I'd first heard of Retribution Gospel Choir in connection with frontman Alan Sparhawk's main band Low; but I didn't really get into them until last year, when they released their EP the revolution on-line for free. In fact, it's still on-line for free. Ironic, since it's also for sale on itunes. Why undercut their own revenue with free samples?
Of course, for a tiny, underexposed side-project like RGC, free samples make perfect sense. You can hook new listeners with free samplers. I myself went and got their first 2 albums after downloading the revolution. The revolution is new-media marketing at its shrewdest, cutting-edge tactics for the new post-music-industrial-complex era.
Which internet-shrewdness I find hilarious, because RGC is just such a retro throwback of a band! Case in point: RGC just released their 3rd album (imaginatively entitled 3), and as opposed to last year's efficient 4-song 10-minute internet EP, this cut is a sprawling 2-song 40-minute vinyl release, featuring one whole extended guitar jam per side.
Chew on that for a sec: Two 20-minute extended jams, and that's the whole record. Who does 20-minute, side-filling guitar jams anymore?? That's something that Pink Floyd, Iron Butterfly, Jethro Tull or some other Classic Rock fossil would do, not any band from the 21st century. Yet here we have it--a pair of un-ironic, non-self-conscious, strait-forward psychedelic guitar jams, participating in the most self-indulgent excesses of the Classic Rock era, released on LP in 2013.
And then just consider the format: one song per side. As in the side of a record. An LP. Made of vinyl. The length of each guitar jam is limited to 20-odd minutes, because that's how much much music fits on one side of a record. This ancient medium determined the format of the album. How much more retro can you get?
And yet this has been the overall trend for years now--with the ubiquity of MP3s, CD sales have decreased, while the surprise is that LP sales have increased. The more intangible and ephemeral our music-storage becomes, the greater our apparent need for formats we can heft, feel, connect with, touch (those sound-waves are physically etched into the grooves, after all). When Chaperone Records offers the option of buying 3 on CD, they tease, "Cop it before this 30 year old medium goes the way of the 8-track..." as though we weren't saying that about LPs just 20 years ago! Whereas CDs once announced the end of vinyl, LPs have had their karmic vengeance.
So here we have an odd phenomenon: RGC is simultaneously at the most cutting edge and most retro of music trends. They release free internet MP3s and old-school LP dinosaur rock. Everything old is new again. There is nothing new under the sun.
3 is a cool album, btw. Only 2 bucks on amazon if vinyl's not your thing. (As opposed to 10 bucks on itunes, seriously, screw itunes!)
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Friday, January 25, 2013
Epic of Gilgamesh and the Intentionality of Art
Must art be intentional? If you'd asked me two weeks ago, I'm pretty sure I would've answered with an unequivocal yes--the whole point of art, its whole raison d'etre, I probably would've claimed, is that someone has intentionally presented some artifact as art.
I would've cited Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" and so forth, wherein a urinal is intentionally presented as art, instead of as a mere urinal. You may not like "Fountain," you may not find it particularly pretty or even clever, but "Fountain" is still art, because the urinal was presented as art. Bad art if you wish, but still art. Duchamp merely calls attention to the fact that art is what ever we present as art--and therefore art must be intentional.
The wonders of nature I probably would've provisionally classified as "beautiful," even "sublime"-- even exceeding the works of art by man in beauty and sublimity--but still not art, for it's not obvious that nature is presented as art. (Now, one might argue then that God is an artist and nature is his highest creation, but that's a discussion for another day). Beauty, then, is received and interpreted by the subject, while art is presented by the artist. With intention.
My simplistic (and provisional) classification of art as "intentional," however, was thrown out of whack last week when I finally read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the impossibly-ancient Sumerian poem from 4,000-odd years ago. It is quite possibly the oldest surviving work of literature in the world; it predates Homer by centuries.
It was originally written on clay tablets because, well, the Egyptians still hadn't invented paper yet. As such, it has come down to us only in fragments (we still do not have the entire Epic of Gilgamesh in other words)--a fragmentation that was surely un-intentional on the part of writers. Any scholarly edition of Gilgamesh (I read the most recent Penguin edition) is filled with editorial asides that mark where there were breaks in the tablets and certain lines have been lost. Yet this fragmentation is, at least for me, now part of the whole aesthetic experience of the Epic.
