WALLPAPERS(by munawar 9949935350)

(This essay is cross-posted at Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, where I am this week’s guest-blogger)

Witnessing in a crowd has a particular role to play. As when Jesus dispensed the five loaves and two fishes that fed the crowd of hundreds, sharing actually proliferates and foments grace among individuals until it affects the people around them. The miracle is that in sharing, good things actually multiply until they fill every hungry mouth.

If you believe an active group can accomplish more than individuals in isolation, that it can build up individual courage, and allow individual talents to shine, then you believe in aggregated witness.

So I’d like to share two examples from my own work.

The first has to do with bloggers and readers, just like the guest blog you’re now reading. The Internet allows a special kind of witness, making it possible for you, the reader, to create your own witness in response to mine, instantly.

The second has to do with activities afoot right now among Progressive Christian activists, by which I mean both those concerned about addressing issues like poverty from within church congregations, and those who would prevail upon Christians to make issues like poverty matter once more in American politics. Their witness intends to begin direct and tangible appearances in American society within the next year.

For the hunger that haunts America is at once physical hunger in the shape of the 37 million Americans who live in poverty, the one million added each year, those who live down the very street each of us live on who by some accident, injury, or mistake will be unable to feed their families — and a spiritual hunger, in the form of fake religion, fake compassion, fake values, fake diplomacy, and fake dialogue.

Both hungers are worsened in the age of mass media, where it has been, until recently, all but impossible for voices of compassion to break through the white noise of fake Christians, empty values, and the politics of blind-eye-turning to human cruelty.

Witnessing on the Internet

When witnesses come to town, souls wake up. The Internet brings witness to everyone’s town. Bloggers serve a role that itinerant ministers played in the age of John Wesley.

Wesley’s Methodist circuit riders took the gospel by horseback to poor miners and farmers who never before had the opportunity to engage Christian teachings. The long-term result of their work was what we call the Progressive Era of politics, a sudden boom of concern for the poor. Progressive politicians got poor children out of the mines and into schools; they passed acts to protect divorced and abused women; they legalized unions, and laid the foundations for Civil Rights.

Spreading information to people who don’t have access to it creates the possibility for working together among people who have hitherto been suppressed by powerful, entrenched interests.

Bloggers write because they’ve been transformed. People respond because they’re moved by witnessing such a transformation. Street Prophets, the major discussion board for progressive religion, regularly gets fifty comments to a single post, of which there may be twenty a day. The newspapers of America regularly report on the expansion of bloggers and blog-readers — getting and sharing information this way is becoming part of everyday life for many people. The bloggers at Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and throughout the Progressive Christian Bloggers Network are actively testifying to the power of witness, so much so that the stranger who googles the phrase “Christian Blogger” learns first about Progressive Christians at work, not about Pat Robertson. As the patterns of reading and sharing on the Internet expand, the power of this form of witness will continue to expand.

Aggregating the Witnesses

Sneaking links into this information is powerful: it means that if you find one blog, soon you know that there’s a movement, whether or not the blog explicitly tells you so. Information in the same place is also good for encyclopedia-like power to search under topics — that’s what Google did for all the information on the Net, but also what Progressive Christians could do for Progressive Christian sermons and blogs.

Finally, shared information means helping collaborate in the most basic senses — at the moment, the National Council of Churches and Sojourners only know about each other’s events, lobbying, press releases, and mailing lists haphazardly. To plan for greater numbers at their turnouts, greater participation in their conferences, and greater effect behind their important lobbies, they, as well as smaller groups and tiny blogging communities and Sunday School clubs, need to share.

CrossLeft.org is one example of an aggregator that seeks to network Progressive Christian work. CrossLeft newsstreams pull together hundreds of Progressive Christian blog headlines into a dozen different streams (clergy’s personal stories, just politics, mostly theology, etc.), so that after an event like the horrible bombings in Samara, you can literally watch as reactions spread through the Progressive Christian community: prayers are posted, political Jeremiads are delivered, proposals for relief mooted, all by bloggers and their readers.

Aggregation is powerful because it enables individuals to feel that they’re not alone, and shows strangers that we inhabit a neighborhood of other people with similar experiences.

CrossLeft is only one form of aggregation. Co-blogging, like the Sollicitudo Rei Socialis guest blog and the regular Progressive Faith Blog Carnival, is another way. This form of aggregation brings strong voices into the same room, and offers real quality to readers. Discussion boards like StreetProphets are yet another way of showing numbers and solidarity. Linking to each other’s sites is also a good way for people with weblogs to testify to the fact thay they’re in community with other people whose work they value.

For people who run organizations, conference calls are another way of sharing. Live conferences for denominations is another.

