Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Learning from Art’s Flaws

“Ars longa, vita brevis.” Quite often I’ve found myself unwilling to take risks with my writing because I’m afraid I simply have no time to write anything that’s flawed. Then fellow poet Marsha Truman Cooper gave me this invaluable little book, Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. The following words have become my touchstone:


Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork….

The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. (pp. 5-6)
Further on, Bayles and Orland explain that even good art will be imperfect, because it’s made by flawed human beings:


[T]o require perfection is to invite paralysis. The pattern is predictable: as you see error in what you have done, you steer your work toward what you imagine you can do perfectly. You cling ever more tightly to what you already know you can do — away from risk and exploration, and possibly further from the work of your heart. You find reasons to procrastinate, since to not work is to not make mistakes. Believing that artwork should be perfect, you gradually become convinced that you cannot make such work. (You are correct.) Sooner or later, since you cannot do what you are trying to do, you quit. And in one of those perverse little ironies of life, only the pattern itself achieves perfection — a perfect death spiral: you misdirect your work; you stall; you quit.

To demand perfection is to deny your ordinary (and universal) humanity, as though you would be better off without it. Yet this humanity is the ultimate source of your work; your perfectionism denies you the very thing you need to get your work done. (pp.30-31)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Ring Out, Wild Bells”

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
    The flying cloud, the frosty light:
    The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
    Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
    The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
    For those that here we see no more;
    Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
    And ancient forms of party strife;
    Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
    The faithless coldness of the times;
    Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
    The civic slander and the spite;
    Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
    Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
    Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
    The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
    Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Give It Up!

Happy new year, dear readers. I was going to resolve to be more cheerful this year, but stories like this keep happening. Lawrence Downes writes in the New York Times:


The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. …Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.


As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so … one-dimensional.


It would be easy to chalk it up to adolescent rebellion, an ancient and necessary phenomenon, except these girls were barely adolescents and they had nothing to rebel against. This was an official function at a public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address….

Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.


There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem….


I thought of this article last night when we were making the rounds of First Night events in our New England college town. One of the highlights was a performance featuring children and teens from our local dance schools, all girls except for one boy of about eleven who gave a courtly, athletic performance of “Union Jack”. The young ballerinas were achingly lovely, reminding me that the beauty of youth is its infinite potential, shyly hidden even from itself, tragic because its promises can never be fully realized. (Yes, I know I’m only 34, but I do have gray hairs.)

And then the modern dance groups came onstage, doing the best they could with their graceless, aggressive choreography, to the hump-de-bump strains of Sean Paul’s “Give It Up to Me” (“From you look inna me eye gal I see she you want me/When you gonna give it up to me…So gimme the work yeah cause if you no gimme the work the blue balls a erupt yeah”) and The Knack’s “My Sharona” (“Such a dirty mind. Always get it up for the touch of the younger kind”). Children onstage, children in the audience. Of all the pop songs to choose, why these? For a town with a prominent women’s college, we do a good job acting like we never heard of feminism.

Ain’t That Good News? (Da Vinci Code 2)

Having finished this rather dopey book, I have only one question: Why would so many people want to believe it? I admit, I’ve sometimes felt it was unfair for Jesus to be given a human body but never have a girlfriend. And millions of men probably jumped for joy when they read that we were meant to access God through sex rather than church attendance. But, because Dan Brown taps into popular anxieties about the hierarchy, authority and secrecy of the Catholic Church, it’s easy to miss how elitist and exclusionary his vision is, compared to orthodox Christianity.

“I don’t need the church to mediate my encounter with God.” Whether you’re a Protestant clinging to sola scriptura or an ordinary American individualist who resents having your spirituality crammed into pre-set rituals and doctrines, this sentiment should be very familiar. It sounds so democratic, right? But the church and the sacraments are open to all comers. What does Dan Brown put in its place? Heterosexual intercourse. Bad news if you’re gay, underage, physically incapacitated, or the pimply kid standing by the punchbowl all night at the senior prom. We want so much to believe in transcendence through pleasure, to skip the disciplines that help us endure pleasure’s fading.