Without getting into plot summary, the Epic concerns the friendship and various adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Gilgamesh's great grief when Enkidu falls ill and dies. Upon Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh goes in search of Utnapishtim, the Babylonian Noah, to try to learn the secret of eternal life (he fails, btw). The Epic's main preoccupation, then, is the fear of death--and it's rather sobering to contemplate that 4,000 years and countless technological innovations later, we are still no closer to resolving this fear of death than our most distant forebearers.
This preoccupation with death is really brought home during Enkidu's grand death-bed soliloquy, as Enkidu decries the unfairness of it all, how he longs to have died gloriously in battle rather than ignobly with sickness, and how time touches and ruins and destroys everything, and how none can escape--
And then there is another break in the tablets. "The next thirty lines are missing" informs the Penguin editor.
I had to put down the book for a moment there. My interest in Gilgamesh up till then had been mainly academic (hey, oldest book ever, why wouldn't I read it?), but that break caught me off guard. Not the text mind you, the break. For here's Enkidu soliloquizing of how all is lost to time, and then his soliloquy itself is lost to time. The sheer tragedy of Enkidu's death could not have been better underlined than by that break, even if the writer had intended it.
Which he most assuredly had not!
You see what I'm getting at? The Epic of Gilgamesh became infinitely more profound, tragic, and pathos-ridden for me because of that unintentional break, not despite it. But there was no intention behind that break--it was just the sheer random happenstance of chance and time that these particular fragments survived than others! And yet that very unintentional randomness is part of what gives the tragic pathos of Gilgamesh its peculiar power and heft.
Who knows, maybe things aren't as random as they sometimes seem, maybe God or some force beyond us created that break, which could not have been more tragically fortuitous than if it had been planned--but whether or not that be so, it is for sure that the ancient, forgotten-to-us writer of Gilgamesh did not plan, did not intend for that break to appear!
Something un-intentional underscored that work of art. What else is art without intention? The question of just what is art is more complex than ever for me.
I would've cited Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" and so forth, wherein a urinal is intentionally presented as art, instead of as a mere urinal. You may not like "Fountain," you may not find it particularly pretty or even clever, but "Fountain" is still art, because the urinal was presented as art. Bad art if you wish, but still art. Duchamp merely calls attention to the fact that art is what ever we present as art--and therefore art must be intentional.
The wonders of nature I probably would've provisionally classified as "beautiful," even "sublime"-- even exceeding the works of art by man in beauty and sublimity--but still not art, for it's not obvious that nature is presented as art. (Now, one might argue then that God is an artist and nature is his highest creation, but that's a discussion for another day). Beauty, then, is received and interpreted by the subject, while art is presented by the artist. With intention.
My simplistic (and provisional) classification of art as "intentional," however, was thrown out of whack last week when I finally read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the impossibly-ancient Sumerian poem from 4,000-odd years ago. It is quite possibly the oldest surviving work of literature in the world; it predates Homer by centuries.
It was originally written on clay tablets because, well, the Egyptians still hadn't invented paper yet. As such, it has come down to us only in fragments (we still do not have the entire Epic of Gilgamesh in other words)--a fragmentation that was surely un-intentional on the part of writers. Any scholarly edition of Gilgamesh (I read the most recent Penguin edition) is filled with editorial asides that mark where there were breaks in the tablets and certain lines have been lost. Yet this fragmentation is, at least for me, now part of the whole aesthetic experience of the Epic.
Without getting into plot summary, the Epic concerns the friendship and various adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Gilgamesh's great grief when Enkidu falls ill and dies. Upon Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh goes in search of Utnapishtim, the Babylonian Noah, to try to learn the secret of eternal life (he fails, btw). The Epic's main preoccupation, then, is the fear of death--and it's rather sobering to contemplate that 4,000 years and countless technological innovations later, we are still no closer to resolving this fear of death than our most distant forebearers.
This preoccupation with death is really brought home during Enkidu's grand death-bed soliloquy, as Enkidu decries the unfairness of it all, how he longs to have died gloriously in battle rather than ignobly with sickness, and how time touches and ruins and destroys everything, and how none can escape--
And then there is another break in the tablets. "The next thirty lines are missing" informs the Penguin editor.
