Sunrise Girl

Sunrise girl, passing from one morning to another, a morning caught in his arms, only to leave the impression of beauty before fading into another memory in another recollection, preempting the emptiness to be left behind. The void though is a fond one, an emptiness that is a transfigurative one, leaving a light behind it, even if only for a moment. It is a light that leaves longing on the lips. Sunrise girl you enlighten the world, but leave it in shadow when you leave, the day you leave behind is the longing of twilight.

 

You bring the morning sun, you lay out the clouds and scatter them to the four winds that they might carry them in the shapes of dreams and revelations, and they carry your impression, approved by your charming whisper, carried into the early twilight before the breaking of dawn

 

You bring the day, but you bring it at the expense of twilight, of lasting ignorance, and in shedding light on something less than alive, you yourself have brought its own death before it. Your light is a terror to those who are asleep, those who would have remained if not for your touch

 

With every sunrise that you bring, you bring your own death keeper of dreams. You disseminate them among the weary, and in instilling hope into the weakened, betray your own hopelessness as you bring dreams out of shadow. With the evanescing shade comes reality like a putrid corpse in the form of sunrise before the perceptions of an unwitting night.

 

Haunted by the memory of sleepless nights, by broken hearts left in the recollection of your tears, the guilt you run from sunrise after sunrise, enlightening and illumination after illumination makes your countenance darker and darker. Feeling the pain just as equally as they do, knowing the subtle sense of loss that comes as the day brings commonality back into perception. As your dawn casts them into even deeper shadows.

 

Mortality blurs in your memory and you become cold, as the mirror shows you less and less of yourself, and more and more of a citadel, a fortress to protect a bleeding heart enshrined on a throne of tears, the weakness of which causes such great strength, inverted, perverted, true. The cold icy sting of your eyes, protects your weakened gasps, as you stand tall you rasp for rattling breaths in your dissatisfied and weary lungs, a mighty fortress with weakened and empty halls, derelict and void. A silent citadel seemingly forsaken, yet blooming with life.

 

Sunrise girl looks into herself and sees death, yet her touch blooms with life. She looks at the effects of her own impartations of light and wonders whether she has scorched the earth beneath her, but she cannot judge for in seeing her path she is blinded to what it truly looks like, mindless of what truly exists beyond her perceptions.

 

Sunrise girl, bathed in light, touched in darkness, look into this mirror, meeting my eyes we assume it’s just another sunrise, another fleeting escape another sense of loss, another moment in another set of arms. It’s not. The eternal sunrise begins tonight, it ends now. We’re the same, the coin’s sides are the illusion, it’s just like us to make our own luck. It’s just like us to make our own way, but we know that already.

 

You call me out into the light, you dance your dance in another direction, but as children of the mind, we can bear to do no other. Two sides of the same thing, one perceives light, the other darkness and both are right, it’s twilight after all.

 

Your eyes meet mine, and I see a mirror, you see a mirror, we look into this moment and perceive an event that makes us tremble. We’re not like this, not anymore. Sunsets and shades of dusk are not our beginnings, not anymore. Cloudfall and storms, we welcome them, but they welcome us no more.

 

This event, it shakes and shapes us. You’re afraid, sunrise girl, afraid that sunrise might go on into everlasting day, into everlasting light, into an Eden you can’t anticipate.

 

Go into that Eden, and don’t knock at the edges of the River Styx anymore.

By The Window

Words float on like photographs
that tremble in the pouring rain,
Echoing my heavy thoughts,
That drift like solemn memories
Endlessly refracting lights, drifting on my tired skin
It echoes like an empty song
That once lit up my face again
Candlelight is my parade,
it drifts through me like falling rain
Across the endless skies

Paint the sky with diamonds
You’re just another chemical in my catalytic converter
I am lost out here, painted on like masquerades
Waiting for the last return
I feel it echo in my universe
Resident entrapment,
And I’m the echoed memory, making stills
In the shadows of the darkroom
Chemicals and fading lights, they capture my breathless soliloquy
As I paint the universe with photographs
I’m not the devil anymore,
I’m not the devil anymore

