All you need is love...

I’d been calling H. a fatass-capitalist-placator-of-bourgeois-souls for the past six months. He actually agrees. And then he calls me a champagne-socialist-teacher-of-bourgeois-kids. Fair enough.

A couple of links to Target Women

Feeding Your F---ing Family
Chick Flicks
Birth Control
Yoghurt

Don’t you tell me what to think! A few thoughts on Zizek’s last oeuvre

So I’m back from the Quaker meeting. Today, a woman stood up and ministered in the following way: “What I really like in Quakers is that they don’t force me to believe things that I don’t believe in, like, you know, God having a white beard and Jesus physically rising from the dead”.

Today was a bit of a popcorn fest, which in Quaker parlance means that plenty of the attendees pop up with something to say. About six or seven people shared similar views: “yeah, I hate it when Christians from other denominations tell me what to think”.

I hadn’t been to a Quaker meeting in a while and the thing that struck me most is that they haven’t moved one bit in the last six months. Six months ago, a number of spiritual refugees from various denominations were saying the exact same things and everybody was nodding along.

The first thing that came to my mind was “Gawd their theology is bad!”. See, they don’t really mean it with God having a white beard and all that. But these cute little childish tropes hide the fact that they don’t know that much more.

I know it because I do it too. Pretending to be more stupid than I am is a way to communicate to others to please not probe me too much on a given topic. Behind those sibylline remarks is a gapping hole of misunderstanding and indifference. As someone who is sometimes involved in other expressions of church I resent the placation of their indifference. Making stupid comments about the white beard of God is like shouting to my face: I couldn’t care less what Christians believe, I’ve never bothered finding out, and that’s why I’m here among you tolerant Quakers who let me believe what I want.

The striking thing, though, is the amount of emotion that was involved in these "I want to believe what I want" statements. Seriously, the woman was feeling so strongly, it was almost like a tantrum: “Let me believe what I want, don’t tell me what to think, don’t tell me what to think!”. I did not argue with her, but I would like to venture the thought that in fact, she did yearn for something more. She has spent the last two years of her life becoming free, and now what? Maybe she needs to become freer still and self-actualize more or some other crap along these lines.

One of the passage that struck me most in Zizek’s tome is the passage about the fascination that the “free” individuals have for what they think is real faith. I went through a bit of a revival of my own faith last year. I’d found some folks whose thoughts echoed mine and I tried to be faithful to that truth. I regularly bawled people out on things faith-related. And boy did they love it!

After a short while, I began to feel a bit reflexive about this parasitic relationship. I wondered how much of me was morphing into a poser. We were parasiting each other, they consumed my enthusiasm while I consumed their fascination. In a cultural critique of Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie “Stalker”, Zizek describes this parasitic relationship in those terms:

What if Stalker, far from directly believing, manipulates, feigns belief, in order to fascinate the intellectuals he brings to the Zone, arousing in them the prospect of belief? What if far from being a direct believer, he assumes the role of a subject supposed to believe for the eyes of the decadent intellectual observers? What if the truly naive position is that of the intellectual spectator, of his fascination with Stalker's naïve belief? And what if the same goes for Tarkovsky himself, who —far from being the authentic Orthodox believer in contrast to Western skepticism— acts out this role in order to fascinate the Western intellectual public?

Hell, I’m not a super believer! My grandmother died of one of the most horrible degenerative illnesses on the planet. And I’m not impressed with tsunamis and earthquakes that kill children in agonising pain while God doesn’t seem to lift a finger. I believe against reason, in an experiential sort of way. One of my favourite blogger lost her husband to aneurism a couple of years ago. She is 40 and has three children; one of them was a baby when his father died. She hopes that there is no God. She really hopes that there is no God, because if God is real she hates Him so bad she could spend eternity hating Him. She’d rather there was no god than a God she would loathe. I can understand that.

And still faith fascinates. It fascinates precisely the free individuals who endlessly reassert that nobody has a right to tell them what to do. It fascinates those who are passionate about being left to think for themselves. I didn’t realise how prevalent this ideology was until about a month ago, when I got into a very heated argument on yet another blog. On that occasion, I got in touch with the blogger telling her that it was irresponsible to depict a victim of rape liking what was happening to her, especially on a mainstream support (she was writing a series of short stories to be published at a later stage, and this was one of them). She got back to me with the now habitual stance of “DON’T YOU DARE TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!!”.