I had to put down the book for a moment there. My interest in Gilgamesh up till then had been mainly academic (hey, oldest book ever, why wouldn't I read it?), but that break caught me off guard. Not the text mind you, the break. For here's Enkidu soliloquizing of how all is lost to time, and then his soliloquy itself is lost to time. The sheer tragedy of Enkidu's death could not have been better underlined than by that break, even if the writer had intended it.
Which he most assuredly had not!
You see what I'm getting at? The Epic of Gilgamesh became infinitely more profound, tragic, and pathos-ridden for me because of that unintentional break, not despite it. But there was no intention behind that break--it was just the sheer random happenstance of chance and time that these particular fragments survived than others! And yet that very unintentional randomness is part of what gives the tragic pathos of Gilgamesh its peculiar power and heft.
Who knows, maybe things aren't as random as they sometimes seem, maybe God or some force beyond us created that break, which could not have been more tragically fortuitous than if it had been planned--but whether or not that be so, it is for sure that the ancient, forgotten-to-us writer of Gilgamesh did not plan, did not intend for that break to appear!
Something un-intentional underscored that work of art. What else is art without intention? The question of just what is art is more complex than ever for me.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
On This MLK Day
So I teach MLK's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" to my freshman, ostensibly as an emulateable example of parallelism, amplification, and other effective rhetorical strategies. Of course, given the subject matter, the class discussion inevitably enters more meaty directions.
For example, most students nod along approvingly at Dr. King's virtuoso take-down of racist thought and institutions, and his justification for disobeying unjust laws, and of the need for "creative extremists." Let me be clear before proceeding that I deeply admire Dr. King's accomplishments, radical non-violence, and uncompromising moral clarity; but the complications begin immediately, the moment I ask what would happen if we all decided to disobey all laws we deemed unjust? (The Southern segregationists, after all, thought integration was unjust). "Anarchy" comes the confessed student response.
Where then do we draw the line between social stability and "creative extremism," between needed and unneeded tension? That line is as difficult to parse today as in 1963.
At LDSBC, I complicate this dilemma further by pointing out that, in the LDS faith, we have an Article of Faith and Scriptural commands to "obey the laws of the land," "for he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land" (D&C 58:21). There is no qualifier for whether the laws be just or unjust. So where then do we stand in relation to Dr. King?
I tell them how the Church was able to build a Temple in Soviet East Germany during the Cold War precisely because the Saints trapped there kept "the laws of the land," and the Communist authorities knew that; obeying "the laws of the land" moved the work forward.
More darkly, I tell the story of the LDS youth working for the Underground in Nazi Germany, who listened to BBC Radio and spread the word about Nazi atrocities and how the war effort was actually going, and for their troubles were not only executed by the state, but also excommunicated by the Church; they had broken the commandment of God to "obey the laws of the land."
And of course, when Missouri passed the flatly-unjust Extermination Order, those Saints obeyed the law of the land and left.
I give a thought experiment--it's 1851, and Congress has just passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal felony to aid and abet an escaping slave. You're preparing to cross the plains from Illinois to Utah, when all of sudden a black man from nearby Missouri appears, begging you to hide him from slave-trackers hot on his trail. "I want to join my family in freedom up North!" he begs, "Please, you Mormons hate Missourians too, right? You gotta hide me!" It is a divine commandment to obey the laws of the land, and the law of the land at that moment is that you must turn that man over to the slave-trackers. What do you do?
After a brief silence, the super-majority of students confess that they would help the slave hide--even the students who only a minute ago claimed that we should just always do whatever the Prophet has said. The more thoughtful say they would pray about it--then help the black man anyways.
Some even admit that they would help him because their conscious wouldn't let them do otherwise, no matter what the commandment says--and I'm not sure they recognized the full import or implications of what they're saying. (Your conscious takes precedence over God? I don't ask that rhetorically) (To quoth Thoreau, "Why then does every man have a conscious?").
To date, only two students have said they wouldn't help, and in both cases their concern was about how violation of federal law would affect the safety of their families, not about whether they squared with the "law of the land."
Then, to complicate the issue even further, I point out that those aforementioned German youth were later posthumously reinstated into full fellowship by a frankly-embarrassed Church leadership; that we revere the American Revolution as divinely decreed, despite it being an undisputed example of disobeying the "laws of the land"; and as one student helpfully pointed out, although missionaries are forbidden to swim, if you see a small child drowning in a pool, I sure hope you jump in to save her.
