The Battles of Immanence vs. Transcendence: Eastern vs Western Perspectives

Oy!

 

h/t- Woodsterman

On Being Too Preoccupied with Non-Things...

I wish Mr. Ducky was Still Around for this one....

...on the Birth of the New Left.

Luke Burgis, "Bob Dylan’s “Judas” Moment: Why Stories Matter in Discernment"

At his concert on May 17th, 1966, Bob Dylan was a lightning rod. Some of his fans were outraged. They’d heard that he was bringing an electronic guitar on stage during his recent concerts, a shocking departure from his folk music roots. Would electric Dylan grapple with social issues and speak to people as soulfully as acoustic Dylan?

Then came a moment that changed rock music forever. More importantly, it changed Dylan.

Shortly after 7:30 p.m., Dylan walks onto the stage of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England. In front of 2,000 fans he plays a solo set with his acoustic guitar and harmonica. The crowd swoons.

After he finishes Mr. Tambourine Man, he walks off the stage. The audience is on edge as they wait for the second set. They’ve heard rumors that it might be electronic rock.

When he comes back on stage with his band, the Hawks, he’s got a 1965 black Fender Telecaster electric guitar with a maplecap neck swinging from his neck. Rick Danko, the bassist, has a Fender Jazz Bass plugged in to a Traynor amplifier. Dylan is about to blow them away with high decibel sound.

Tension builds in the crowd. Hecklers rumble. By the time he finishes the song I Don’t Believe You, Dylan is straining to be heard over the speakers. Fan C.P. Lee remembers the thunderous volume: “I felt like I was being forced back in my seat, like being in a jet when it takes off.”

Then things turn nasty. After Ballad of a Thin Man comes to an end, one fan, a non-believer in Dylan’s evolution, finds a rare moment of quiet and cries out “Judas!”

In the history of heckling, this stands apart. It’s the accusation that one is a traitor, not true to oneself, and not true to one’s friends—or fans. The only thing worse is the rebuke of Peter: to be called “Satan.” Neither one is good.

Dylan strums his electric guitar and grumbles, “I don’t believe you.” He starts plucking the strings of his Fender. “You’re a liar!” Then he turns his back, turns up the volume, and delivers a thunderous version of Like a Rolling Stone. When he sings the line, “How does it feel?” it sounds like an accusation, not a question. His whole body writhes, and he pours what’s left of his voice into his microphone as if he wants it to climb down his heckler’s throat.

Dylan knew himself.

When he heard a voice call him “Judas”, he knew it wasn’t the voice of someone who truly knew him. It wasn’t the voice that called him from the beginning.

Dylan knew the lie because he knew his story.

The Story of Stories

Bob Dylan is a master storyteller. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his songwriting in 2016. But before he told stories through his music, he listened to his own story. Because he did this, he understood his personal evolution, even if others didn’t.

Dylan also listened to our human story, which is caught up in a divine drama of creation, rebellion, redemption, and restoration. He didn’t learn about it as a third-person observer, but as someone caught up in the drama.

The story was not only about him, he was an actor in it. Knowing the story allowed him to make sense of his life and the events unfolding in the world–the Cold War, the Space Race, the Civil Rights Movement–because he knew the plot.

Dylan’s writing reveals the extent to which he assimilated the Christian narrative into his life. In his early years in Greenwich Village, the American Civil War fascinated him. But he didn’t see it merely as the bloody, mindless death of 750,000 people. In his memoir he writes, “Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”

He didn’t learn the godawful truth about human nature from the Civil War. He learned it from the bible. He saw life, death, and resurrection happening all around him because he knew the universal story of salvation.

According to the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the mark of postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives,” or a refusal to accept the story that we’re all immersed in. Dylan, the most modern of men, didn’t adopt this incredulity. Instead, he rooted himself in our human story and the personal stories of the people around him—stories bound together with timeless truths. Because he did this, he was able to make some of the most powerful music of the 20th century.

We can learn from him.

Story-Driven Discernment

God can break into our lives and change our trajectory in a heartbeat. But he never destroys our history. He redeems it.

Dylan knew that his musical evolution was true to himself because he didn’t view events in his life in an atomistic way. He didn’t adopt a “hermeneutic of discontinuity” which does away with the past. Pope Benedict XVI often spoke about the dangers of this hermeneutic, or way of interpretation, when speaking about the Church’s liturgy. Instead, he says that a hermeneutic of “reform” must be seen within a hermeneutic of continuity.

And so with life. Dylan understood his evolution as an artist through the whole of his life.

Am I not sometimes guilty of thinking of vocational discernment only in terms of the future? In terms of what God is calling me toward? No doubt God is calling me toward something, but He has been calling me from before I was born! If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been born. To ignore that reality is to ignore the story of God’s love for me.

It’s only if I take my entire story seriously that I can understand and find meaning in the present, and this brings an entirely new depth to vocational discernment.

But it’s not only my story that matters. The people that I encounter in my daily life have personal stories that deserve to be listened to. It’s an act of love to enter deeply into their stories with empathy, imitating the love of God who entered into mine. Looking at another with an empathetic gaze that says, “I’m here, I care about your story,” has the power to awaken and make present a story that brings light and life to us both as we witness the work of the Holy Spirit who was present from the beginning.

Often, the “shape” of God’s call can only be discerned after we’ve stepped back and looked at the entire canvas. And we can do this by entering into one another’s stories.