Another conceit of the book is that Christ was not divine, just a human prophet who had a real wife and a royal bloodline that continues to this day. That’s an interesting story, but as irrelevant to my life as Zeus and Hera. The Bible says Christ’s bride is the Church, that is, all of us. Through him, our souls can be as intimate with God as Dan Brown’s Jesus was with Mary Magdalene. Why would anyone prefer a story about a royal family that we worship from afar? If Jesus wasn’t divine, what makes his kids better than the rest of us? (Does God drive a SmartCar with a bumper sticker saying “My son is an honor student at Galilee Elementary School”?)

Finally, I don’t get why so many people find relativism more comforting than sincere belief. Brown’s fictional hero, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (another reason I never give to the Harvard College Fund), explains thus his decision not to publicize evidence that the gospels are a fraud:


“Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith — acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove….The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof that Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.” (pp.369-70, paperback edition)


My husband’s a Buddhist, and I don’t think the lotus blossom legend plays a big role in their activities over at the sangha. On the other hand, if there were proof that no one had ever achieved enlightenment by meditating, and the stories to the contrary were a plot to get Tibetans to sit still while the Chinese took over their country, I’m sure he would want to know.

Again, what seems like liberal openness is the worst kind of elitism. The world is divided into “those people” who need their illusions, and “our kind of people” who know better. Because “we” don’t believe that religious ideas have real-world consequences, we don’t mind that billions of people are misled about the nature of ultimate reality. (This is what my minister believes, BTW, which is why I’m blogging this morning instead of going to church. “Resistance is futile!”)

Someone, please explain to me the appeal of this kind of thinking. Is it that you want the warm feeling and pageantry of church membership but can’t manage to agree with the doctrines? Are you afraid of dividing the human race between true and false believers (a line that relativism merely redraws, not eliminates)? Do you actively disagree with Christianity and want to appropriate its cultural capital for other ends? As for me, I’d rather live in a world that God loved enough to die for, instead of a world where most people have to swallow comforting lies in order to avoid eating a bullet.

Poem: Charles Atlas Shrugged

The icons on the beach, drifted over with 
      kicked sand:
that starving boy, the first
to wish evolution would give him a hand,
clap him on the back like an elder
brother, say: You won’t be bad, kid, when 
      you’re grown.
Bucks die with horns locked in the distant forest
falling tangled like trees. You’re not one of those.
Here comes the girl,
the type who’s always ready
to play Fortune in the pictures
supine in borrowed silks, her eyes asking
What have you done for me lately?
Black bikini now, teeth so white
her smile’s one continuous crescent, like the moon.

The bully barrels in, plump as a steer,
pissing on everyone’s picnic.
He’ll run to fat when he’s older,
go deeper into the forest
shattering nests with shot
and ripping the silence away like a roof,
his days on the beach forgotten.
The burning cloud of history
doesn’t show in the sky.

The end of the tale’s well-known:
in just one panel
the runt improves himself, becomes a man
with tight buttocks and a hammer fist,
the wedge of his chest blocking the sun.
His highest ambition was to hit back,
or to know he could.
And what’s wrong with that? Too many victims
tinkled out the sonatas of their homeland
on a piano of bones,
quibbled over matchstick games of cards
and honorable regulations till the total fires
swept everything flat like a smoothing hand.

Dagny Taggart’s trains
run nevertheless, though pulling boxcars
of short-weight goods and heads full of error
in the passenger cars. They deserve to die
when they smash up, says Rand, for winking at
the drunken signal-men, the corrupted routes.
Two trains can’t run on the same track.
No patronage repeals the laws of force.
Mac can’t throw
the brute off the beach till he becomes one
with the other man’s mechanism, his simple 
      switches.
The morals of a mad world
are the power of goodbye.

Dagny sees this at last,
slams the door behind her
on her way to Galt’s Gulch
where copper sunlight sets on silver metal
and all the women have heroes,
where every one
smokes Marlboros and stays out of each other’s 
      personal space.
And the girl on the beach, what does she want?
It would be a mistake
to peg her as a bimbo, she could be
a communications director or a veterinarian, 
      like Barbie.
All the more reason
why she craves a man who’ll overcome her,
who doesn’t need a manager or mother
to hide in like soft sand.