Individuals can also share information, wisdom, and experience, just by letting others know what they’re up to. Even without a blog, you can share sites and articles you found valuable, by noting what you’ve been looking at with the tag PROCHRIST (PROgressive CHRISTian) on information sharing sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr, which let individuals tell the world which websites or pictures they’re looking at. Going to a local church where there are people you feel comfortable with is another great way to share. There’s no one way to share, but the sharing is vital to our life as a community.

In the faces of other members of the church, we see Christ’s own features; in the charitable works of their hands, in every loving word or comment exchanged, we feel the loving touch of Christ’s own hands.

From Aggregation to Agenda: The Progressive Christian Leadership Summit, Feb. 4-5, 2006

In the name of aggregation, CrossLeft recently held a summit of activist leadership in San Francisco.

We had fifty leaders of Progressive Christian organizations; new groups in Nevada and Oregon; solid think tanks from the Washington, D.C. beltway; ninety-year-old crowds like the million-person California Council of Churches.

Our goal was to put on the table the values, issues, and actions that Progressive Christians are working toward. We wanted to find the political issues and cultural ideas that had the greatest purchase in American culture.

We wanted to review what everyone was doing, and to choose a couple of big actions for collaboration that represented issues everyone cared about. We wanted to get as many organizations as possible to sign up to help participate in these actions.

You can read an overview of the values, issues, and actions we talked about on the CrossLeft site. You will eventually be able to access a database of groups’ strengths, weaknesses, and contact information.

Essentially, the summit allowed us to point to what, to the best of our knowledge, represents the five big actions the Progressive Christian Movement will be working on in 2006. These are:

• To elect Progressive Christians to office, principally through the distribution of Christian Values Voting Guides;
• To oppose the Iraq War, especially through church school programs and adult study toolkits;
• To map moderate-to-progressive churches and Progressive Christian organizations;
• To establish a national network of Progressive Christian groups on college campuses;
• To engage in protests and lobbying focusing on the budget as a moral document.

CrossLeft suggested, and will promote, a very straight-forward plan for accountability. On top of each action is one coordinator, a representative from some activist group. The coordinator’s job is to keep calling and writing all groups, from Sojourners to the local church, who are involved with the coordinator’s particular project. The coordinator will ask them to brainstorm together, share resources, think about areas where their work is redundant, and think about what still needs to be done.

Our disorganization and isolation is the single biggest factor working against the Progressive Christian Movement. Collaboration across organizations is difficult, and it’s never really been tried before in the Progressive Christian Movement, where Methodists work with Methodists and not Episcopalians, and peace activists work with peace activists and not homeless advocates.

The reason we’re so dispersed is a throwback to the sudden way we came to meet each other: many participants in the summit confessed that they had an “aha” moment on or around 9/11. Thus, many of the organizations that showed up are only a year old or less, although some are already powerhouses like the above-mentioned California Council of Churches. The flourishing of a new generation of activists is a testament to the times, and a witness to growing interest in the movement and its work.

The new generation needs to learn how to work together. Only when we understand who’s out there and what they’re working on will these attempts to put together large movement-wide collaboration come together.

Only with the best and brightest of all backgrounds can we really begin to develop strategies to win cultural battles, to break through the fortress of the media, to defeat the idiom of right-wing pseudo-Christian politics for good, and to win back real territory for Christian values.

That’s why we need you to read and to witness, in whatever form your calling takes you. Witnessing is the work that brings the broken pieces of God’s body together.

Let that witness be about sharing information, spreading the loaves and fishes through the entire crowd, until so great a multitude is transformed that the faith will last another thousand years.

A Call to Witness: Lent

The last month’s several shared blogs and the San Francisco summit both set the course for an experiment in movement that will be taking off in the next several weeks, even while the church invites Christians to participate in one of the great religious rituals of collective discernment through Lent.

Lent is an invitation for the individual to take some comfort and offer it up to God. That action, in its act of pure, arbitrary will, makes room for the individual to change according to a greater plan.

There are many individual readers who feel discouraged and isolated, fed up with American politics and the culture of the self, hungry for political change, and unsure of where to give their talents. Even among bloggers and organizers, there is legitimate concern about how to best strategize with each other, that our poor, solitary efforts should amount to more than a futile series of protests.

Let me therefore offer, in the spirit of sharing and inspiration, a very small spiritual practice in the form of a meditation, which may be engaged as part of a Lenten discipline.

1. What issues do I personally feel most moved about?
2. What is it that the movement itself needs to succeed, regardless of where my own talents or inclinations lie?
3. What form of working with others allows me to share the most good?

The first question is extremely personal, the innate emotional pull of where an individual is at the moment. The second is detached and political, even theoretical — what form of action would produce the desired change, by any means, at any cost? The last question, of where the individual fits, moves back to what the individual in question can do to change at this very moment.

This is a circular movement, from the personal to the selfless and back to the personal. It mirrors a form of Lenten practice in confession, self-denial, waiting for discernment, and final return to a re-awakened everyday practice.

