Jeremiah Webster
“We’re so pretty, oh so pretty, vacant.”
– The Sex Pistols
We had driven past midnight and needed sleep. The last four exits had been Labor Day destinations with each hotel booked through the weekend, a blaze of NO VACANCY neon extinguishing the last star in the sky. “Don’t bother,” a woman told me the moment I entered a Motel 6. She was lounging on the sofa wearing a bathing suit. A television pleaded with a young boy to buy gold bullion before it was too late. An elderly man deployed choice obscenities to win more towels at the reception desk. And here I was: Idiot Pilgrim without a place to stay. My friend and I left the motel and drove past golden arches and palm readers, tour buses with high school athletes, unwieldy buffets, and an intoxicated man wearing some kind of dinosaur for a hat. After numerous failed attempts to find a room, we decided to press on, hoping there would be amenities further north on I-94.
Johnny had flown from Spokane to Milwaukee to ride coach gun as I drove back to Washington after graduate school. I had promised to find reputable haunts and would pay for meals. I had promised to get him home to his wife and child in less than 72 hours. I had promised free ice water at Wall Drug. I had promised efficiency. There would be no Fear and Loathing as we traversed the Great Plains, the Black Hills, Idaho. Such promises and more, and I had forgotten Labor Day.
There were fewer signs for water parks and casinos after The Dells. I imagined the interstate suddenly losing power, the street lights, like the stars, renouncing their glow like a series of cigarettes against the bottom of a black ash tray. This was my sixth road trip across the country. Like all the others, it filled my mind with a Post-America, Post-Facebook, Return of the Mule kind of future. Everything became fine-china fragile and transitory. There would be no frozen custard burger joints until La Crosse, no Wi-Fi “hot spots,” espresso, or factory outlet stores for miles. Johnny’s cell phone would lose bars, find bars, and experience a minute by minute obsolescence. Wisconsin went Paleolithic rural.
“I’m taking the next exit we come to,” I announced.
“Whatever works,” Johnny said.
The next exit belonged in a Tobe Hooper film, but I took it anyway. A blue sign a mile back had promised MOTEL, so I assumed this was the place. Beyond a hedge of trees, a faint glow became stadium glare, a summer Christmas display. Subwoofers accosted the senses before we saw an actual building. Turning the corner, there was a motel, that was also an RV campground, that was also a Laundromat, that was also a bar. You could say it was hopping. Riotous is better.
“Is this the place?” Johnny asked, concerned.
“You can wait here,” I said. “I’ll check it out.”
I left the car running, got out, and headed for the front entrance. The glass doors pulsed in perfect time with the music coming from the bar. A massive aquarium sustaining algae and little else commanded the lobby, along with a big screen television from the 80s the size of a Mini Cooper. ESPN was running highlights, but you couldn’t hear anything over the music. I had played in an unapologetically loud rock band in college. This was louder.
“Please tell me you have a room,” I said to the guy running night shift.
“One left,” the man said. “Wedding was called off, so there’s the honeymoon suite. I’ll give you fifty off seeing how it’s late.” The big hand on the lobby clock was lazing past the six of 1:30.
“I’ll take it.”
“Bar is open all night, karaoke ends at two,” he continued, handing me an electronic keycard.
“Thanks,” I said, walking out of the lobby and back to the car as Michael Jackson insisted the kid was not his son.
“There’s a room?” Johnny asked hopefully.
“Yeah,” I intoned, “a honeymoon suite.”
“Awesome. Let’s call our wives and cuddle.”
It was then that we heard someone yell “bitch” from the bar and the sound of shattering glass. Three inebriated zombies stumbled out into the parking lot, and a final round of karaoke (a Bon-Jovi finale) commenced beneath the strobe lights. I suddenly wanted to get to our room as quickly as possible. I opened the Corolla trunk and removed our bags. I threw a fleece blanket over a .40 caliber pistol case, and slung it under my arm.
“You brought a gun?” Johnny asked.
“A gift from the English Department when I graduated,” I said, deadpan.
We headed back to the motel lobby, up a flight of stairs, and arrived at room 230. A sign beneath the number read CAUTION: WHIRLPOOL. I had visions of naive lovers being devoured by a hot tub leviathan. I waved the keycard in front of the door handle and waited for a green light. Nothing. A second time. Nada. I was Ali Baba on the fourth try.
