A stick; a stone; the end of the road

Águas de março, Jobim's masterpiece evoking the end of the summer, coincides with Lent because it was written in the Southern hemisphere. Maybe it’s a coincidence but it works. The song is a hymn, a kind of knowing nod at the ineffability of life's mystery. The fragments of images; the yearning chords; the gentle insistent passage of time. It always brought tears to my eyes since I heard it as a teenager. I heard it again today and wept. I know more of the words now, and marvel at the faith of Jobim’s setting in English. But I also have a child now, and I think of my dad playing the Getz Gilberto version for me and maybe wondering if I would hear it new, thirty or forty years later. Who knows. Who can know these things. This meditation can't do justice to the song or what it makes me feel. But it’s March now, it’s Lent now, it’s a good time; let me write this small thing, poor as it is, now, while the feeling is fresh. I’ll hear it differently again next year. That too is the promise of life in your heart.

Wars and rumors of wars.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. 
-- Matthew 24:6

I’m reminded of one time on my mission, knocking doors in Buenos Aires in 2007. A lady answered the door, took one look at our Yankee faces, said “You guys are killing babies in Iraq!!”, and slammed the door on us. It really made me reconsider the phrase “wars and rumors of wars,” one of the signs we’re taught to expect in the last days. Thanks to mass media, this lady was able to know instantly about atrocities happening a world away. She wasn’t directly affected by the wars, but she was affected by the “rumors of wars” -- the anxiety and mistrust and uncertainty attendant on living in a world saturated by bad news. And she suffered by it. Her outrage was justified, but misdirected, and her despair blinded her to the merits of our invitation to do good within her sphere of influence.

I generally consume a lot of news, and I think it’s important to be an informed citizen. But lately I worry that my news consumption that goes beyond informing myself and starts to look like the worst kind of sports consumption. Obsessively following a contest I can do nothing to control, and letting my mood be dictated by it, is unhealthy and unproductive. Many of my most beloved thinkers, among them Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, talk about attention as a sacred resource, the bestowal of which, when done well, sanctifies both giver and receiver. I want to be more deliberate about this bestowal. I’m done giving any more attention than absolutely necessary to someone elected on the strength of a preternatural talent for stealing it.

Here’s the silver lining I’m trying to weave out of this very dark cloud.

I’m heartbroken and astonished at what happened last night. Its impact on the globe, both material and symbolic, is likely to be immense and horrifying. But I’ve been thinking about the practical impact it will have on my day-to-day life. While it’s not negligible, the only control I have over that practical impact is how I choose to let it color my actions. I refuse to let it drive me toward either cynicism or tribalism. While I still want to be an informed citizen, I’m trying to view this catastrophe as an opportunity to reorient myself more locally. To me, this election paints a clear picture of two Americas in a state of utter mutual incomprehension. As members of Mormon congregations which include people of all social strata, we’re better situated than most to understand and build bridges with people who see the country in a fundamentally different way. I’m planning to unplug a little bit from the 24-hour news cycle, and plug into my community. For me, that might mean following local politics, tutoring refugees, being a more dedicated home teacher, and above all, communing with my family.


I can only pray, with my whole heart, that last night doesn’t presage more wars. But we can and will do our small part to make sure that the “rumors of wars” (and of other terrible things beyond our control) don’t divert our attention from the good we can do for those we can reach, including those whose cause for worry is more immediate and visceral than our own. The danger of being paralyzed by despair is countered by the opportunity to be catalyzed into action.

Sorry if this all sounds sanctimonious. And thank you to all of you for your words. This is a day of mourning, but reading this email thread sparks hope in me. We are comforting each other, who all stand in need of comfort. Let’s build on that, and strive to bear the burdens of those around us whose burdens are most likely to get heavier.

Heaven WILL help us, I’m confident. The end is not yet.

Love, W.

That nature is a Heraclitean fire.

I went back! To Boston, this charmed corner of this beloved country that I so belove and that so charms me. Walking from Harvard Square across the Eliot bridge, nostalgia hit me hard. Here was the place where I had worked, the river where I had run, the bench where I had sat and agonized over the decision to move away. They were happy years, rich with good memories and dear friends. I stayed with one of those dear friends who still lives in the neighborhood I called home from 2012 to 2014. We reminisced about what a great time that was. He told me how it's still great, but it's not the same. I told him about how my new city isn't the same either.

I spent the last three weeks on vacation with my family, and I don't relish the prospect of going back to my solitary life. I miss this place where I'd felt such strong community. I know, I know: I recognize that nostalgia is unproductive, and the grass is always greener. Still, I'm meditating on loss and stasis and where abundance comes from.