Sharing relies on noting the self and leaving the self, then leaving the strategy to return back to life. This is a form of witness to which the Progressive Christian Movement, on the Internet and in the board room, immediately aspires.

May we enter then, together, into this season of Lent, conscious of the great multitude which waits to be fed, conscious of our own hunger, as of our talents, and of the miracle of sharing, manifesting even now among us.

(This essay is cross-posted at Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, where I am this week’s guest-blogger)

Witnessing in a crowd has a particular role to play. As when Jesus dispensed the five loaves and two fishes that fed the crowd of hundreds, sharing actually proliferates and foments grace among individuals until it affects the people around them. The miracle is that in sharing, good things actually multiply until they fill every hungry mouth.

If you believe an active group can accomplish more than individuals in isolation, that it can build up individual courage, and allow individual talents to shine, then you believe in aggregated witness.

So I’d like to share two examples from my own work.

The first has to do with bloggers and readers, just like the guest blog you’re now reading. The Internet allows a special kind of witness, making it possible for you, the reader, to create your own witness in response to mine, instantly.

The second has to do with activities afoot right now among Progressive Christian activists, by which I mean both those concerned about addressing issues like poverty from within church congregations, and those who would prevail upon Christians to make issues like poverty matter once more in American politics. Their witness intends to begin direct and tangible appearances in American society within the next year.

For the hunger that haunts America is at once physical hunger in the shape of the 37 million Americans who live in poverty, the one million added each year, those who live down the very street each of us live on who by some accident, injury, or mistake will be unable to feed their families — and a spiritual hunger, in the form of fake religion, fake compassion, fake values, fake diplomacy, and fake dialogue.

Both hungers are worsened in the age of mass media, where it has been, until recently, all but impossible for voices of compassion to break through the white noise of fake Christians, empty values, and the politics of blind-eye-turning to human cruelty.

Witnessing on the Internet

When witnesses come to town, souls wake up. The Internet brings witness to everyone’s town. Bloggers serve a role that itinerant ministers played in the age of John Wesley.

Wesley’s Methodist circuit riders took the gospel by horseback to poor miners and farmers who never before had the opportunity to engage Christian teachings. The long-term result of their work was what we call the Progressive Era of politics, a sudden boom of concern for the poor. Progressive politicians got poor children out of the mines and into schools; they passed acts to protect divorced and abused women; they legalized unions, and laid the foundations for Civil Rights.

Spreading information to people who don’t have access to it creates the possibility for working together among people who have hitherto been suppressed by powerful, entrenched interests.

Bloggers write because they’ve been transformed. People respond because they’re moved by witnessing such a transformation. Street Prophets, the major discussion board for progressive religion, regularly gets fifty comments to a single post, of which there may be twenty a day. The newspapers of America regularly report on the expansion of bloggers and blog-readers — getting and sharing information this way is becoming part of everyday life for many people. The bloggers at Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and throughout the Progressive Christian Bloggers Network are actively testifying to the power of witness, so much so that the stranger who googles the phrase “Christian Blogger” learns first about Progressive Christians at work, not about Pat Robertson. As the patterns of reading and sharing on the Internet expand, the power of this form of witness will continue to expand.

Aggregating the Witnesses

Sneaking links into this information is powerful: it means that if you find one blog, soon you know that there’s a movement, whether or not the blog explicitly tells you so. Information in the same place is also good for encyclopedia-like power to search under topics — that’s what Google did for all the information on the Net, but also what Progressive Christians could do for Progressive Christian sermons and blogs.

Finally, shared information means helping collaborate in the most basic senses — at the moment, the National Council of Churches and Sojourners only know about each other’s events, lobbying, press releases, and mailing lists haphazardly. To plan for greater numbers at their turnouts, greater participation in their conferences, and greater effect behind their important lobbies, they, as well as smaller groups and tiny blogging communities and Sunday School clubs, need to share.

CrossLeft.org is one example of an aggregator that seeks to network Progressive Christian work. CrossLeft newsstreams pull together hundreds of Progressive Christian blog headlines into a dozen different streams (clergy’s personal stories, just politics, mostly theology, etc.), so that after an event like the horrible bombings in Samara, you can literally watch as reactions spread through the Progressive Christian community: prayers are posted, political Jeremiads are delivered, proposals for relief mooted, all by bloggers and their readers.

Aggregation is powerful because it enables individuals to feel that they’re not alone, and shows strangers that we inhabit a neighborhood of other people with similar experiences.

CrossLeft is only one form of aggregation. Co-blogging, like the Sollicitudo Rei Socialis guest blog and the regular Progressive Faith Blog Carnival, is another way. This form of aggregation brings strong voices into the same room, and offers real quality to readers. Discussion boards like StreetProphets are yet another way of showing numbers and solidarity. Linking to each other’s sites is also a good way for people with weblogs to testify to the fact thay they’re in community with other people whose work they value.