Most students, then, resolve this conflict between conscious and law by accepting that certain commandment trump others--that the duty to save life trumps mission rules, that battling injustice trumps the laws of the land, and so forth. But really we've only returned to square one, for if certain commandments trump others, then when and how do which commandments trump which? When two commandments conflict, which do we obey? What is our criteria? And we are back where we started.
What suddenly struck me this last week as I taught MLK's "Letter," is that this clash of commandments is not peripheral to doctrinal consideration, but are actually central, even fundamental to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. No less a doctrinal-conservative as Boyd K. Packer has taught that Justice and Mercy are eternal principles, yet are also in opposition to each other, an irreconcilable paradox that it took the awful price of the Atonement to resolve. "Mercy cannot rob justice," nor can justice rob mercy. The constant clash of commandments and principles is why Jesus had to be raised on the cross. The dilemmas presented by Dr. King are not theoretical thought experiments, but central to religious experience.
This fraught tension is best articulated in Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," his unparallelled analysis of the Abrahamic sacrifice, and the "paradox of faith" he presents: Abraham is promised progeny like unto the stars in number, yet the very God who made that promise withholds on its fulfillment for not years but decades--and when the covenant child is at last delivered, he's promptly told to turn around and kill him, in violation of not only the covenant, but of the just laws of God themselves (namely, thou shalt not kill).
This is the paradox of faith; the commandments can be contradictory, the ethical principles at play seem to cancel each other out. Why then, asks Kierkegaard, does Abraham not just throw his hands in the air and just walk away? "Forget it!" he could've screamed, "There is no rhyme nor reason to any of this, I will not violate my conscious, I'm going home!" Yet such would not have let him off the hook; even my atheist students at SLCC recognize that the tension between social order and social justice is a fine line not so easily resolved or distinguished--David Foster Wallace said we all worship something, and whether that's our God or our own personal set of inviolable ethical principles, still there is going to be contradictions between our most deeply-held beliefs.
Kierkegaard stands in awe of Abraham, then, because Abraham effects the most sublime example of what Kierkegaard coins "the leap of faith"--contrary to certain critics, faith is not an uncritical acceptance of wild fancy over fact, oh no, faith actually accepts the presence of skepticism and doubt, faith beholds the irresolvable tensions quite soberly. If our Church teaches that doubt cannot exist where faith is, it's not because faith ontologically eliminates doubt, but rather because faith faces down doubt straight in the eye. Faith is not knowing everything and knowing you don't know everything, yet leaping anyways. Faith embraces the awful paradox.
For Abraham, the paradox was resolved by the ram in the thicket; for Christ, it was resolved by the cross and the resurrection. As for us and MLK, it is resolved on a case-by-case basis, leaving us to grapple with the tensions and paradoxes at all times. And don't think that you can escape the test, whether you're an atheist or a devout believer; the clearer your own personal moral codes, the more difficult the tensions become. Perhaps this is why the Atonement had to be infinite, to account for the full paradox of faith.
For example, most students nod along approvingly at Dr. King's virtuoso take-down of racist thought and institutions, and his justification for disobeying unjust laws, and of the need for "creative extremists." Let me be clear before proceeding that I deeply admire Dr. King's accomplishments, radical non-violence, and uncompromising moral clarity; but the complications begin immediately, the moment I ask what would happen if we all decided to disobey all laws we deemed unjust? (The Southern segregationists, after all, thought integration was unjust). "Anarchy" comes the confessed student response.
Where then do we draw the line between social stability and "creative extremism," between needed and unneeded tension? That line is as difficult to parse today as in 1963.
At LDSBC, I complicate this dilemma further by pointing out that, in the LDS faith, we have an Article of Faith and Scriptural commands to "obey the laws of the land," "for he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land" (D&C 58:21). There is no qualifier for whether the laws be just or unjust. So where then do we stand in relation to Dr. King?
I tell them how the Church was able to build a Temple in Soviet East Germany during the Cold War precisely because the Saints trapped there kept "the laws of the land," and the Communist authorities knew that; obeying "the laws of the land" moved the work forward.
