1 In this passage 'comes [ercheta] is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah is called ho erchomenos, 'he who comes'- that is, he who never ceases to come. Having perfectly understood Paul's meaning, Walter Benjamin once wrote that, 'every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.'

Time takes us to the end, and yet we can end our customary image of time and liberate ourselves from it. What interests Paul (and Agamben) is not the last day or the end of time, but the time of the end—the inner transformation of time that the messianic event has produced!

Agamben says in another related book,

The paradox of the Church is that, for the eschatological point of view, it must renounce the world, but it cannot do this because, form the point of view of the economy, it is of the world, which it cannot renounce without renouncing itself. But this is exactly where the decisive crisis is situated: because courage…is nothing but the capacity to keep oneself connected with one’s own end.

This lack of courage creates a bland humanitarianism that delegitimizes the messianic vocation of the Church and overemphasizes bureaucratic legalism of the institution. The Church becomes supernaturally dry, aimless in its ontological moorings, and fragile from internal corruption like most secular institutions. In kneeling before the world, it begins to fall from religious relevance. 

I’m reading another terrific book on The Idol of Our Age (which by the way is not Taylor Swift—not yet anyways—but secular humanitarianism) in which the author makes this relevant point,

The Christian God is both transcendent and incarnate. He promises something much more precious than bread and circuses, or even social justice, which in its quasi-socialist forms is inseparable from an excessive passion for equality, and even an encouragement of envy. We must not confuse sincere love of the poor, an undeniably great injunction of the Gospel, with a humanitarian or socialist political project to bring about heaven on Earth. That is the dangerous path pursued by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who remains so far from the authentic spirit of the Gospel.

The heaven on Earth project, as noted by Agamben, should not be a political one but a deeply spiritual one. By severing our ties with messianic time, we undermine our sense of reality and capacity to be enchanted with temporal reality. We attempt to control the temporal at the expense of given freedom of the Eternal. We sojourn as disembodied beings buffered by time and space, instead of foreigners always available to inhabit our true home.

It's Always An Inside Job

Writing is sometimes difficult while marinating in Being. I feel words can get in the way of something they point to. And I am always trying to point to THAT on this blog. Many today are searching for purpose and meaning through words without realizing the paradoxical nature of this search. Often purpose and meaning is turned into a conceptual story for the self, which becomes more about self-absorption and mere self-expression. This keeps us away from the immediate experience of the NOW, and theo-drama of the ETERNAL. It is only through our surrender to THAT, where purpose and meaning expresses itself as YOU in RELATION to the NOW and ETERNAL. 

There are always obstacles in the way, which is always THE way. These experiences can “feel” soul crushing, but they’re anything but that in Reality. I was amused by Allen’s test for a dying soul. I have felt all these things at moments, now seeing they are all reactions to a conditional self exhausting its own limits to Truth.

Is Your Soul Dying?

Nothing really seems remarkable. You can go whole days without ever being astonished.

You have very little curiosity. You’re interested in novelty, food for the restless me, but genuine curiosity, and discovery of the genuinely original, this is not something you seek or experience very often.

You don’t notice much, and therefore you don’t recall very much. Nothing is very vivid, so nothing really impresses itself into your depths. You remember facts with your surface mind, particularly the useful ones, but there are few qualities to recollect in your heart.

You don’t sing and dance. You can go days, weeks, without wailing with joy or throwing absurd shapes. You don’t draw, either, or write poems, or make beautiful and difficult things, a bit of craft perhaps, dib-dab, dib-dab, but just as a hobby please.

You laugh infrequently. The last time you cried with laughter, holding your sides, begging it to stop — when was that?

Your love life is problematic at best, disastrous at worst. Probably tamely okay, alright, you know, can’t complain! Love affairs occasionally inject some excitement into your life, some romance, but it soon fades, after six months usually, sometimes after a few minutes.

In fact opportunities for love, for opening your heart, seem to be rather thin on the ground. You cannot tear yourself open at school or at work, that’s for sure, but your friends and family are not that interested in your soul either.

The days pass slowly, the years quickly. Nothing really happens, and so time concatenates into the few vague happenings the year offers.

Your mind constantly returns to the same subjects. You go over and over the same old junk. You love to complain, and you love even more to get together with others who love to complain, so you can all wank yourselves up into a lovely big lather of moaning.

Anxiety rules you, or, the cannibalistic indulgence of the moribund soul, despair. These two feelings never touch the intensity of profound self-contempt and shattering horror at the grim condition of your existence, because that would mean real change.

You are becoming numb. Bright lights, loud noises, clashing colours, violence and porn do not cause you great pain. Indeed you seek them out.

You cannot be alone without stimulation; without chatter, shopping, televisual entertainment, giddy excitements. You are afraid of looking into the cellar of your heart, and seeing the dead body you’ve got hidden down there.

If you're aware of this, then THAT which is aware is gently nudging you from the futility of this posture. You have to move toward THAT, or you continue to fall down into the despair. The separated thinking mind has become the false guide, allowing you to be contracted from the Real. 

So where can we find the living soul that is uncontracted from life? That's the inside job that is always available moment-to-moment beyond the divided mind. I just discovered a beautiful book by Clarise Lispector. It reads like one raw sutra wholly with immediate experience. Near the end of it she reveals,

Now—silence and slight amazement. 

Because at five in the morning, today July 25th, I fell into a state of grace. 

It was a sudden sensation, but so gentle. The luminosity was smiling in the air: exactly that. It was a sigh of the world. I don’t know how to explain just as you can’t describe the dawn to a blind man. It is unutterable what happened to me in the form of feeling: I quickly need your empathy. Feel with me. It was a supreme happiness. 

But if you have known the state of grace you’ll recognise what I’m going to say. I’m not referring to inspiration, which is a special grace that so often happens to those who deal with art.

The state of grace of which I’m speaking is not used for anything. It’s as if it came only for us to know that we really exist and the world exists. In this state, beyond the calm happiness that irradiates from people and things, there is a lucidity that I only call weightless because everything in grace is so light. It’s a lucidity of one who no longer needs to guess: without effort, he knows. Just that: knows. Don’t ask me what, because I can only reply in the same way: he knows.

There is much JOY with being with a LOVER that never leaves. I often take some time during the year-end to seek out any noted “best-of” films in culture that may be worth exploring. I recently saw the film Past Lives, and loved it for the simple masterpiece that it is. It is special, and in the same vein as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset, Lost in Translation and Once. All these films were some favorites of mine in the last few decades, and I notice a common theme that ran across all of them. On the surface, they appear as well-crafted love stories that don't fall into conventual Hollywood tropes. Digging deeper, we see these films echo the pull toward the Eternal through the beauty of pathos in human longing, authentic and magical connection, and providential synchronicities that come from vivid beings relating-in-love. We all yearn to genuinely relate with another that offers some promise of perfection; and yet at some point we also come up against the finite realities of our fallen natures. It is only when we can see where this points to—beyond the object of our desire—that the momentary beauty of the instant is where our soul truly comes alive! The LOVER that never leaves verses the one who can only point to THAT.

That instant can never truly be found in the external world, but perhaps touched upon through these sacramental guideposts that may send us within. Just look!