Since I left Boston, two of my dearest friends there married one another. I visited them and met their child. Child! For the last 14 weeks, they have been building a world, and it's hard work, and they're tired. They're building a world for this tiny, mild, beautiful person with thick black hair, by whose eyes I was beheld and by whose smile I was graced.

I say 14 weeks, but no, it didn't start then. Nor did it start 9 months + 14 weeks ago. These good people have been building a world for this child their whole lives long. They were building it when they were camping and worshiping and talking economics with me. They were building it during my first nervous weeks in Boston, when each of them reached out to welcome me and make me feel at home. And when they did the same for countless other people here who were in some way new or different or uncertain or struggling. They've been hard at work on a world for a long time, and I think that tiny, thoughtful, black-haired human I held is lucky to live in it.

As I left their house, retracing familiar streets, the evening was warm and close without being sticky or oppressive. The air swaddled me. There was a lot in my heart; peace and melancholy. It was a sad and sweet day, but the sadness was hopeful and the sweetness was deep. It was a good day. It was a day that said, You can never go back, but this world's makers also did a pretty fine job. And they made it go forward.

Buckle up, buttercup.

On the flight from Provo to LAX, a scrawny redheaded gal in a hot pink hoodie that said “Buckle Up Buttercup / You Just Flipped My Bitch Switch” was also wearing a tattoo on the left side of the back of her neck. “Faith,” it said in a flowy script, then below and at right angles, “Jeremiah 29:11.”

I looked up Jeremiah 29:11 on my phone. Here it is:

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

I don't even know why I found that neck tattoo so comforting. Christ plays in ten thousand places. Thanks, redhead.

Peace.

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace.  What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it? 

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
        He comes to brood and sit.

- GMH.

It's all I know.

Ash Wednesday.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me?  Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause.  See, banks and breaks

Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,

Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

- GMH.

My boots are falling apart.  On the day after Christmas 2011, my whole family went to Modern Shoe down on Center Street and picked out hiking boots.  I found a pair of waterproof Merrells that felt like old friends from the moment I tried them on.  That same week, I took them on their maiden voyage with Nate through the snow and mud on Little Squaw Peak.  They accompanied me all year as I wandered with brothers and sister and parents and cousins all over the patient, wise, matriarchal mountains that rule benevolently over Utah Valley.  Timp's foothills.  Cascade's Toes.  Little Rock Canyon.  G Mountain.  The Camel.  Windy Pass.  The best view in Provo, I discovered, is from the top of Y Mountain, looking east.  That's where I hope to be when I see Jesus coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

For Christmas 2012, I wore these boots on my family's surreal pilgrimage to Machu Picchu.  Over five days they faithfully took me over Salkantay Pass at 15,000 feet and through an actual thing called the Cloud Forest.  When we reached the ruins, it was rainy and we were all sick but Nate had come this far and was not about to turn back before summiting Huayna Picchu, and I will ever be grateful he convinced me to man up and go with him.  Up narrow steep staircases and past sheer precipices, my boot-clad feet were as sure as a goat's.  Sitting on top of Huayna Picchu with my brother -- the Urubamba River burbling far below, Machu Picchu alternately obscured and revealed by the mist -- was sublime, mystical, godly.

This is what my boots are capable of.  But lately they carry me thanklessly from my house to the bus stop and from the bus stop to work, day in, day out, as the winter in Boston goes from long to interminable.  They follow me uncomplainingly through snow laced with ice-melting salt; the salt builds up and stains.  Somehow I never remember to clean them -- there is always a more pressing worry, and in the general cacophony of my life they're just one in a chorus of needs I'm constantly neglecting.  The salt eats away at the leather and rubber and glue, until one morning I noticed that these boots which have scoffed at Wasatch mud and Andean streams are now powerless against the dirty puddles in Harvard Square.  All day my feet stayed damp.  When I finally took a wet rag to my boots today after work, I found scars and gashes I hadn't even noticed in a half dozen places.



Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.  I went to an Ash Wednesday service yesterday at the Old South Church in Copley Square.  The ministers spoke about how our need for mercy is constant and how we are not God.  In the small, spartan chapel at the back of the church, to listeners seated on wicker chairs, they lamented that the havoc of evil is in us all, and confessed our sneer at grace.  The first hymn was set to Bach's achingly penitent Passion Chorale, the tune known in the Mormon hymnal as "O Savior Thou Who Wearest A Crown".