The life of each person can’t be understood in a snapshot, a resume, or a social media profile. We have to enter fully into one another’s stories if we hope to know and love them as God does. He is the archégos (ἀρχηγός)–the Author –of every human life (Acts 3:15).

And God is an author worth reading.

Spoiler ALERT!

Apple Blossoms...

Turning to The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (written by his son) I am unable to find any reference to the scythe, but there is a lengthy description of the painting from the artist’s wife Effie:

In May, 1858, they went as usual to Bowerswell, where in due time the artist applied himself to ‘Apple Blossoms’, or ‘Spring’ as it was latterly called, painting it in neighboring orchards.

Here I must again avail myself of my mother’s notebook, and her remarks on ‘Spring Flowers’, as she calls it.

“This picture, whatever its future may be, I consider the most unfortunate of Millais’ pictures. It was begun at Annat Lodge, Perth, in the autumn of 1856, and took nearly four years to complete. The first idea was to be a study of an apple tree in full blossom, and the picture was begun with a lady sitting under the tree, whilst a knight in the background looked from the shade at her. This was to have been named ‘Faint Heart Never Won Fair Ladye’. The idea was, however, abandoned, and Millais, in the following spring, had to leave the tree from which he had made such a careful painting, because the tenant at Annat Lodge would not let him return to paint, for she said if he came to paint in the garden it would disturb her friends walking there. This was ridiculous, but Millais, looking about for some other suitable trees, soon found them in the orchard of our kind neighbor Mrs. Seton (Potterhill), who paid him the greatest attention. Every day she sent her maid with luncheon, and had tablecloths pinned up on the trees so as to form a tent to shade him from the sun, and he painted there in great comfort for three weeks whilst the blossoms lasted. During that year (1857) he began to draw in the figures, and the next year he changed to some other trees in Mr. Gentle’s orchard, next door to our home. Here he painted in quiet comfort, and during the two springs finished all the background and some of the figures. The centre figure was painted from Sir Thomas Moncrieff’s daughter Georgiana (afterwards Lady Dudley); Sophie Gray, my sister, is at the left side of the picture. Alice is there too, in two positions, one resting on her elbow, singularly like, and the other lying on her back with a grass stem in her mouth. He afterwards made an etching of this figure for the Etching Club, and called it ‘A Day in the Country’. When the picture of ‘Spring Flowers’ was on the easel out of doors, and in broad sunlight, the bees used often to settle on the bunches of blossom, thinking them real flowers from which they might make their honey. ” 

 –The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais Vol. I

The Essence of Embarrassment...

....the 'Other' knows something about me that I don't know myself.

On the Pas-Tout of Subjectivity (Incompleteness which can never be completed):
 

Delphic Exhortation: "Know Thyself..."

Where Today and Tomorrow Meet...

 

Tomorrow?:

Beau Is Afraid is described as a "decades-spanning surrealist horror film set in an alternate present", in which Phoenix plays an "extremely anxious but pleasant-looking man who has a fraught relationship with his overbearing mother and never knew his father. When his mother dies, he makes a journey home that involves some wild supernatural threats".

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

The 6 Stages of Dementia

William Utermalen (self portraits)

Everywhere at the End of Time[a] is the eleventh recording by the Caretaker, an alias of English electronic musician Leyland Kirby. Released between 2016 and 2019, its six studio albums use degrading loops of sampled ballroom music to portray the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Inspired by the success of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011), Kirby produced Everywhere as his final major work under the alias. The albums were produced in Krakow and released over six-month periods to "give a sense of time passing", with abstract album covers by his friend Ivan Seal. The series drew comparisons to the works of composer William Basinski and electronic musician Burial, while the later stages were influenced by avant-gardist composer John Cage.

The series comprises six hours of music, portraying a range of emotions and characterised by noise throughout. Although the first three stages are similar to An Empty Bliss, the last three depart from Kirby's earlier ambient works. The albums reflect the patient's disorder and death, their feelings, and the phenomenon of terminal lucidity. To promote the series, anonymous visual artist Weirdcore created music videos for the first two stages. At first, concerned about whether the series would seem pretentious, Kirby thought of not creating Everywhere at all; he spent more time producing it than any of his other releases. The album covers received attention from a French art exhibition named after the Caretaker's Everywhere, an Empty Bliss (2019), a compilation of archived songs.

As each stage was released, the series received increasingly positive reviews from critics; its length and dementia-driven concept led many reviewers to feel emotional about the complete edition. Considered to be Kirby's magnum opus, Everywhere was one of the most praised music releases of the 2010s. Caregivers of people with dementia also praised the albums for increasing empathy for patients among younger listeners, although some medics felt the series was too linear. It became an Internet phenomenon in the early 2020s, emerging in TikTok videos as a listening challenge, being transformed into a mod for the video game Friday Night Funkin' (2020), and appearing in internet memes.

Retro'd... to 1971-3

First Produced in 1971 and Based on the Gospel according to Matthew, Godspell is the first musical theatre offering from composer Stephen Schwartz who went on to write such well-known hits as Wicked, Pippin, and Children of Eden. The show features a comedic troupe of eccentric players who team up with Jesus to teach his lessons in a new age through parables, games, and tomfoolery.  Godspell also features the international hit, “Day by Day”, as well as an eclectic blend of songs ranging from pop to vaudeville, as Jesus’ life is played out onstage. Even after the haunting crucifixion, Jesus’ message of kindness, tolerance and love lives vibrantly on.

Heads Hung Low