For people who run organizations, conference calls are another way of sharing. Live conferences for denominations is another.

Individuals can also share information, wisdom, and experience, just by letting others know what they’re up to. Even without a blog, you can share sites and articles you found valuable, by noting what you’ve been looking at with the tag PROCHRIST (PROgressive CHRISTian) on information sharing sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr, which let individuals tell the world which websites or pictures they’re looking at. Going to a local church where there are people you feel comfortable with is another great way to share. There’s no one way to share, but the sharing is vital to our life as a community.

In the faces of other members of the church, we see Christ’s own features; in the charitable works of their hands, in every loving word or comment exchanged, we feel the loving touch of Christ’s own hands.

From Aggregation to Agenda: The Progressive Christian Leadership Summit, Feb. 4-5, 2006

In the name of aggregation, CrossLeft recently held a summit of activist leadership in San Francisco.

We had fifty leaders of Progressive Christian organizations; new groups in Nevada and Oregon; solid think tanks from the Washington, D.C. beltway; ninety-year-old crowds like the million-person California Council of Churches.

Our goal was to put on the table the values, issues, and actions that Progressive Christians are working toward. We wanted to find the political issues and cultural ideas that had the greatest purchase in American culture.

We wanted to review what everyone was doing, and to choose a couple of big actions for collaboration that represented issues everyone cared about. We wanted to get as many organizations as possible to sign up to help participate in these actions.

You can read an overview of the values, issues, and actions we talked about on the CrossLeft site. You will eventually be able to access a database of groups’ strengths, weaknesses, and contact information.

Essentially, the summit allowed us to point to what, to the best of our knowledge, represents the five big actions the Progressive Christian Movement will be working on in 2006. These are:

• To elect Progressive Christians to office, principally through the distribution of Christian Values Voting Guides;
• To oppose the Iraq War, especially through church school programs and adult study toolkits;
• To map moderate-to-progressive churches and Progressive Christian organizations;
• To establish a national network of Progressive Christian groups on college campuses;
• To engage in protests and lobbying focusing on the budget as a moral document.

CrossLeft suggested, and will promote, a very straight-forward plan for accountability. On top of each action is one coordinator, a representative from some activist group. The coordinator’s job is to keep calling and writing all groups, from Sojourners to the local church, who are involved with the coordinator’s particular project. The coordinator will ask them to brainstorm together, share resources, think about areas where their work is redundant, and think about what still needs to be done.

Our disorganization and isolation is the single biggest factor working against the Progressive Christian Movement. Collaboration across organizations is difficult, and it’s never really been tried before in the Progressive Christian Movement, where Methodists work with Methodists and not Episcopalians, and peace activists work with peace activists and not homeless advocates.

The reason we’re so dispersed is a throwback to the sudden way we came to meet each other: many participants in the summit confessed that they had an “aha” moment on or around 9/11. Thus, many of the organizations that showed up are only a year old or less, although some are already powerhouses like the above-mentioned California Council of Churches. The flourishing of a new generation of activists is a testament to the times, and a witness to growing interest in the movement and its work.

The new generation needs to learn how to work together. Only when we understand who’s out there and what they’re working on will these attempts to put together large movement-wide collaboration come together.

Only with the best and brightest of all backgrounds can we really begin to develop strategies to win cultural battles, to break through the fortress of the media, to defeat the idiom of right-wing pseudo-Christian politics for good, and to win back real territory for Christian values.

That’s why we need you to read and to witness, in whatever form your calling takes you. Witnessing is the work that brings the broken pieces of God’s body together.

Let that witness be about sharing information, spreading the loaves and fishes through the entire crowd, until so great a multitude is transformed that the faith will last another thousand years.

A Call to Witness: Lent

The last month’s several shared blogs and the San Francisco summit both set the course for an experiment in movement that will be taking off in the next several weeks, even while the church invites Christians to participate in one of the great religious rituals of collective discernment through Lent.

Lent is an invitation for the individual to take some comfort and offer it up to God. That action, in its act of pure, arbitrary will, makes room for the individual to change according to a greater plan.

There are many individual readers who feel discouraged and isolated, fed up with American politics and the culture of the self, hungry for political change, and unsure of where to give their talents. Even among bloggers and organizers, there is legitimate concern about how to best strategize with each other, that our poor, solitary efforts should amount to more than a futile series of protests.

Let me therefore offer, in the spirit of sharing and inspiration, a very small spiritual practice in the form of a meditation, which may be engaged as part of a Lenten discipline.

1. What issues do I personally feel most moved about?
2. What is it that the movement itself needs to succeed, regardless of where my own talents or inclinations lie?
3. What form of working with others allows me to share the most good?