The room was Greco-Roman kitsch. Ionic columns stood in each corner with plastic burgundy grapes cascading from each phallic monolith. Faux-silver framed poster prints depicted amorous fauns and wood nymphs. Pan was reproduced in oil as he stared deviantly at a sorority of European virgins bathing. And everywhere else there were mirrors. Mirrors on the ceiling, the bed’s headboard, an entire coffee table of reflective glass, mirrors encircled the Jacuzzi. A bust statue greeted us, perched on the column closest to the door: Marcus Aurelius (120-180 AD). The Stoic himself had been immortalized in designer resin and was now resigned to a vacant suite in the backwoods of Wisconsin. The author of Meditations, and here he was, a tired looking understudy in tasteless decor.
Johnny and I fell into hysterics. We posed heroically for the mirrors. We sent shirtless photographs to our spouses with exaggerated come hither stares from the whirlpool. “Wish you were here,” we texted. We marveled at the four inadequate locks on the door. We laughed until it hurt like sit-ups.
“You must bring Rachel here someday,” I told Johnny.
“Tenth anniversary,” he quipped.
Had we shared the room with some other ghost from antiquity, our expedition would have been vastly different. Marcus Aurelius, however garish his sculpture, haunted us all the way home. His philosophy of dispassion and resolve offered an alternative to the perpetual tragicomedy we witnessed on the roads of America. If human beings are “incurably en route” (Adam Zagajewski), an essential component of our journey is figuring out the stride, the cadence, and the rhythm of whatever we happen to find along the way. I never want to stop attending to this work. Driving west with Johnny and a dead philosopher did immeasurable good for my education.
This side of the Romantics, Stoicism gets a bad rap. Its moderation is a bore, its restraint, the antithesis of children begotten by Oscar Wilde and Lady Gaga. Perhaps it deserves reclamation. As pagan wisdom, it bears an unparalleled elegance. As an ethical creed in the face of adversity and hardship, it exhibits an admirable dignity. It reminds one that there is always a center, a still point, even when this life of cheap hotels and karaoke, fast food and frivolity seems so pretty, oh so pretty, vacant.
* * * *
Meditations / Marcus Aurelius
Trans. Gregory Hays
Book Five
23. Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone – those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us – a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.
24. Remember:
Matter. How tiny your share of it.
Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.
Fate. How small a role you play in it.
featuring work from:
art by Jeffrey Youngblood
Tara Ballard
Michele Burkey
Jackson Culpepper
Kristin George
Michael Gray
Matthew E. Henry
Adam Hughes
Jeremy B. Jones
Laurie Klein
Alyse Knorr
Abigail Knutson
Linda Martin
Jonathan May
Amy McCann
David Oestreich
Nancy Reddy
Adrianne Smith
Kathryn Smith
Joshua Michael Stewart
Brett Strickland
Jeremiah Webster
Paul Willis
Maya Jewell Zeller
and an interview with Robyn Schiff
Kathryn Smith
Ours is a God who lives in every sort of dwelling, with every sort of person, whether we live in a house or a tent or no place at all. In the Old Testament lesson, God chooses the humble dwelling place—the tent rather than the cedar house. Similarly, God chooses the humble person, Mary, through whom to bless the world. Perhaps it’s in our humblest state that God has the most use for us.
God of the Homeless
God of the cedar house and the cedar tree.
God of the tent. God of the low-rent apartment,
recipient of a shut-off notice:
thirty days and you’ll lose power.
God of the powerless. God of the living
in a rusted-out Ford. God of those who carry
their belongings in plastic garbage sacks.
God of garbage. God who seeks the lowest
of the low, and finds favor. God who inhabits
the least likely of places. God of those with nothing
to do but wait for blessing to find them.
Kathryn Smith
There are plenty of places in our West Central neighborhood for Isaiah’s prophecy to take hold. Who are the captives? What devastations – “the devastations of many generations” – surround us? And what is our role in the transformation? I see it in efforts like Project HOPE and Riverfront Farms. After all, someone has to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. It might as well be us.
Advent Comes to the Dead End Street
The stairs lead nowhere: an empty lot, rubble
of a burned-down house left to rats and junkies.
This is the street the city paving crews forgot,
sidewalks strewn with rags and doll bones,
tattered remnants of indecipherable loss.