Any second thoughts?
Of course I love you,
I’m breaking in my drifting pace
Nothing ever develops fast enough
It’s only what’s inside that matters, right?
Hey There,
Turn out the lights, meet me in the darkroom,
Blow out the red lanterns, follow my directions
I see these coordinates laid out, written into my skin,
Engraved into my alibi, like burning commandments
And the autumn leaves turn like pools of blood in twilight on the outside
Forget the bitter winds, and meet me on the darkroom floor

How deep do you really believe?
Does it turn like tidewater?
Breathe in the musty earth around you…
Shake off the dust that’s gathered on your Sunday dress,
take a photograph
Leave the stains on the floor behind
Let words float on,
It’s just dodged the development of something beautiful
Catch my drift,
Hold my hand, and breathe in the endless memories
If you follow the wind,
wait for it to turn up, through kisses shared in the dark,
see it happen like before
set it up, follow my lead love,
follow the wind, forget the cold, give me your hand
I feel the bitter wind again, as words float on like memories

Dryad

Rest, How does a lover rest? Drunk and stumbling in the arms of twilight

My heart is ablaze with myriad pictures painted on silence.

In the sunset, the world grows soft, little wonder that I am out here, drinking in the wild places

Dark hair, long and flowing, a memory, a voice, like wild honey, and a laugh like wine, a memory and fiery text in the walls of my heart

Doubt, Fear, unbelief, just another passing moment, a breath in silence, exhale the cares

drunk with a looming passion, it hangs on my lips like the scent of wine

Her skin, brushing up against mine, otherworldly in the twilight, the sunset in her eyes like emeralds in a fire.

A soft blush on her cheek, a sudden indrawn breath of excited surprise, the laugh like summer memories

Even with the lights and seeming like a forgotten dream, she glows.

A stone for my pillow, to dream of you tonight.

I smell apples on her breath, and hear rivers in her footsteps, a single word exchanged at sunset, that’s all it takes, she vanishes away, taking my heart with her to wild places.

Dogma and the Imagination: Architecture

What is faith? Faith is that by which we are called to live out in awareness of something at times beyond immediate perception.

We live in a beautiful world, a world of wonder and amazement, you can feel it in the waves. It echoes in the wind, passes through the mountain peaks and into the valleys, fills the earth with life and green fields endless beauty on every side. We live in a world of color and inspiration, a world of music and sound and light, and warmth. We live in a world full of God’s glory. We can feel it at times, looking at the sunset, listening to the world around us at peace and rest. We find ourselves being in it, captured by it, alive through it, and reacting to it.

We live in a world full of chaos and greed. Full of vicious cycles of violence, where reason out strips beauty or ethics, where efficiency is king. We live in a world full of money, and slavery. Bloodshed is on every hand and the taste of blood on every lip. All are responsible. Nature is a competition and war zone for survival. Predators hunt prey daily and all nature itself knows is violence, terror. Politics rage around our heads as nations fling themselves at other nations and the threat of nuclear war shows us how much our own state of mind is fallen in the world today. We live in a world where people kill people for pocket change, where disaster lurks around the corner, and chaos is on our breath. We have bullet shaped teeth a penchant for violence, oppression in our every step, our institutions enslave us, we enslave others, and no one is free. We are a fallen world. Our planet decays under our cities, our strip mines destroy landscapes and our landfills hide our disasters.

The world is hideous. The world is beautiful.

Both of the above statements are true.

So what do we do about it? What are you and I supposed to do about a world that’s out of whack and thirsty for violence? It takes a move beyond the cursory glance into the news to do something about it. We live in a society where everything needs a microwaved, ready packed, do-it-yourself-in-seconds, prepackaged answer. But you cannot do that with life’s big issues. It takes moving out beyond the 30second attention span and into a meaningful reflection on what it means to be in the world.

So, what is the answer to our problem? I believe it is The Creative Imagination.