And yet.  Because every day is short, the preacher said, every day is shot through with import.  What gets me every time about that tune is how its frank acknowledgment of sin and loss is the dark backdrop to a tiny point of brilliant hope in the last line's resolution.  There is power in deep and abject humility; the kind one does not seek but is forced to; the kind at the edge of the mind's sheer cliffs.  The scripture reading underlined the spiritual force of naked need.  Psalm 51—David pleading for forgiveness.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean:
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Make me to hear joy and gladness;
that the bones which thou has broken may rejoice.
Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

I had been one of the last to arrive, and the only seating left was on the front row.  So I was the first in line to get an ashen cross painted on my forehead by this bright-eyed lady priest, who told me "Remember, mortal, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  But for today, you live.  May God grant you the power to do all you need to do, and then some."  As I returned to my seat, I heard her saying the same words to everyone else.  But it felt like the Spirit was dictating to her a personal admonition just for me.



From the front of the program: "Today, we begin a forty-day journey through the wilderness of Lent and into newness of life."  I love the wilderness, but lately I'm plagued with doubt about the journey.  I'm in the middle of my life's season of abundance of rejection letters from PhD programs.  They are ripening and falling off the trees all around me.  I second-guess the gifts I thought I had, choices I might have made, things I should have learned.  More than usual, my desert wanderings feel aimless and meaningless.

But Lent, like the Passion Chorale, like winter, holds the promise that He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces.  Lent is the chance -- the decision, really -- to consecrate loss and failure, compost it with the dust of mortality and grow something beautiful.  To go hiking in the wilderness, deliberately, trustingly.  To step calmly into the flames of nature's Heraclitean fire and to find God there.

Bring on the locusts.  Bring on the wild honey.

Annus Mirabilis.

Slept like a rock on the red-eye back from Salt Lake.  Came home to a letter from a girl I might love.  Went running in a clear 18° F.

The Charles is frozen over and it's finally 2014 and I love everything.

Fog.

I encountered my favorite smell again today.  I call it a smell because I can’t think of a better word for it, but it’s something you rather breathe than sniff; you feel it not in your nostrils but way back behind your nose, at the top of your throat, in the center of your head.  It’s wet, it’s rich, it’s slightly sweet and it’s somehow electric.  Maybe like some kind of fresh and elemental cigar.  Yes, there is a burnt quality to it, but it’s more charged than charred.  Again, electric.  Exhilarating.  Heady mystery, incomprehensible fullness.  Humid and electric and faintly sweet like the world just barely got done being made.

I found it while I ran along the Charles in fog so thick I had to stop twice to wipe it off my glasses.  A hint, a note, as I passed through the densest sliver of woods.  This smell is like a fairy godmother, cropping up from time to time in my life when I least expect it.  I remember it from when I was small and my mom put a humidifier in my room; from the foggiest day I ever experienced on my mission in Ciudad Evita; and most strongly from the tunnels of the Línea A in the Buenos Aires subway.  Maybe it crops up when I most need a confirmation of the world’s lush fathomlessness.  To be surprised by something familiar.

Starlings.

In the fall, birds would hop and flit and perch on the branches not five feet in front of my face.  Bodies black, sprayed with white stars.  The interaction of sun and wing.  They gobbled the bright orange berries among the tree’s thinning, yellowing leaves.  They flashed and glinted and without warning launched themselves effortlessly, wings spread, out of the field of vision framed by my window.

The light goes early now.  Midday feels like afternoon; afternoon feels like dusk.  Night falls by five.  This morning two squirrels slalomed my tree’s bare branches, one black, one gray.  A solitary bird came by later, his feathers darker than I remembered, his beak half-dipped in ink.

Notes from run along Charles, 29 August 2013.

Today the earth is made of Viking monosyllables: raw and wet and ripe and full.  The sky is gray and low and close, and the earth is raw and wet and ripe and full.

Today is just this side of the calm before some storm; the wind is gathering, pregnant with anticipation, electric with possibility.

Today is urgent, insistent.  There’s no time to lose.  The iron is hot.

Today, all of us -- rowers, runners, bus drivers, geese -- are conspiring to create the world.  We glance at each other with subtle, knowing smiles.  We barely hold back our laughter at the sheer delight and nerve of building something that no one will believe.

Today the brooding world is tight-wound, wire-taut, skin-tense; at any moment it bursts.

Keep your carefree, blue-skied, springtime afternoons.  Christ comes on a day like today.

Demon.

An ugly thing flew into my heart today and is trying to make its nest there. It found a tiny wound of rejection and solitude and started gnawing at it. It made a fire out of some resentment it had brought along; it threw fuel on the flame from my ample reserves of pride. Then it gathered up all the scraps of self-doubt lying around and nestled down cozily in them.

Go away, thing. Fly off, ugly dark thing.