The first question is extremely personal, the innate emotional pull of where an individual is at the moment. The second is detached and political, even theoretical — what form of action would produce the desired change, by any means, at any cost? The last question, of where the individual fits, moves back to what the individual in question can do to change at this very moment.

This is a circular movement, from the personal to the selfless and back to the personal. It mirrors a form of Lenten practice in confession, self-denial, waiting for discernment, and final return to a re-awakened everyday practice.

Sharing relies on noting the self and leaving the self, then leaving the strategy to return back to life. This is a form of witness to which the Progressive Christian Movement, on the Internet and in the board room, immediately aspires.

May we enter then, together, into this season of Lent, conscious of the great multitude which waits to be fed, conscious of our own hunger, as of our talents, and of the miracle of sharing, manifesting even now among us.

I was Googling the words “fish emblem,” hoping to find a nice seventeenth-century emblem of Jesus feeding the multitude with the five loaves and fishes for an illustration to an essay.

Google found me a few scholarly pictures of manuscripts amidst the multitude of chrome fishes for sale, to be affixed to the cars of well-meaning evangelicals across America.

And then I saw it.

The “Sinner Fish.”

It took my breath away. Every Christian should have one, I thought.

The Sinner Fish, a reminder that Christ loves all of us, Christian and not. That the Christian is no different than the non-Christian with regards to his morality, for every Christian is a sinner as well. That the sinning Christian comes closest to God when he loves his fellow sinners and gives them the shirt off of his back.

I immediately betook myself to the website and wondered if I could buy a few dozen sinner fish for friends at church.

But immediately, visions of confrontations in parking lots began to race through my mind, and I began to feel a little queasy about how public I want my witness to be…

(”Are you callin’ Jesus a SINNER?” “No, man, I just know that the Lord came to SAVE sinners, all of us!”)

Anyway, I’m not even sure what the intention of the Sinner Fish maker was. There on the Darwin Fish website you can find some pretty darn offensive material for your automobile, including an Evolution Fish humping an Ichthus Fish, a Satan Fish, an Isis Fish, and a Flying Spaghetti Monster Fish.

I was, however, mercifully spared the decision to witness, this once.

The Sinner Fish is temporarily out of stock.

I was Googling the words “fish emblem,” hoping to find a nice seventeenth-century emblem of Jesus feeding the multitude with the five loaves and fishes for an illustration to an essay.

Google found me a few scholarly pictures of manuscripts amidst the multitude of chrome fishes for sale, to be affixed to the cars of well-meaning evangelicals across America.

And then I saw it.

The “Sinner Fish.”

It took my breath away. Every Christian should have one, I thought.

The Sinner Fish, a reminder that Christ loves all of us, Christian and not. That the Christian is no different than the non-Christian with regards to his morality, for every Christian is a sinner as well. That the sinning Christian comes closest to God when he loves his fellow sinners and gives them the shirt off of his back.

I immediately betook myself to the website and wondered if I could buy a few dozen sinner fish for friends at church.

But immediately, visions of confrontations in parking lots began to race through my mind, and I began to feel a little queasy about how public I want my witness to be…

(”Are you callin’ Jesus a SINNER?” “No, man, I just know that the Lord came to SAVE sinners, all of us!”)

Anyway, I’m not even sure what the intention of the Sinner Fish maker was. There on the Darwin Fish website you can find some pretty darn offensive material for your automobile, including an Evolution Fish humping an Ichthus Fish, a Satan Fish, an Isis Fish, and a Flying Spaghetti Monster Fish.

I was, however, mercifully spared the decision to witness, this once.

The Sinner Fish is temporarily out of stock.

Al Askari Mosque - Wikipedia
87 dead, the Guardian counted last night. On NPR, American soldiers are interviewed as being shocked that grenades were being thrown at them from the Samarra police station. So civil war rattles into being in Iraq, even as America builds its nuclear reserve. A sad day for the world. Christ, have mercy.

Al Askari Mosque - Wikipedia
87 dead, the Guardian counted last night. On NPR, American soldiers are interviewed as being shocked that grenades were being thrown at them from the Samarra police station. So civil war rattles into being in Iraq, even as America builds its nuclear reserve. A sad day for the world. Christ, have mercy.

Bernard Mandeville writes in 1723:

Few children make any progress at school, but t the same time are capable of being employed in some business or other, so that every Hour of those poor people spent at their books is so much time lost to society.

Going to school in comparison to working is idleness, and the longer boys continue in this easy sort of life, the more unfit they’ll be, when grown up for downright labour, both as to strength and inclination.

Men who are to remain and end their days in a laborious, tiresome, and painful station of life, the sooner they are to put upon it at first, the more patiently they’ll submit to it for ever after.