Art has the ability to bring with it presence, to create presence between the observer and the object being viewed. I think we can all agree that when we find a truly beautiful piece of art, we move beyond our everyday into something peaceful, serene, soothing, and tranquil. This does not mean all art is this way, but at the same time we can find those works that inspire us with their great beauty. Now, art is not just a frivolous and empty experience that makes us feel good about ourselves for a few moments. I believe that art is an integral part of humanity, and subsequently of Christianity. Why? Because through art, we experience the presence of something beyond ourselves, it takes us to a reality outside ourselves where we can admire our world with the beauty that it has. Furthermore, as a creation of beauty it glorifies the Creator God, who is the Triune Lord that we confess.

It would seem to me that art is going to play a central role in God’s reconciliation of all things. Because art is a means by which we can create beauty, observe the world, and celebrate what we see. This is not the only type of art though, nor does it need to be. While it is beautiful to paint a natural setting, there are other beauties, shapes, and forms, colors, shadows. Art can also show us darkness, the horrors of things past, nightmares from the minds of others, sadism, and death. But this is not the way art has been done before. Where modernity would seek to tell us to move along and be functional, rational and effiecient about the world, we must say ‘No.’ Where modernity would tell us that art is purely political, purely forms or minimalism, we cannot agree.

Art teaches us to stop, to breathe, to appreciate. It inspires us to see the world through different eyes, through another mind, through another perspective, through another heart. Art is not an aside to the Christian gospel, nor does it stem from scant and scattered verses about the arts in the Bible, rather it is integral to God’s plan to set things to rights within the created order. Art is the creation of repose, maybe secondarily, but how many of you have ever painted or taken a picture and found a rest and peace in that moment? The arts inspire us, bless us and heal us, they are a reminder of a world beyond modernity, beyond efficiency and offices.

Not just art alone though, because art can be done by anyone with talent. What it takes is Creative Imagination, inspired by the Creator.

The imagination is not a frivolous empty place where imaginary things hide in our closets and scare our children, the imagination is an active participant in the nature of human being. The imagination is an integral locus of what it means to be human. The imagination needs freedom to express itself and create beauty in our lives, without it we lose a pillar of our existence. The modernist pursuit of function actually served to our detriment, because the buildings of the era, like the thought of the era homogenize and reduce, alienate and divide. This is not supposed to be, created spaces should cultivate relationships and human interaction rather than divide people and separate them. The Creative Imagination can create these spaces.

For an assertion on the nature of Imagination, I briefly turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose work and reflection on the imagination serve a great good in society, and whose voice and contemplation point to something higher than himself. For Coleridge, the Imagination mediates between a world of real objects and a real presence, an “I am,” if you will. But the imagination does not create reality, it creates poetry. It creates a willed experience of the real. It is consciously willed creative control of the potentials within something that characterizes and signifies what the imagination is to Coleridge. It is a conscious mediation between the real world and something other, through the exercise of creative control that allows the mind to create something new and beautiful between the real world and the mind perceiving it.

As Christians, we should call for architecture that speaks meaning, and as Christians in architecture, spaces need to be functional but should also capture relationality between people and the space, should inspire imagination and create a place of reflection and interaction. We need to exercise willed creative control of a space in order to properly imagine all that space could be. Art is not divorced from life but is part of it, creating the environments we live in, and the places we have our interactions. If In Him we live and move and have our being, should not the spaces where that living moving and being reflect the glorious splendor of the creator and inspire something within us?

Have you ever considered what the architecture of our age says about us? We have no open spaces, we have symmetrical monstrosities that make us feel crowded in and insignificant. Our architecture worships our intellect and the feats of humanity’s vertical achievement, but reduce horizontal space to a trivial necessity in order to go higher and higher. I’m not an architect, not a philosopher of architecture, but we cannot let industry create our world, so that there is “a coca-cola advertisement in every village” [1] and a megalithic apartment complex every three blocks. This is not they things should be, buildings have voices, and symmetrical anonymous, identical, faceless buildings impose conformity and oppression. An age that promised enlightened thinking has stripped us of our freedom, an age that sought to create the ultimate humans has alienated their individuality, and stripped them of their power.