It’s the street where self-destruction
and survival look the same from the other side
of the river, neighborhood littered
with bad intentions, or no intention at all,
failed forgiveness, second chances squandered for want
of a bus pass, a wristwatch. It’s a neighborhood
waiting for someone to walk these barren spaces
and see sunflowers sprouting where the kids
shoot up. The scars of arson erased by zucchini’s
tenacious blooming. A garden rising from ashes.
And once it’s planted, there’s no keeping it down.
Kathryn Smith
What does it mean, in the year 2011, in an urban setting, to prepare the way of the Lord? What if a neighbor’s howling dog is a messenger, the voice crying out of which Isaiah speaks? Or perhaps we’re the messengers, the ones to bring comfort. This poem allows those possibilities as it explores the notion that the sacred dwells within the mundane.
Prepare the Way
I.
I will howl at the moon for blazing and howl
at birds as they wake, their notes
piercing the night. Too bright! Too early
for singing! Those poor stars
cannot abide such shrill distraction. They
have been given one grim task:
guiding souls through night’s fissures
to its bleary end. I am the one
called to keep the darkness
from cracking. I am the one
who keeps watch, the voice crying out:
In the neighborhood, prepare! Oh stars,
cradles of light in the wilderness!
How can birds know all this, their bird brains
filled with chatter, gossip
of the night and of each star’s reason for fading?
II.
In my dream I comfort the dog
who’s been left out all night,
take him a dish of water.
There now, I say, stroking his ears,
scratching behind them. I leave him
to drink, to sleep then if he is able,
as I continue to the next yard, unlatch
the gate, greet the next dog with the same
soft consolations. All the neighborhood mutts
await me, the quencher of thirsts.
Piece by piece their dissonant chorus
diminishes, dawn
fills with the cacophony of bird-song,
and in the gathering light
the dogs return to their dreams.
The whole rescued world sleeps.
Kathryn Smith
What struck me about today’s gospel—in addition to the ominous imagery—is that notion that the Lord’s coming will surely happen at night. So what if we stayed awake to keep watch? Would it be possible for any one of us to interpret the signs?
The Insomniac Keeps Watch
The dog grows restless as day
intersects evening. He paces door
to window to door. Clouds obfuscate
sunset, despite its calculated hour.
I will not sleep—not with such a storm
closing in. Time to batten down
the garden. Latch the shutters
against the wind. Pray the maple
holds on to all its branches. Wait.
*
“I’m sorry, old friend,” I tell the dog
as I rouse him from the edge of forgetting.
At 1 a.m., a moment’s calm. Leashed
and hooded, we practice discerning
among the winds. Will the rustling
arrival of angels feel like this upward
swelling, sky cloistering us in something
close to revelation? Stoplights begin
their chain reaction, a yellow pulse
pulling west toward town,
mimic of stars, an earthbound
luminosity too dim to guide us.
*
Close to dawn, the television
is infomercials and weather maps. A product
for every ailment. A model for predicting
every natural destruction. But what
of the supernatural? I consider
the meteorologist, whose job it is to know
both the day and the hour of every
atmospheric phenomenon. Can a scale
that tracks the wind and its trajectory
interpret beyond the ionosphere, discern
cirrocumulus from seraphimic? The man
at the map tells us the moment, accurate
within minutes, that the thunderstorm
will strike. When it will cease.
The dog circles once, twice, three times.
Morgan Feddes
The end of the year is notorious for many things. Among them: Stress. Top [insert number here] Lists of the holiday season. Late last month, Consumer Reports combined the two, creating a list of America’s Top Holiday Dreads.
The list itself is pretty much what you’d expect — after all, half of the holiday season is seemingly spent ranting about the stresses of the holidays at our supposedly stress-free parties. Crowds and long lines tops the list; gaining weight around the middle and on the credit card tied for second. Other typical complaints are on there — Christmas music, travelling, shopping for gifts, and so on.
But I was more interested in the bottom of the list. At number ten: “Having to be nice.” Fifteen percent of respondents said that was one of their top holiday dreads.
I doubt that most of these respondents are scrooges eleven months out of the year, but I have to wonder what they thought being “nice” entailed. Faking kindness and happy enthusiasm at seeing Great Aunt Bertha at the annual family party? Offering a polite smile to the Salvation Army bell ringers whether or not you have change to drop in the bucket? Saying “Hello” to the neighbor down the street whose outdoor lights can blind airline pilots at 20,000 feet? Giving up that parking spot at the mall to the minivan packed with a harried mom and five kids?