— “An Essay on the Charity Schools”

Schools discipline their students for certain forms of engagement: tedium, activity, leisure. Our own system has been described as a “forced system of prolonged adolescence” for the manufacture of “peons”.

Progressive politics (in nineteenth-century American and Britain) was among the most trenchant advocates of extended mandatory schooling (so as to save the children from the mines and to provide a rationale for universal suffrage).

On the other side, liberation theology has traditionally stood on the side of informal education instead of formalized top-down education dictated from a national level.

In our era of mass distraction among pupils, of limited success with universal testing programs, and the least common denominator of educational ambition, Mandeville, Progressive politics, and Liberation Theology provide the three models most likely to be taken by argument.

Bernard Mandeville writes in 1723:

Few children make any progress at school, but t the same time are capable of being employed in some business or other, so that every Hour of those poor people spent at their books is so much time lost to society.

Going to school in comparison to working is idleness, and the longer boys continue in this easy sort of life, the more unfit they’ll be, when grown up for downright labour, both as to strength and inclination.

Men who are to remain and end their days in a laborious, tiresome, and painful station of life, the sooner they are to put upon it at first, the more patiently they’ll submit to it for ever after.

— “An Essay on the Charity Schools”

Schools discipline their students for certain forms of engagement: tedium, activity, leisure. Our own system has been described as a “forced system of prolonged adolescence” for the manufacture of “peons”.

Progressive politics (in nineteenth-century American and Britain) was among the most trenchant advocates of extended mandatory schooling (so as to save the children from the mines and to provide a rationale for universal suffrage).

On the other side, liberation theology has traditionally stood on the side of informal education instead of formalized top-down education dictated from a national level.

In our era of mass distraction among pupils, of limited success with universal testing programs, and the least common denominator of educational ambition, Mandeville, Progressive politics, and Liberation Theology provide the three models most likely to be taken by argument.

Back on campus today, writing in the grad student lounge whilst hammering out serious notes on the bureaucracy and civil service (from John Brewer’s masterpiece, The Sinews of Power (1989)).

As always, the company of grad students on campus causes me a strange reaction. I’ve seen myself here so many times.

In my mind’s eye I can imagine (and recall) the happy conversations, the rapid exchanges of ideas. The fantasy is so vivid that every betrayal of it sacks me in the gut and leaves me feeling loose, unhinged, disconnected.

Like today, and like every day, when I write in their company too often — I find myself looking up from my work, studying the blond hipster in a faded check shirt (the blue fades to white with wear around his cuffs), the girl flipping through notes by her laptop and the next table.

I both want to speak and am afraid — afraid because, in reality, no grad student strikes up conversation with a stranger in the library or the study room or the cafe. It happens only in film. Strangers talk to each other in the Mission District of San Francisco, amidst the homeless and the starving musicians, but never in the Berkeley library.

Speaking to loose acquaintances is liable, all grad students know, to prompt hysteric displays of insecurities: lavish boasting on the one hand and asinine whining about unsolvable dilemmas on the other.

In the company of grad students I always want to approach strangers and find myself choking in my inability to connect.

Words from T.S.Eliot come back to me: “She would like someone to speak to her / and is almost afraid that someone may commit the indiscretion.”

And so another scene comes back to me, from Lars von Trier’s film work of genius, “The 5 Obstructions,” a 2004 collaboration (or act of sadism) between Lars von Trier and his own mentor, Dutch filmmaker Jorgen Leth.

In the film, the two intellectuals are trying together to remake Jorgen’s 1967 short, The Perfect Human. They boast, they brawl. They over-perform. They get self-conscious. Amidst their bizarre, intellectual jousting is spliced scenes from the original 1967 shot (in its ultra-modern white-screen space-age black-and-white glory) and its animated, Indian, and Cuban remakes.

And in each remake, the character main character, the perfect human, pauses from his shaving and dining and other lonely, perfect, activities, to recite, resignedly, as he did in 1967, the following line:

“Today, also, I saw something that I hope to understand in a couple of days.”

A line gesturing past fear to some place where insecure individuals moving through the world may meet each other.

Back on campus today, writing in the grad student lounge whilst hammering out serious notes on the bureaucracy and civil service (from John Brewer’s masterpiece, The Sinews of Power (1989)).

As always, the company of grad students on campus causes me a strange reaction. I’ve seen myself here so many times.

In my mind’s eye I can imagine (and recall) the happy conversations, the rapid exchanges of ideas. The fantasy is so vivid that every betrayal of it sacks me in the gut and leaves me feeling loose, unhinged, disconnected.

Like today, and like every day, when I write in their company too often — I find myself looking up from my work, studying the blond hipster in a faded check shirt (the blue fades to white with wear around his cuffs), the girl flipping through notes by her laptop and the next table.