Have you as an architect or building design engineer considered that function is important but buildings can be used to point to something greater? To God Himself? Not as an empty sort of homogenization of architecture into cathedrals or religious buildings everywhere, but each space as its own voice and way of expressing the glory of God. Each space should be cultivated to the full extent of what it can be in itself, not as a universal style of distinction, but within each space a maximization of space, utility and relationality creates the Christian vision of what architecture means to us. Colin Gunton claims that one of the chief failures of modernity is the lack of reconciliation between universality and particularity. What this means for architecture is simple, either our buildings all look the same or they are disjointed and fragmented spaces juxtaposed over each other in a struggle for supremacy. What culture, what architecture needs is unified diversity.

Postmodernism is attempting to restore to particularity those things which belong to it, such as individual significance and importance, however, we cannot allow postmodernity to flatten our sense of space, place and being so that all things are equally valid. When all things are equally leveled out, they are all equally reduced into identical categories, none can be more beautiful, more special, or even individual anymore, and thus they all become boring. It’s like school uniforms, even in the uniformity of everything, it’s the people with the accessories that stand out.

Art and its mediation of presence to us through a created reality draws out the beauty within our own imaginations and inspires us to do something more with ourselves than merely be functional. Functionality is death if it is all that we do. We cannot possibly attempt to have any meaning beyond our bank statements and credit history if we do not actively engage in something beyond functionality. What is the purpose of life?

Certainly it is not to edify and construct institutions at the expense of our identity, to be functional at the expense of ourselves. It is something above and beyond that, and mediating between the horrors of the world and what can be done requires imagination. It requires the creation of beauty in the world, yes in art galleries and on sidewalks and in the streets, on the highways, and byways, in the villages and towns, among the lower classes as well as the socially privileged. The horrors and evil in the world requires us to actively engage the world with imagination, to take control of the situation and create beauty where there was none. Not in the sense of buildings alone, or paintings and inanimate objects, rather the imagination should be used in every aspect of life, actively engaging the world and discovering ways to beautify and cultivate a richer experience from things for the individual as well as the community.
At the core of the imagination is not an arbitrary idea, nor an idealism that is fragile, for Christians the core of the imagination should be the dogmas that inspire us, for the sake of active engagement in the world while not being of the world. The Christian Imagination, that creative force of the will that resides within us and inspires us should look to God’s affirmations of what it means to be in the world for guidance. Christ came to redeem, restore and reconcile all things to himself. He will someday reconcile and redeem all things, and it has already begun in his disciples, the Church, this is a core dogma of our faith. What this means for our artistic merit is that we are called to reconcile all things to God actively, by the Holy Spirit and the active imagination we can participate in. Not that this should reduce art to paintings of Jesus and the disciples, or make everything about looking religious, but really, it’s a celebration not just of spiritual things but the entire creation. Everything has the potential to be beautiful, or redeemed into beauty.

Recently reading an article by N.T. Wright, he mentioned a sculpture of the tree of life, made entirely out of decommissioned weapons.[2]

The world is good, and was created to be so. In acknowledging this we don’t need a specific apologetic for aesthetics, other than ‘for the glory of God.’ We can celebrate the goodness we already see within the world. We have the right to glorify God who created the beauty we do see. We have an imagination that can envision the way things should be, and point us to that reality.

The horrors of the world are real, but in the midst of them we can find peace in the One who is already Lord, and who will continue to bring reconciliation to all things by His Spirit. Christianity is calling…and is asking us to imagine what the world, redeemed and filled with God’s love looks like, and to do our part in making that happen, to create beauty that reflects the glory of God in what we do, the space we live in, the places and ways we exist.