Mexer.

This is it; this word is it.  The keystone, the code, the fragment of DNA that maps the whole genome of Brazilian Portuguese.  Or at least the whole big space it occupies in my imagination. Spanish's mover is so torpid; its menear is even worse. I mean it's to Spanish speakers' great credit that they move at all (in fact I'm pretty sure they do, much better than English speakers, notwithstanding to move's relative gusto).  But mexer?  There's a word that does its job.  That subtlety.  That verve.  Imagine how the world could move with a verb like mexer.  Or maybe couldn't -- maybe God put mexer in Brazil because he knew that's where it would fulfill the measure of its creation.  Well, it worked.

John 5.

For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

I was running at night on the Watertown side of the Charles, along the stretch where the path nestles right up against the river.  As I ran I gradually became aware that the water in the shallows next to me was, well, troubled.  It wasn't noisy or predictable, but every so often some part of the still surface would betray an isolated burble.  I stopped, and walked down to the edge, and perched atop a rock that jutted out into the water, and watched.  And listened.  At intervals of 10 or 20 or 40 seconds, each time in a different place, the water would be ever so slightly broken.  Silent ripples would race around the surface, hinting at an abundance of movement I could only murkily perceive.  It seemed for all the world like the path of someone dancing in the air, with toes only occasionally grazing the water. I stared into the dark, hoping to catch a clear glimpse of the unseen mover.  No such luck.  Which was fortuitous, since I left there steeped in magic and contentment, knowing that some fish or some angel was having a ball.

Godliness.

I just barely got back from a big, explosive, rumbly space blockbuster in IMAX 3D, shown in a theater attached to a furniture store which also features a trapeze school and human-sized flowers made out of jellybeans.  It was a blast.  It was a little stupefying to watch the credits roll the names of the thousands of people who helped craft that world.  They did a bang-up job -- it is a big, explosive, rumbly world.  I mean the flick was a total blast.

But there's more than one way to make a world.  Just listen to these three guys in these nine minutes.




I spent as much time in this song today as I did in that movie.  Have you heard Herb Ellis do that thing that makes a guitar sound just like a sigh?  Have you heard Ray Brown treat every single quarter note like it's the loveliest woman on earth?  Have you heard Oscar Peterson growl?  Have you heard that groove??

That groove is a world.

Is Kanye West an emissary from the future?

I'm wondering because on Jesus Walks (2003) he quotes his own future song Hey Mama (2005).  UNCANNY.

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Jesus+Walks/27WFt5?src=5

1:10

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Hey+Mama/2h3gMV?src=5

0:23

As always, Wikipedia destroys the mystery by informing that Hey Mama was actually recorded in 2000, citing an MTV interview.  Still, it strikes me as pretty ballsy to steal from one's own unreleased track.  I see it as a glimpse of Kanye's early clear view of the long game.  He lays it all out in that 2003 interview, which paints his ambitions as kind of adorable:  he "earnestly" says he'll follow up The College Dropout with Late Registration and then Graduation.  "Is this an overly optimistic projection of his hip-hop future?" asks the author.  "Maybe."

Nope.  It's fascinating and kind of disorienting to look at this snapshot of the pre-Kanye world.  Another anachronism is the reference to Yeezy's "typical disarming modesty."  The nuttiest part is that it backs up the claim with quotes which actually do exhibit disarming modesty.  "I gotta give myself the best chance because I don't really feel like I'm the best [rapper] out there."  With a decade's hindsight, it's easy to forget there was a time when KANYE WEST knew how to say things like that.  Who knows, maybe he is a time traveler, and in the future he went back to 2003 because he didn't like what he had become.  Maybe this time he'll figure out how to be happy and peaceful and fulfilled.  Only one way to find out.  Imma let him finish.

Oh Maybellene.

Why can'tcha be true?

I wish I knew how to fix cars. I feel like in my dad’s generation, the minimum functional level of cultural savvy included the capacity to open up the hood of a car and poke around and pronounce casually authoritative assessments using words like “torque” and “gasket.” I can’t do that. I wouldn’t know a gasket if it punched me in the nose. Much less a torque.

I take solace in the observation that at least among my generation, I’m not alone. I don’t think the median twentysomething American knows much more about fixing a car than I do. And I blame the machines themselves. In 1959, when my dad was born, all cars had the same basic elements, and the way they interacted was transparent and reasonably intuitive. Not so now! Cars, like the rest of the world, are run by computers. I actually felt a stab of irreparable loss when I was listening to Car Talk a couple weeks ago and heard Tom and Ray mention “the computer.” I know, it’s the twenty-first century, and it’s their job to understand comprehensively whatever someone decides to put in a car. But it jarred. I don’t turn on NPR to hear Click and Clack talk about computers. I want to hear Carburetor and Spark Plug and Belts. I want to hear Gasket.