I both want to speak and am afraid — afraid because, in reality, no grad student strikes up conversation with a stranger in the library or the study room or the cafe. It happens only in film. Strangers talk to each other in the Mission District of San Francisco, amidst the homeless and the starving musicians, but never in the Berkeley library.

Speaking to loose acquaintances is liable, all grad students know, to prompt hysteric displays of insecurities: lavish boasting on the one hand and asinine whining about unsolvable dilemmas on the other.

In the company of grad students I always want to approach strangers and find myself choking in my inability to connect.

Words from T.S.Eliot come back to me: “She would like someone to speak to her / and is almost afraid that someone may commit the indiscretion.”

And so another scene comes back to me, from Lars von Trier’s film work of genius, “The 5 Obstructions,” a 2004 collaboration (or act of sadism) between Lars von Trier and his own mentor, Dutch filmmaker Jorgen Leth.

In the film, the two intellectuals are trying together to remake Jorgen’s 1967 short, The Perfect Human. They boast, they brawl. They over-perform. They get self-conscious. Amidst their bizarre, intellectual jousting is spliced scenes from the original 1967 shot (in its ultra-modern white-screen space-age black-and-white glory) and its animated, Indian, and Cuban remakes.

And in each remake, the character main character, the perfect human, pauses from his shaving and dining and other lonely, perfect, activities, to recite, resignedly, as he did in 1967, the following line:

“Today, also, I saw something that I hope to understand in a couple of days.”

A line gesturing past fear to some place where insecure individuals moving through the world may meet each other.

freemason spire in mendocino, california
Originally uploaded by joguldi.

The angel of time with his scythe braids the hair of a maiden repairing the toppled columns of the temple.

Just back from a weekend in Mendocino, staying at the Sweetwater Inn and hiking around the headlines with my parents.

This spire now stands atop the current Mendocino Savings Bank, the former Freemason Temple for the region.

freemason spire in mendocino, california
Originally uploaded by joguldi.

The angel of time with his scythe braids the hair of a maiden repairing the toppled columns of the temple.

Just back from a weekend in Mendocino, staying at the Sweetwater Inn and hiking around the headlines with my parents.

This spire now stands atop the current Mendocino Savings Bank, the former Freemason Temple for the region.

For many months now I have been praying for the peculiar blessings of constantly-experienced joy.

In the shower this morning three exquisite joys came to me and I held them for fifteen minutes, as if savoring the flavor of some rare coffee that had to be turned over in the mouth:

- The rare love of daughters that is given to certain fathers. My roommate’s father is staying with us, and while he went to sleep in the guest room before I got home last night, I thought that I would surely meet him and see him smile on his daughter today.

- The special love of God for the depressed. I thought of those whose depressions have been cured by love, and those who go into depression because they sense a special need for some kind of love nowhere expressed in their every-day life.

- God’s special love of monks. I thought of the smiles of monks, their modest and courageous self-discipline, downplaying themselves in order to pursue certain aims of education and activism.

I felt each of these loves like a hand soft around my heart.

Yesterday the tag on the tea-bag of Yogi Dong Quai Tea in my mug read, “Make yourself so happy that when others see you they become happy too.”

For many months now I have been praying for the peculiar blessings of constantly-experienced joy.

In the shower this morning three exquisite joys came to me and I held them for fifteen minutes, as if savoring the flavor of some rare coffee that had to be turned over in the mouth:

- The rare love of daughters that is given to certain fathers. My roommate’s father is staying with us, and while he went to sleep in the guest room before I got home last night, I thought that I would surely meet him and see him smile on his daughter today.

- The special love of God for the depressed. I thought of those whose depressions have been cured by love, and those who go into depression because they sense a special need for some kind of love nowhere expressed in their every-day life.

- God’s special love of monks. I thought of the smiles of monks, their modest and courageous self-discipline, downplaying themselves in order to pursue certain aims of education and activism.

I felt each of these loves like a hand soft around my heart.

Yesterday the tag on the tea-bag of Yogi Dong Quai Tea in my mug read, “Make yourself so happy that when others see you they become happy too.”

All of my life, since fourteen or so, I’ve read myself into the pursuer’s role in love. I’ve never thought of myself as a hunter or exploiter, but I *did* identify with Dante and Abelard themselves, rather than Beatrice or Heloise.

Most of all, I identified with Shakespeare’s Viola of Twelfth Night: the cross-dressing heroine, who becomes a page in order to win the affections of her long-suffering Sebastian, mad for love for the proud heiress Olivia: all of the long-suffering, long-waiting, sweet-speaking single heroes who waited to be recognized by their objects of desire.

I understand Viola, waiting for Sebastian. Comfortable as his companion, I wait while he pursues harlots and harpies, Cleopatras and shepherdesses. I do not understand why Sebastian goes where he goes; nor do I resent it; nor do I understand why he doesn’t think of me as an object of desire. Nor do I understand those who think that I should turn to them simply because of my being the object of their own desire.