Practically, we can say this: At the center of all the ugliness in the world is a sacrifice that calls us to change the way we think about things. There is for us a man on a cross, who shows us where God has entered into our pain, our suffering our emotional state, and said “enough.” There is a man who has entered into the heart of where the world feels pain, and he is calling us to go there too.

Imagination is not about feeling peppy, but rather is an active engagement in thinking creatively about reconciliation. The Christian Imagination calls us to enter into that same place where the world feels pain, and actively imagine what the love of God looks like there and to set about the task of expressing and ushering in that love, be it in architecture, music, art, sculpture, painting, reflection, philosophy, theology, conversation, ecology, and everything else.

Untitled

Turn around slowly, and let the fire consume your eyes
an empty lullaby today, the death of poetry tomorrow

God is dead they say, standing in an ovate circle
They, contemplate the death of the oven bird over coffee

This is for you,
Watch the tragedy of our fallen state consume you as you feel the world,

Awake from your dogmatic slumber
and shake the age old dust that burdens you

Shake off the carefree detachment of scientific analysis
and feel the world for what it is

Feel that beating heart,
the cries of innocents and the voices of martyrs

Convulse yourself to breathing life
and open your ears to hear the cries,

Feel the tremors of our whole existence
shuddering under the burden of our indifference

Bring yourself to life,
convulse yourself to meaning

Unnerve yourself and take these words like prophecy,
Letting them burn in your bones like a Mandate

Then, reach out weary, tired hands,
To help another breathe again

Memory: Echoes and Breathing

Well, this is a new blog and it is time I began saying what I really think and feel somewhere.

In Echoes Breathe: It’s not just a catchy title, although it is quite catchy if I do say so myself. It’s a philosophy of memory, an interpretation of life. In echoes, we find that which has been spoken reverberating, resonating sound occurs throughout our being drinking in memories as sunlight. In echoes we hear voices past, things forgotten, vanities and conceits fulfilled, nymphs betrayed, and stories told. We all have echoes, we all leave echoes, our touch, our actions spreading outward in an arc from us to others in an unpredictably consequential ripples of causality. Echoes remind us we are not alone, they tell us stories from the past, things forgotten, ripples we have caused to spread across space and time and lives like a chain reaction, like breathing.

In the face of memory, we breathe in the stories, absorb our pasts and remember together, we are faced with the echoes that ripple across our flesh and minds. The love of another, the chaos of betrayal and deception, the power of self sacrificing love. In the face of memory we all breathe in something beyond ourselves, echoes imply space, a cavernous abode wherein we can remember the sands of our past, and dwell in the hot moonlit night of the present, remember the drums and fires that have echoes in our genes. We are the accumulation of memories from those who have gone before, our genes, testaments of someone’s life story for ages past and ages to come.

In echoes, we breathe. In the face of memory we are sustained. One cannot accomplish life alone, that is measureless folly and the hope of pure abandon of the other. Memory teaches us to remember the Other. To set before our awareness that holy togetherness which we all share in. In echoes, we carry on the traditions of the past, and listen to the voices of the generations before us. In echoes we hear dark tales of evil happenings, whispers that some should seek to have forgotten, as well as memories of heroes and legends from before. These that have gone before unite us, they provide our breath in that we can look to them for the guidance we need in the life that we now live.

Memory is more important than failure, more important that success. Without memory we shall soon forget even ourselves. Memory gives us solidarity, reminds us that we have all been present, in times past, in the events of our ancestors. Memory teaches us that the accomplishments of the one, find their life in the acceptance of those facts by the many. Memory reminds us that we are not alone, not in relation to ourselves nor to God, who has forsworn never to leave us.

There is a God in heaven who looks upon us and asks us to remember. Forget Me not, he says. Because it is in memory that we can relate to God, that we can hold before ourselves graces in times past and hold hope for the future.

As we listen to those echoes of the past, flooding our pores with light and awareness, let us enter that sacred communion which comes in the breathing in of memories, in absorbing them into ourselves and exhaling out their worth. In echoes, find your past, and breathe, fully aware of who you have been and where you may be going.

In Echoes Breathe