The people behind them
tan themselves in his cartoon halo,
trying to forget that
soon summer will be over and the factory
has fallen down. Someone tried to run it
as if need were the measure of one’s wages,
ability the weight of one’s chains.
As if need were anything
but the stern carver’s adze
that polishes you or grinds you down.
The trains rust on the abandoned siderail.
Somebody just like you
could still write away for the booklet
that works you into strength, for two holy dollars.
The dollar-sign over Rand’s coffin
might be translated: To call virtue priceless
means no one is willing to pay for it. “That was 
      the end
of the noble plan and of the Twentieth Century.”


      from A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003)

Poem: Against Nirvana

Coming awake:
The quiet tongues of the orchids.
The well-meant fruit in its wicker cradle.
Think of something other
than your breast. What is yours, what is not yours.
The light without calendars:
at the window, a rainy square of day.

You were dreaming in the flooded forest,
tucked like a worm into the earth’s brown blanket.
You were dreaming the milky whisper
of your flesh, a snowbank, dissolving.

The awakened one sees no difference
between his arm and the arm of another.
No difference between himself and the wind
breathing in, breathing out.

Your arm is wired to life,
the forest twitter of blinking, peeping machines.
Where did you go when your body slept?
They could have broken you apart
and passed around the pieces like peppermint.
Who would you be then?

The same as ever:
nothing yesterday, no less today.

If craving is suffering,
as the mad cells crowding
your breast like refugees might prove,
don’t wonder where it lies,
collapsed like an orange rind, pithed like a frog.
It changes nothing to call it yours.

But what else but craving — sour, red
and rough as wine, cracking like the claws
of lobsters plundered for sweet meat —
wakes you lost in lullaby snow
to remember your body, the dumb turning
toward heat that defines your cells as living?
Cruel therapy dangles your wants before you.
Nothing but the dirty needs of morning,
the bladder, the belly,
could reassemble you from cool white sleep.


         published in Mudfish, issue 14 (2005)

That’s MISTER Jesus to You

From the Christian parody website LarkNews:


PASTOR TRIES INAUTHENTICITY

For years pastor Terry Bradley of New Life Community tried to be entirely real with everyone.
That experiment is now over.

“Authenticity is bogus,” he says. “It’s never real. Nobody knows himself well enough to be fully authentic, and trying to self-divulge all the time breeds shallow relationships because it denies the complexity and mystery of human personalities.”…

“I don’t see much benefit in everybody knowing everything about me,” says Bradley. “Jesus’ example is to be guarded and realistic about human nature….”

Read more….
   
Or, as contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton once said, “If sincerity means showing what you really are, it’s good to be sincere only if it’s good to show what you are.”

Whip It Good (Da Vinci Code 1)

The day after Christmas seems like a good time to defend corporal mortification. (Memo to world: stop giving me cake unless you’re going to reinforce my office chair.) Anyhow, with the shining obliviousness to social trends that has always been my hallmark, I am just now getting round to reading The Da Vinci Code, and finding it both as exciting and as annoying as I expected.

I mean, poor Silas. In case you don’t know, he’s the tormented albino monk who likes to whip himself when he’s not assassinating people. The book makes a little effort to arouse our sympathies about his abusive childhood, but the overall tone is voyeuristic and superior. Just as in Chocolat, a film that made fun of the Lenten fast, we’re supposed to apply our little pop-Freudian insight that anyone who would deny himself bodily pleasure (or worse, deliberately undergo suffering) for the sake of spiritual formation must be repressed and neurotic at best, a lustful hypocrite at worst. By implication, nothing that this character believes should be taken seriously.

I’m not a big fan of extreme ascetic practices, as they can feed un-Christian ambitions to bring about perfection by our own efforts. Meditation, therapy and a sense of humor about one’s inevitable weaknesses are a healthier path for most everyday struggles with temptation. BUT — a little respect, please, for anyone who loves righteousness so much that he’s willing to tear his own flesh to conquer the devil within.

Ask yourself: would Dan Brown mock a vegan? a bodybuilder? an anorexic? a U.S. Marine? a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War? Like Silas, and unlike me most of the time, these folks have made some extreme physical sacrifices, sometimes for a noble goal, other times for a questionable one (you do the match-up yourselves, kids). I’m with Simone Weil, who saw something godly in every effort to transcend one’s self through discipline, even a mundane one like doing your math homework when you hate math. Christianity needs its freaks.