She asked me to preface all of my comments with a statement sounding like this: “personally, I think that it could be perceived as offensive by some people, but that’s just me. Other people think differently and, at the end of the day, everybody is entitled to their own opinions”. I disagreed. I reclaimed the right to speak in absolutes and reasserted that what she was doing was objectively wrong. She then proceeded to reframe me as if I was a five year-old who had yet to learn the basic principles of tolerance and anger management.

That’s it. Nobody can speak in absolutes anymore. In this postmodern world speaking in absolutes is a form of “terrorism”. Terror is wanting someone else to change the way they think. Zizek illustrates this point with the movie "Derailed" in which Jennifer Aniston tells Clive Owen that she doesn’t just want him to do the dishes, she wants him to want to do the dishes. That’s the way in which Zizek understands terror.

The book goes on reviewing historical accounts of terror, particularly Robespierre’s views. Robespierre wanted everyone to subscribe to revolutionary ideals. He wanted people to want to be revolutionaries. When he failed, that’s when the real physical terror entered the picture. Zizek thinks that all revolutionary violence is a failure. A failure to make people want to be revolutionaries. This is also the failure of Che Guevara.

Still Zizek argues that "while these phenomena were, each in its own way, a historical failure and monstrosity [...] this is not the whole truth: there was in each of them a redemptive moment which gets lost in the liberal-democratic rejection and it is crucial to isolate this moment".

So I got interested. Every time I go to church I feel like the world’s biggest hypocrite. That’s why I’m interested in those “God against the world” theories. Maybe there’s a revolutionary movement somewhere that would turn me into something less hypocritical. So I googled “revolutionary ethos” hoping to find some bullet points that would tell me what the revolutionary ethos was. I found nothing. Noone was describing a revolutionary ethos anywhere. Noone was laying out how they were being faithful to the Event of their encounter with a life-changing phenomenon.

So now, what are we left with? The freedom to think what we want, or the terror to tell others what to think? Now, whenever I think of the first option, I’ll think of that woman in the Quaker meeting who’s been trying to be free from people telling her what to think. I’ll remember the fact that she’s been saying this for years. I’ll remember that she was nearly in tears with frustration: “don’t tell me what to think, don’t tell me what to think!”.

Truth of the matter she is ultimately disempowered. She is alone, imprisoned in the single cell of her freedom to think. One of my favourite quotes by Stanley Hauerwas is a passage in which he has a go at the movie "Dead Poets Society" and argues that the freedom to think what you want is a form of oppression too:

It is an entertaining, popular movie that appeals to our moral sensibilities. The movie depicts a young and creative teacher battling what appears to be the unthinking authoritarianism of the school as well as his students' (at first) uncomprehending resistance to his teaching method. The young teacher, whose subject is romantic poetry, which may or may not be all that important, takes as his primary pedagogical task helping his students think for themselves. We watch him slowly awaken one student after another to the possibility of their own talents and potential. At the end, even though he has been fired by the school, we are thrilled as his students find the ability to stand against authority, to think for themselves. This movie seems to be a wonderful testimony to the independence of spirit that democracies putatively want to encourage. Yet I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. (From this website)

We gave up the terror of telling people what to think. How many times have we heard the cliché that we can’t change people, it’s got to come from them? So we told them nothing. We hoped that they would find the commitment to justice within their own heart. And they didn’t. They just got more self-absorbed. Bring back “terrorism”! Tell people what to think! Sure, this might raise a few knee-jerk reactions. But ideas take time to mature. This is not a call for everyone to mindlessly follow their leaders. This is an appeal for the terrorism of absolutes. Zizek wants to be able to talk in absolutes again.

Waking up before dawn

In the north of England, during the summer you hate dawn. It wakes you up crazy bright at 4am unless you have very good quality curtains. If you wake up before dawn, suddenly it feels like winter, or at least like then end of summer. There is this slight period of readjustment: hang on, it's dark, but it's summer right? Okay, maybe the end of summer. Those 2-3 weeks which reek of back to school.

That's the time of year I'd spend at my grandparents, usually after a whole month and a half of getting sunburnt on the beach. We'd make pancakes and blackberry jam. That's the time of year they'd catch up with my life, find out about my love life and later share my excitement when I was off to University for the first time. My mum always tried to stay as long as possible. Sometimes there was barely a day of turnover before we were back at school. I miss them like mad.