Now, perhaps I’m a bit old-fashioned, but I always thought being nice was something we were supposed to do beyond the bleak midwinter. As a Christian, I believe everyone has inherent worth. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll like everybody all the time, but that does mean I need to treat everyone with politeness, respect, and love. (Or try to; admittedly this is much, much easier said than done.)
I realize the holidays are a time where we place special emphasis on love and care for others. But what does it say about us when a decent percentage says they dread being nice for one season in the year?
Joshua Robbins
As we enter Advent’s home stretch, I’ve found myself wishing the season’s anticipation would feel…well, more sublime. But, then again, I wonder if Advent should feel sublime. Is this a season of sublimity?
And what do we mean by “sublime,” anyway? Is grandma’s Christmas ham sublime? Is the passing of the flame during the Christmas Eve candlelight service sublime? How about that high note in “O Holy Night”? If anything is sublime, surely that high G is, no?
Well, it seems the first rule of the sublime is similar to the first rule of Fight Club: you do not talk about the sublime. Or, well, maybe it’s more like: you cannot talk about the sublime.
Third-century rhetorician Longinus described an encounter with the sublime as an experience in which the soul “takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting.” This experience of uplift is “produced by greatness of soul, imitation, or imagery,” and is an experience that cannot be contained or expressed by language.
For centuries, philosophers, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant among them, have written extensive definitions of the sublime in an attempt to understand and explicate that which feels like momentary contact with the ineffable. Even in today’s disintegrating world of commodity fetishism, hierarchical mumbo-jumbo, etc., postmodern philosophers like Slavoj Žižek continue to unpack this sublime encounter that leaves us without words, that transports and elevates our souls. And that’s been the centuries-long problem with talking about the sublime: to talk about it in language is to diminish the totality of it.
Despite the fact that it’s written in words and so it is automatically disqualified as a legit description, I find Emily Dickinson’s maxim about poetry immensely useful as a way of relating to the sublime. With apologies to the Belle of Amherst whose poems can, I think, lead us right up to the precipice of the sublime, here are her words with one significant adjustment in italics: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is sublime. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
So, I’d like to know what you think. Can Advent be sublime in the fashion of Longinus and Emily Dickinson?
This month, I’ve found one handy response to my question in a poem by Bertolt Brecht, the great twentieth century Marxist playwright, director, theorist, and poet, who may be best known popularly today (with Kurt Weill) for The Threepenny Opera and influencing musical artists like Jim Morrison, Tom Waits, and P.J. Harvey, among many others. Here’s the poem:
Mary
The night when she first gave birth
Had been cold. But in later years
She quite forgot
The frost in the dingy beams and the smoking stove
And the spasms of the afterbirth towards morning.
But above all she forgot the bitter shame
Common among the poor
Of having no privacy.
That was the main reason
Why in later years it became a holiday for all
To take part in.
The shepherds’ coarse chatter fell silent.
Later they turned into the Kings of the story.
The wind, which was very cold
Turned into the singing of angels.
Of the hole in the roof that let in the frost nothing remained
But the star that peeped through it.
All this was due to the vision of her son, who was easy
Fond of singing
Surrounded himself with poor folk
And was in the habit of mixing with kings
And of seeing a star above his head at night-time.
Imagistically, it’s a fairly straightforward Christmas poem: a starry night, a stable, angels, shepherds. Been there, done that. But even with its normative Yuletide menagerie, Brecht’s “Mary” ain’t your typical crèche. Brecht’s poem challenges us to critically engage the history and legacy of the Christmas story and break down what we see in both the poem and, subsequently, in our individual relationships to Advent.
In Brecht’s poem, the reader is forced to see the birth of Christ as an actual birth. When was the last time you encountered a manger scene with accompanying placenta? And whereas a run-of-the-mill Christmas poem might compel us to squeeze out an approximation of catharsis from its lines or might manipulate our emotions toward that all-too-inevitable impact of a Christmas poem’s narrative, this Mary has forgotten how it all really went down, forgotten about the cold, the shame, the poverty, the exposure. All recollection of how it was in Bethlehem has been replaced over time with the stuff of holiday legend leaving the reader to be challenged to recognize their own complicity in the historical revisionism.