Viola is the prototype of another age: as historians of sexuality like Tom Laqueur have pointed out, the Violas who love silently at a distance and woo and win like men belong a Renaissance mentality more susceptible than ours to the concept that gender is a performance, a dance put on, not the simple DNA of birth and life and death into which we are born.

There is surely no real feminism or belief in the freedom and individuality of a woman’s soul until we have room for Viola.

It’s been quite a week. I’ve just been through a breakup with my best friend of 2005, and it may be a while until we speak again; my best friend of 2004 isn’t speaking to me because I wouldn’t go out with him and had the stupidity to argue with him about why; one of the men I admire most right now wants to woo me, and, less interested by far, I foresee it ending in tears; I’ve just gone out for a drink with the man whom I admire most in the world, and he is brilliant and lovely and yet more interested in someone whom he himself deems mostly unsuitable. God bless us all.

I dislike the 90’s addiction to dragging one’s personal life into political discourse. I hesitate to even bring up this constellation of sordid events. But it reminds me of something long in my heart, something longing for a voice. I’m sitting in the middle of warring egos and warring loves: every character in this bizarre drama is an intelligent, loving creature, begging the universe for his or her own just deserts in the form of another human being. None of us are getting what we truly want. All of us are reaching some grim reconciliation: some by yelling at God, some in anger, some by not speaking to someone else, some by pining wistfully, some by existential incertitude, some by accepting Providence.

I don’t want to preach about the faults of romantic love, or the valor of suffering through long denial. I don’t want to draw a lesson about longing or my imperilment as a woman from this. All of these points seem equally artificial, and equally mute to the dumb, worthless, stupid suffering of us all — creatures who admire each other and yet look past each other at something else.

And yet: something in my heart is saying that if ever there was a lesson about gender, a lesson is here. How often we’ve watched movies about heroes longing eternally for heroines who turn them down. I watched one last night: The Fisher King, seen for at least showing number six in my short life; my roommates quoting every line of the movie as the film rolled on:

The much longing homeless Latin teacher Parry at last has his chance with the frigid Lydia. Lydia freaks. Parry persists:

We just met, made love and broke up,
all in the space of seconds.

I don’t remember the first kiss,
which is the best part.

The audience swoons. He understands that the object of his desire is hesitant! He grants her that liberty! What a kind and understanding man! See how much he deserves her? The audience, from this very moment, knows that Parry will win in the end. From this one blossom of generosity, it is clear to us all that he has, in every way, deserved, and therefore, won her.

A meditation on the limits of gender in contemporary discourse long overdue, and yet so irrelevant to so many things in politics today. And yet: here’s where I am. How many stories have we heard where the hero pines for the heroine, and after long discernment or frustration, he at last says the right thing, and she breaks down? How few stories do we have when the itinerant heroine, a stranger who knows herself and her mind, meets him, speaks sweet words, waits for the him, and he gives in at last?

The Fisher King offers a prototype more typical of our age. Anne, the long-suffering, lasagna-baking girlfriend, has nurtured Jack all along. She waits for his affection, rants to thin air, coaxes, coerces, and is left, before Jack eventually comes to his senses and returns to her. Woman in a relationship must wait. Man in a relationship leaves and then returns.

Lydia, the single woman, ambles like an inchoate doe through the labyrinth of New York skyscrapers. Single woman, blind in the world, waiting to be made a woman by the initiatory exercise of some man’s affection. Single man, like a hunter, capturing woman and melding her to him. Dating woman, loyal to the core, employing innumerable tactics to keep her man’s attention. Dating man, ever looking to see if he can do better.

In the twenty-first century, our love-stories are primitive stories of apish men wooing and conquering the strange woman, of the woman who cooks and makes love winning back her husband : they are not stories of the new and courageous woman who wins her equal by talking and wooing and feeling equally to him.

Until we have more such stories of Viola, I reckon glumly that I’m in trouble.

Smart women are doomed to be pursued by creatures who feel themselves worthy and will prove themselves until they’re exhausted.

Smart women will be expected to prove themselves over and over again to the men who are ostensibly wedded to them.

And the equality of the sexes, the kind and equal relationship where woman and man both talk and love and struggle?

That waits for us in an alternative time, or, perhaps, in the seventeenth century, where we abandoned it for other things.

Man of my dreams: listen when I tell you my stranger’s admiration of you. Don’t reckon your own worth or passion enough to make you deserving of any other creature, even as I don’t deserve any one by mere fact of admiration. Hold me when I’m crying. Let us both be honest and courageous and cheerful and loving, even when turned down, even when moving on. Man of my dreams: you have, you do. God bless you. Then accept and consider my stranger’s admiration with all the weight you might give it if you were Beatrice and I Dante.