More darkly, I tell the story of the LDS youth working for the Underground in Nazi Germany, who listened to BBC Radio and spread the word about Nazi atrocities and how the war effort was actually going, and for their troubles were not only executed by the state, but also excommunicated by the Church; they had broken the commandment of God to "obey the laws of the land."
And of course, when Missouri passed the flatly-unjust Extermination Order, those Saints obeyed the law of the land and left.
I give a thought experiment--it's 1851, and Congress has just passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal felony to aid and abet an escaping slave. You're preparing to cross the plains from Illinois to Utah, when all of sudden a black man from nearby Missouri appears, begging you to hide him from slave-trackers hot on his trail. "I want to join my family in freedom up North!" he begs, "Please, you Mormons hate Missourians too, right? You gotta hide me!" It is a divine commandment to obey the laws of the land, and the law of the land at that moment is that you must turn that man over to the slave-trackers. What do you do?
After a brief silence, the super-majority of students confess that they would help the slave hide--even the students who only a minute ago claimed that we should just always do whatever the Prophet has said. The more thoughtful say they would pray about it--then help the black man anyways.
Some even admit that they would help him because their conscious wouldn't let them do otherwise, no matter what the commandment says--and I'm not sure they recognized the full import or implications of what they're saying. (Your conscious takes precedence over God? I don't ask that rhetorically) (To quoth Thoreau, "Why then does every man have a conscious?").
To date, only two students have said they wouldn't help, and in both cases their concern was about how violation of federal law would affect the safety of their families, not about whether they squared with the "law of the land."
Then, to complicate the issue even further, I point out that those aforementioned German youth were later posthumously reinstated into full fellowship by a frankly-embarrassed Church leadership; that we revere the American Revolution as divinely decreed, despite it being an undisputed example of disobeying the "laws of the land"; and as one student helpfully pointed out, although missionaries are forbidden to swim, if you see a small child drowning in a pool, I sure hope you jump in to save her.
Most students, then, resolve this conflict between conscious and law by accepting that certain commandment trump others--that the duty to save life trumps mission rules, that battling injustice trumps the laws of the land, and so forth. But really we've only returned to square one, for if certain commandments trump others, then when and how do which commandments trump which? When two commandments conflict, which do we obey? What is our criteria? And we are back where we started.
What suddenly struck me this last week as I taught MLK's "Letter," is that this clash of commandments is not peripheral to doctrinal consideration, but are actually central, even fundamental to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. No less a doctrinal-conservative as Boyd K. Packer has taught that Justice and Mercy are eternal principles, yet are also in opposition to each other, an irreconcilable paradox that it took the awful price of the Atonement to resolve. "Mercy cannot rob justice," nor can justice rob mercy. The constant clash of commandments and principles is why Jesus had to be raised on the cross. The dilemmas presented by Dr. King are not theoretical thought experiments, but central to religious experience.
This fraught tension is best articulated in Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," his unparallelled analysis of the Abrahamic sacrifice, and the "paradox of faith" he presents: Abraham is promised progeny like unto the stars in number, yet the very God who made that promise withholds on its fulfillment for not years but decades--and when the covenant child is at last delivered, he's promptly told to turn around and kill him, in violation of not only the covenant, but of the just laws of God themselves (namely, thou shalt not kill).
This is the paradox of faith; the commandments can be contradictory, the ethical principles at play seem to cancel each other out. Why then, asks Kierkegaard, does Abraham not just throw his hands in the air and just walk away? "Forget it!" he could've screamed, "There is no rhyme nor reason to any of this, I will not violate my conscious, I'm going home!" Yet such would not have let him off the hook; even my atheist students at SLCC recognize that the tension between social order and social justice is a fine line not so easily resolved or distinguished--David Foster Wallace said we all worship something, and whether that's our God or our own personal set of inviolable ethical principles, still there is going to be contradictions between our most deeply-held beliefs.
Kierkegaard stands in awe of Abraham, then, because Abraham effects the most sublime example of what Kierkegaard coins "the leap of faith"--contrary to certain critics, faith is not an uncritical acceptance of wild fancy over fact, oh no, faith actually accepts the presence of skepticism and doubt, faith beholds the irresolvable tensions quite soberly. If our Church teaches that doubt cannot exist where faith is, it's not because faith ontologically eliminates doubt, but rather because faith faces down doubt straight in the eye. Faith is not knowing everything and knowing you don't know everything, yet leaping anyways. Faith embraces the awful paradox.