I mean the Gaskets are still there, of course. It’s just that they’re controlled by the computer. Okay, maybe the gaskets aren’t directly controlled by the computer -- I can’t actually say because I still don’t know what a gasket is -- the point is, fixing a car in 2013 requires some understanding of a computer. But the computer is made by a human, and I want to propose that what cars were to my dad’s generation, computers might be to mine. I don’t mean that we all have to be able to write machine code, any more than my dad’s generation was all professional mechanics. But I think today, cultural savvy increasingly requires familiarity with a basic toolbox that helps you bend computers to your will.

I’m late to the party. It took me a while to get excited about telling stories with numbers (there is another post to write about that). But lately I’ve been learning how to scrape screens and do some basic automation with Python, and it’s opened up a new world. Sure, real codeheads might guffaw at how infantile the stuff is that I’m getting excited about. (Although to their credit, I’ve found computer geeks in general to be indulgently supportive of humble outsiders who want to learn.) But that’s just my point: it’s not that hard to reach a level of basic conversance which, while not exhaustive, is still really useful. I can tell Python to go gather data for a paper I want to write, or tell it to email me when a band I care about is playing nearby.

This is empowering. Eisenhower’s interstate system opened up the country and helped create the abiding American myth of the Freedom of the Open Road -- and cars, as the vehicles for accessing that network, became the symbols of that freedom. As much as I hate to perpetuate a cliché as exhausted as the “information superhighway,” it’s really apt for this metaphor. The world’s data beckons, and the vehicle which now embodies the freedom of that network is code.

I’m making a comparison, not drawing equivalencies. Until I can sit at my keyboard and feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my gangster-leaning arm -- as I listen to some artist who does for the Internet what Chuck Berry did for the Interstate -- I’m not going to pretend it’s an unambiguous step forward for humanity. But it’s pretty cool to be able to tell a computer to download all the data from a government website, crawl through it, and tell you the parts you care about. Or write a script for a game of Battleship! Who knows; maybe within another generation computers will get so complex that, like cars, they will become the exclusive realm of specialists. Like Chuck Berry, we live in a time when amateurs can still customize their own machines as an expression of personality and independence and creativity. Let’s do it, amateurs.

On the sunny side of the street.

One of the thousand independently sufficient reasons to live this life must be its constant newness.  That's got to be near the top of the list.  Even its oldness can be new.  I've been hearing jazz for 26 years, and somehow I never noticed this glowing old standard -- copyright 1930 -- until this week.  I know the words sound saccharine.  But there is depth to it.  Listen: some of the turns in those chords describe pangs of sharp melancholy.  Ah! those first bars of every chorus, that I III7 IVM7 VII7 vi. Remembering hopelessness, yearning for present joys to stay, accepting that times will be dark again, and that they'll be good again, but they'll never be quite the same flavor of good, and ultimately celebrating the gift of this day along with a touch of lament at its passing.  THAT is what that I III7 IVM7 VII7 vi says; that's why the song can be taken seriously.  It is triumphant and optimistic.  But it has been around the block.  It knows whereof it speaks.

I must have listened to this song a hundred times this week.  There are lots of wonderful recordings of it by different folks; I've picked the incomparable Ella.

On darkness and storytelling.

I keep thinking of this piece, Leap, by Brian Doyle.  And of his premise -- our premise, right? -- that we doggedly persist in the face of cowardice by knowing and telling and breathing our loved ones' stories.  Our stories.

Of course it's too soon to know what this thing means, or how we'll look back on it, or what should have been clear.  What there is now, as near as I can tell, is confusion, compassion, and some pretty incredible stories of grace under duress, including some from my friends, who were there.  Also little declarations of stubborn solidarity from New Yorkers, bless them.  I don't know how to deal with loss.  I don't know what to say to those coping with loss right now.  But we can tell stories.

Meine Schwester.

Anne LaMyrl Sandholtz, as anyone who knows her can tell you, is brilliant, compassionate, thoughtful, creative, articulate, curious -- she is, ahem, literally a peach. She is also my sister. She is also Jesus’ sister, and will be spending the next year and a half telling everything she knows about him to anyone in Portugal who will listen. This project is bound to produce stories hilarious and life-affirming and heart-wrenching and true. She has promised to tell us about them in her letters, which will be posted on her blog, which I recommend to you, gentle reader:

asandholtz.blogspot.com

Hurrah for Israel.