In praise of a (situated) non-decision

Yesterday I read about yet another catholic saint. Eugenie became a nun at 20. She was very obedient, and very good at teaching schoolchildren. She died at 28 from TB. One guy with lung cancer invoked her a couple of years after she died and he recovered miraculously. She was beatified and might be canonized at some point in the future. If she had lived longer, who knows, she might even have founded a new monastic order. But that doesn’t matter; she was faithful and dutiful in the little things. Tell you what: most catholic saints are boring.

But that is of little concern to us. In all likelihood, I will never share the desperate plight of millions. How do you get yourself into that position to start with? This is why the movie City of Joy is the closest thing I know to sainthood as I would define it. It happens despite the guy. He has no intention of being a hero but he becomes one because, despite himself, he cares for some of the inhabitants of the City of Joy. When they reproach him they say: “you are not one of us, we cannot trust you, you are a rootless tree, if things get bad you can go back to your privileges, we have to live with the consequences, you don’t”. At that moment, even though he’s been around for years, he knows they are telling the truth.

There isn’t a point at which he bites the bullet and decides to stay, but he never does leave. His friends' reproach stays with him until the end. He is and remains privileged because he could leave them. At the end, it is the people from the City of Joy who incrementally, warily, begin to adopt him. All he’s got to do is to postpone his going home until he finds that he doesn’t want to go home any more. All he’s got to do is to not choose to leave. Maybe true heroism means burning your bridges once and for all, destroying your privileges as much as you can. And stil Dr Max's stance, cowardly as it may be, is also valuable. He ends up staying because of love.

How "edgy" can your advertising get?

Part of me does not want this junk on my little blue blog, but seriously, WTF?
Wrangler Jeans' ads features the bodies of dead women, with the slogan: we are animals.
I seriously hope this shit gets banned. Come on Regulatory Nation State, you can do this!

On playing in the woods and walking on bridges

Before my Grandfather died, my mum had always wanted to go back to Brittany one day. She lives in Alsace, where I grew up. Just recently, she realised that she could not give up her job, and that in all likelihood she would remain in Alsace for a while.

We live right on the border to Germany. When I was a kid we'd go to Karlsruhe, the next big city, to do some shopping. We also knew the villages immediately across the border for their ice-cream parlours and their French-German gymnastics classes, but we'd never explored them in much depth. The area is quite beautiful, with lots and lots of artificial lakes. So today, I was spying on Google Earth to see if I could find a good waterfront pub on the other side. I already know the ones on the French side and I get bored of them.

Google Earth sometimes has random photos, and I recognised pretty much everything. I clicked on one. It was a picture of the uneven terrain right in the forest. I always loved these uneven terrains as a kid. They were fun to play around. On Easter morning, several families would join together for a walk. The parents had been hiding tons of Easter eggs the day before and designed some "challenges" for the kids. Once they had made some floating boats out of styrofoam. These were loaded with the most desirable chocolate eggs on them and we had to fish them out with a hook.

So I clicked on one photo, and up popped that uneven terrain, it's so typical of where I'm from. I never asked where it came from. As we all know, nature is full of oddities. Until the title of the photo alerted me to the fact that these were war trenches. The kind you hear about in WW1 movies. To me they only looked like childhood challenges as in "can you jump over that hole?" Or like holes filled with water from which to recover little boats with chocolate eggs on them.

Back in 2003 I was in Strasbourg on November 11th. Since it's a national holiday in France everything was closed. I had meant to get my teeth checked for a while, so I thought: hell, I'll just pop over to Germany. I walked. I crossed the Rhine on the pedestrian bridge. Right in the middle of the bridge the weirdness of the situation dawned on me: "You are crossing the Rhine on foot to get your teeth checked in Germany, on November the 11th". I stood there, right in the middle of the Rhine. I didn't know whether it was incredibly sad or incredibly joyful. I settled for joyful and I held back my tears. The dentist checked my teeth -no problem there-, I got to the shop to get some German brand products which I like, and I walked right back.

If you'd like to see the photos I'm talking about look for Neuburg am Rhein on Google Earth and then venture into the forest on the top left corner for the pics. You can see the pedestrian bridge in Strasbourg here.

"Telling" people about God?

Twenty years after everybody else, I’ve finally understood the meaning of incarnational proclamation. Yesterday, after a very long night at the office, I walked towards our local pub, looking forward to meeting up with H. I was still singing along to the cosy Iron and Wine tunes, I grabbed a pint, and engaged with whoever was there.