For Abraham, the paradox was resolved by the ram in the thicket; for Christ, it was resolved by the cross and the resurrection. As for us and MLK, it is resolved on a case-by-case basis, leaving us to grapple with the tensions and paradoxes at all times. And don't think that you can escape the test, whether you're an atheist or a devout believer; the clearer your own personal moral codes, the more difficult the tensions become. Perhaps this is why the Atonement had to be infinite, to account for the full paradox of faith.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
I Should Know Better...
Welp, here I go.
Do we ban guns or violent media? False binary, and missing the point.
Countries like Canada, Britain, and Australia, have access to all the same media as Americans, but do not have mass-shootings in the 21st century. China had a class-room stabbing the same morning as Newton, yet without any deaths. What these countries do have is restricted access to firearms.
But of course this is oversimplifying the issue: the pro-gun poster-child is Switzerland, where not only are all citizens allowed but required to possess firearms, including assault rifles. Now, they did have a mass-shooting in 2001, but still nothing like 2012 in America.
But here's what Switzerland, Australia, et al do have in common: a public health-care system. It is easier in these places to gain access to mental-health-care than to firearms.
The mass-killers at Newton, Aurora, etc, were by all appearances mentally sick. They needed serious professional help. But professional help requires insurance, resources, money, income, all of which the mentally-compromised have difficult access to.
In America, it is easier to access a gun than health-care. That's a problem.
Believe it or not, I'm totally open to us Americans preserving our right to arm ourselves--but I have little patience for those who cry "to arms!" as they resist the reformation of our beleaguered health-care system. Take away all the guns and videogames you like, but the sick will still be among us. Now, at least restoring background checks at gun-shows (which I completely favor and am frankly baffled as to why that's even a thing) may keep the sick from hurting others and themselves, but that still only solves a symptom, not a cause.
The worth of souls is great, and until we take serious the duty to care for the sick among us--to make healing easier than violence--then we will continue to miss the point, at our peril.
Do we ban guns or violent media? False binary, and missing the point.
Countries like Canada, Britain, and Australia, have access to all the same media as Americans, but do not have mass-shootings in the 21st century. China had a class-room stabbing the same morning as Newton, yet without any deaths. What these countries do have is restricted access to firearms.
But of course this is oversimplifying the issue: the pro-gun poster-child is Switzerland, where not only are all citizens allowed but required to possess firearms, including assault rifles. Now, they did have a mass-shooting in 2001, but still nothing like 2012 in America.
But here's what Switzerland, Australia, et al do have in common: a public health-care system. It is easier in these places to gain access to mental-health-care than to firearms.
The mass-killers at Newton, Aurora, etc, were by all appearances mentally sick. They needed serious professional help. But professional help requires insurance, resources, money, income, all of which the mentally-compromised have difficult access to.
In America, it is easier to access a gun than health-care. That's a problem.
Believe it or not, I'm totally open to us Americans preserving our right to arm ourselves--but I have little patience for those who cry "to arms!" as they resist the reformation of our beleaguered health-care system. Take away all the guns and videogames you like, but the sick will still be among us. Now, at least restoring background checks at gun-shows (which I completely favor and am frankly baffled as to why that's even a thing) may keep the sick from hurting others and themselves, but that still only solves a symptom, not a cause.
The worth of souls is great, and until we take serious the duty to care for the sick among us--to make healing easier than violence--then we will continue to miss the point, at our peril.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Snowstorm Gandolf
A few Christmases ago, finishing my first semester of grad school, I drove home to Washington from SLC for the holidays. The weathermen warned of a devastating blizzard on its way to the Pacific Northwest; but, having grown up thereabouts, I knew that most snow "storms" in Washington were a once-a-year half-inch that melted next day in the rain. Having gotten my undergrad among the frozen wastes of eastern Idaho, I was rather cavalier concerning said blizzard-alerts.
The fact that this was the same December when Las Vegas snowed 12-inches apparently didn't tip me off.
Needless to say, I drove straight down the throat of the Northwest's worst blizzard in 20 years. I do believe I was 5 the last there was that much snow. 2 feet in one night, no joke.
