Made alive with laughter

Friday, February 15, 2008

The World is a Dark Marvel

to quote Everyday Apocalypse again:)

"Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering and folly before daring a word of hope (lest too light winning make the prize light). The hope has nowhere else to happen but the valley of the shadow of death. ... radical declaration concerning the meaning of human experience...tensions and paradoxes that constitute our understanding of reality...in some cases, our powers of application are so compromised that we're incapable of recognizing as morally edifying anything that doesn't' advertise itself as such... It, now and forever, is bigger than we think. It is always more than what we have in mind ("Why do you call me good?"). I'm grateful for and in dire need of whatever art can keep me awake and alive to the mystery, whatever keeps me paying attention, whatever reminds me that none of us are possessors of the final say. Art That doesn't bear witness to the opaque, the mysterious, or even allow any ambiguity is propaganda at best and, at worst, a ministry of death, and exercise in sentimentalizing, self-congratulatory delusion...
confusion... is the atmospheric condition within which she, by her own accounts lived her life... 'God rescues ourselves from ourselves if we want Him to'...Her characters' resistance to grace will fail...but the joke's on us regardless... You have to believe that there is more than you can understand before you can begin to understand at all...drawing the reader out of the idiotic presumption that any aspect of reality can be reduced to the scope of our understanding.. "The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky"... grace rains down on the righteous and the unrighteous alike... bursting through the fabric of folly [is falling apart at the seams]... one is among her [flannery o'connor] damned... trembling I can't think of another writer who attributes as much gravity and moral dignity to children... "Her churning imagination is almost like a fever within... closest thing to light he's ever known.. all his fury and fear left him"... "the bleeding and stinking mad shadow of Jesus.. emptiness, and haunting"... Christ- haunted... Whatever we call art and whatever we call work will both either put things right or contribute to the proliferation of mediocrity... "I doubtless hate pious language worse than you because I believe the realities it hides".. as feelings go, pain is probably the most reliable one..."


believe in being a sky watcher/gazer. has to do with transcendence, the undercurrent/ story behind every little thing "her churning of imagination is almost like a fever within" Dostoevsky's "hectic flush" "to cool the fever of my brain" of Bright Eyes; I feel this frantic and crucial search for transcendence (or the apocalyptic, revelation, epiphany) in every word deed sight moment of crucial utmost importance. LIFE, real life! This desperate need for what's REAL and eternal, not cheap and fading and soul-numbing. Thus will my eyes be ever on the sky.

2 Comments:

  • beautifully worded, hermana. i've been thinking about how i'm like that, as well.

    By Blogger mjaneb, at 7:56 PM  

  • thanks dawg. we are like that. I like that we share it. I love you to the sulsimous.

    By Blogger marcelle, at 11:21 PM  

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