At the pub, the “God” topic sometimes pops up. I’ve no idea whether it is because H. (an Anglican priest) is there, or whether it would anyway. A bit of both I guess. If anything, H.’s presence just makes the discussion a bit more awkward, as people wonder what he’s thinking and they tend to watch themselves a bit.

So there I was, tired but happy. I buy H. and his friend a pint, and then go and speak to some randoms, I like to let them have their bloke time. I'm staring down my pint, being moderately friendly to the regular semi-strangers I sort-of-know. I was tired and content to be left on my own to think. And then the “God topic” pops out in someone else’s conversation. Steve is the guy I describe as potentially abusive in the comments to this post. Suddenly, out of the blue, Steve states very loudly “God forgives everybody, even sinners like me”.

Right then, Steve’s statement is blood-curdling and makes me want to self-combust. For a second, it makes me want to not be there, it makes me want to stop living. There is so much pain and so much fear in Steve’s tone. But there is nothing wrong with the statement itself. In fact the decent-type Christians at the bar sort of mumble and approve. What is there here to disapprove?

And finally I understand. Whoever the fuck told Steve that stuff without loving him? Who made these words so hollow that they’re not believed? How come he’s not encountered the forgiveness he talks about? I felt like I was never going to "tell" the Gospel to anyone again. If that’s the effect then fuck “telling”. Love first damnit! The Gospel will tell itself when it’s ready.

There's a love song

Will you say when I’m gone away
'Your father’s body was judgement day
We both dove and rose to the riverside

Iron and Wine, Each Coming Night
Full lyrics here Listen to it here

Life in the mainstream: Alzheimer's

They got 5 televisions In a house built for 3
Look up on that fake fireplace
You know the bucktoothed boy's me
See that wood paneled room'
That's where I learned to drink
See that hole in the wall'
That was seagrams I think

That tree was a goal post
That bathroom it was a shroud
That closet it was a phone booth
That mirror was a crowd
See that guy with the bad knees
And his heart on his sleeve'
Watch him slip me ten dollar
When it comes time to leave

It's been five years and some change
And this world is getting so strange
But this house smells just the same
But my mom can't remember my name

I sit on her bed and kiss right behind the ear
She calls out for a dog that's been dead for a year
I say how is it going'
Like I didn't know
Hold on to both of her hands too afraid to let her go
And five times exactly no more or no less
She says how you been eating boy'
I say, okay I guess
In this room where she made me each day she grows weak
She flips on the Golden Girls and the first tear hits my cheek
It's been five years

Lyrics by Chocolate Genius

World's worst Bible interpretation, the competition goes on...

Here is an exegesis of Luke 6: 20-26 (c.f. previous post):

First Part: it means that the rich are indeed blessed but that this blessedness extends even to the poor.

Second Part: Luke’s narrative develops divine reversal quite a lot, that’s just another instance of it. My guess is that the Lukean community must have felt pretty downtrodden and oppressed to feel the need to develop such themes.

Luke 6: 20-26

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when men hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven.
For that is how their fathers treated the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all men speak well of you,
for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets".

That doesn't sound too good. I'm pretty sure we'll go down in history as the unspeakable assholes who let Africa, much of Asia and Latin America, and all of the Fourth world die, no matter how nice and caring we were to the people who immediately surround us.

What does that story tell me about... me?

It struck me recently that I have a tendency to read a Scripture verse and then immediately think: okay now what does this mean for me? So for example, whenever Scripture states that the poor are blessed, it does not say “and those of you who are not poor, go and make yourselves poor, so you can be blessed too”.

In some ways, I don’t think such a statement addresses me at all. It seems to say: “Wait a sec, that passage is not about you, it says nothing to you, it is about the poor and it is for them, it is them that have a right to know just how blessed they are, it is not yet another self-improvement injunction addressed to the rich. It is not a message for the rich to ‘get poor’; in fact it is not a message for the rich at all.”

So when we Western Christians hear this, maybe we shouldn’t immediately translate into – “mmm yes… I need to become poor so I can be blessed”. Maybe we should hear: “and the poor do not know it! The news that they are blessed is just as shocking to them today as it would have been two millennia ago”.

By it, I am not negating the other stories (about the rich young ruler, Lazarus etc.) that seem to directly address the rich. I’m just questioning my own tendency to look for a meaning for myself in things that have a meaning primarily for others.