The first inkling of the price of my hubris came somewhere in northern Oregon. My brother asked if we could sit down for lunch, to stretch our legs; I said, "sure, you bet." Yet as we crossed the parking-lot of some nameless Subway, I was uneasily perplexed to note snow still on the ground.
I casually inquired of le sandwich-artiste therein if it was in fact snowing farther west. "Oh yeah," she replied just as casually, "There's a snow-chain warning for all semis, and I-80 is supposed to close tonight." Right on cue, in the window behind her, snowflakes began to fall silent to the ground.
A sudden panic seized me.
"Samuel, we have to go now," I exclaimed.
"But I thought we were going to sit down to eat," he said sadly.
"No, we have to go now."
We quickly consumed our sandwiches in the car, and the farther west I went, the more I passed pulled-over semis, the drivers scrambling to chain-up their 18-wheelers. Suddenly my little sedan felt very small.
Sure enough, the snow grew heavier, not lighter, the farther I traveled. My hopes of at least reaching Portland before sundown were dashed as the last rays of light were lost in the white-out along the Columbia River gorge. Stop-and-go traffic prevailed in the chaos--Northwesterners cancel school and church for half-inch remember, 2-foot-blizzard-drops are simply beyond comprehension.
"How far have we traveled?" my brother asked once, after a half-hour nap.
"Oh, about 7 miles," I replied, glancing at my GPS, as the ETA in the corner steadily rose higher and higher...
At one point, the only way I knew I was still on the freeway was because I could see the break-lights of the semi ahead of me. I basically fishtailed at 35 mph for 300 miles. When two years later the mechanic told me that all my tire-rods were loose and needed replacement, I knew why.
I called various extended family in the Portland/Vancouver area, not even aspiring to make it home that night, only to safe shelter. "Oh, we don't have a spare bed or couch," they each replied in turn, "We have no place for you, sorry!" The fact that they said this near Christmas was apparently lost on them; no room at the inn indeed.
I've traveled the world I mused while gripping my steering-wheel white-knuckled and wide-eyed I've wandered the mean streets of San Juan, Guadalajara, and Beijing, and now I'm going to die less than a hundred miles from home. In the snow. In Oregon. The irony.
Obviously I survived. As I pulled onto the I-205 to connect to the I-5, my Dad called, to check on my progress; turns out the news had just announced the closure of the I-80. Glad I hadn't sat down to enjoy my tasteless Subway sandwich!
I even made it all the way home that night--the snow-fall was merely heavy as opposed to white-out once I breached western Washington. I still had to take a back-country-road to home once it became clear the un-plowed hill my house sat on was unassailable, but I made it, I surely made it, without a scratch even!
(Then a UPS truck accidentally backed into my parked-bumper the next day. c'est la vie).
As I lugged my suitcase up the snow-hidden driveway, I felt like a champ, invincible, victorious--and that after a semester of reading Samuel Beckett and such, wherein I'd stared the somber inevitability of death in the face. Oh, death is surely inevitable, let's be clear, but not that night, not for me! Oh no--that night, I was better than death.
But every Christmas since, I've flown home.
I was put in this reflective mood by snow-storm Gandolf (apparently we name snow-storms now??) currently hammering the Salt Lake valley, and my gratitude that I'm not driving down Gandolf's throat. I'm reminded of that white-knuckled night in the middle of white-out western-Oregon, as I faced something far bigger than I.
Even here in snow-hardened Utah, there are still storms that exceed our abilities to comprehend, let alone prepare for. In a strange way, I like it when Mother Nature reminds us who's still in charge, that she's still far bigger and better than us, that we still adapt to her, not vice-versa. The awe from snow-storms are humbling, and therefore exalting.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
New and Renew
The first line of a student paper last semester was, "One day, I decided I was tired of waiting to die."
The last line of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is, "She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life."
I had a classmate at the U who, after 25 years as an accountant and then a divorce, decided to return to school at last to get her graduate degree in English.
Happy New Year--emphasis on New.
And renew.
All things go. All things grow.
The last line of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is, "She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life."
I had a classmate at the U who, after 25 years as an accountant and then a divorce, decided to return to school at last to get her graduate degree in English.
Happy New Year--emphasis on New.
And renew.
All things go. All things grow.
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