Marxist critic Fredric Jameson suggests we can locate the sublime in Brecht when we see “the frame and focus of [Brecht’s] representation suddenly enlarge to include the world itself, and Being.” In “Mary,” we are confronted with a revised, revolutionary history of the nativity. Consequently, Brecht’s poem affords us opportunity to enlarge the frame of the manger scene and Mary’s experience in order to recognize the areas in our own lives in which we’ve lost our connection to how-things-really-happened. And in this respect, one might argue that Brecht’s poem does offer an encounter with the sublime during the Christmas season.
The Christmas story is not one that regularly lops off the top of my head. The truth is I may be so jaded that I’m incapable of experiencing the true sublimity of this season. But because of Brecht’s poem, I recognize how my passive acceptance of a cynical attitude toward the “holiday experience” makes me complicit in enabling the relentless, life-sucking Christmas-revision power of malls, shiny paper, and commercial jingles marketing cheap crap. In other words, I need to get back to basics, to the cold night, “dingy beams,” “smoking stove,” and especially to the “bitter shame” of being the lowly.
This season, I may not feel how I would if my soul were taking flight, but I certainly feel like Advent’s delivered a bare-knuckled closed fist to the jaw of my soul, and I’m okay with that. I’ll take that punch. And if I go down for the count, I’ll be okay with that, too. At the very least, I’ll have something to talk about.
Merry Christmas.
Citations:
Kristina Pfleegor
Jeremiah 31:21
A little girl climbing a tree
falls on her back, lungs jarred.
The sky is a darting school of minnows.
The ground shudders.
Look up. The highway from treetop to soil,
a mapped descent. Consider:
wet branch under bare foot,
disobedient twigs, leaves torn off,
bark scraping the shin.
Become acquainted with mercy:
grass flickers against your skin,
anthill pillows your head.
Breath journeys back into your body
and squares of light trail
from the silver sky.
Laurie Lamon
*Editor’s note: Our second Pushcart Prize nomination goes to Cathy Bobb, who had two poems in issue 6.1 (~thom).
Cathy Bobb is a poet of quietness, a poet of the pressure of the unspoken. She acknowledges Jane Kenyon’s influence, and Kenyon’s too-small collection of work has been a worthy mentor, the poet’s eye attuned to nature and experience through the slightest of movements, resulting in poetic simplicity that affords richness and multifariousness. I’ve been reading Cathy’s poems for many years, and in my opinion “Day After Christmas” is a major poetic achievement. From the title to the first two lines, “The angels have gone back/to their heavenly homes.” the poem jolts us from our contemporary experience of Christmas (the big finale finished: presents opened, Christmas dinner leftovers in foil and Tupperware, January bills already on the mind) to the historical second day of Christ’s life. Who thinks of that? The church pageants don’t follow up with the falling drama of the morning after.
The poem’s axis is the relationship between seeing and believing: “The humble who came,/called to the stable by word of mouth,/have seen and gone home.” The incarnation, Christ as infant and then the prepared Messiah “worthy and waiting for his Father’s call,” is placed quietly amid “the sawdust/and tools of his earthly father.” The human Christ is already both with us and leaving us, yet the poem’s form, one unbroken stanza ripe with enjambment and slant-rhyme (“far,” “far,” “sawdust,” “father,” “star”) unites human, Christ, seer, believer. The poem’s last four lines tilt the day after so that it enters our present time and unites those who witnessed the historical birth, and believed, to those of us now who believe. Time collapses, and believers unite in celebrating and worshipping the “star” that led “the humble who came.” The last two lines are a jolt, reminding us that the Christmas pageants acting out Day one point forward to God’s call to his son to “engage Satan in the desert….” War is coming. The Passion is coming.
The last line returns us to the poem’s opening while it pushes against closure. There are eyes “that have not seen, not believed.” The present tense, the “to be” verb, and the repetition of “not” underscore the reality that belief is born through faith. How we wonder at the birth and long to have been one of the humble witnesses. Cathy Bobb’s poem allows us a glimpse by connecting this current moment and time coming to that miracle.
Day After Christmas
Cathy Bobb
The angels have gone back
to their heavenly homes.
The shepherds have returned
to fields and flocks.
The humble who came,
called to the stable by word of mouth,
have seen and gone home.
It is the second day of the incarnation;
the child who is God contents himself
at his mother’s breast,
worthy and waiting for his Father’s call
to engage Satan in the desert
far, far away from the sawdust
and tools of his earthly father.
For some this day after his birth
the world shines brighter than the star,
brighter than the Hand who made the eyes
that have not seen, not believed.
