Brokenness

Sometimes, in the nights, I have to cling to music. Bach, Vivaldi, Brahms. Because  movements and symphonies are woven of structure and harmony, notes in sequence and keys that lift and stir and dance and mourn. They remind me there is cosmos, there is order in the chaos, there is beauty in the ugliness, and there is purpose and love eternally underlying and girding a broken world.

Coffee and Cathedrals

You know, I came here with plans to work off another juicy Dorothy Sayers quote. I've been reading a lot of her lately. School starts next week for me, and she's a good author for kick-starting the brain - not an easy read, per se, but nowhere near the brain-scrambling certain ancient Greek philosophers give me.*

Then I sat down at a new booth in a new coffee place. It isn't just a coffee house; technically, it's a restaurant with a coffee bar and a big beautiful silver espresso machine**, with bags of coffee lining the shelves.*** There's lot of semi-finished honey-colored wood, setting off antiqued clap-board walls, and massive windows, a rack of upside-down wine glasses hanging in the corner. The menus are in simple fonts, the furnishings are cared-for and rustic, like you might find deep in your grandparents' house.

I came in here a little tense from not knowing the area and trusting the wisdom of the all-knowing Google Maps, feeling a bit achy and tired from recent weather swings and allergies, and just a smidgen worn from moving to a new place where I barely know a soul. I've been here for fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. There are three, maybe four other customers in here, with a couple infants to boot. Usually, I dislike being in near-empty restaurants. This is pleasant, sort of like bobbing along in a calm lake.

Places are important. So are people, but the way a space sits, what fills it, in what order it is filled, these things matter. Spaces can impact attitudes. Sometimes, it's a subtle effect. I firmly believe the impact of physical spaces and locations is perilously underrated. Another coffee place I've visited was one sizeable open room, with chairs and tables arranged in the middle of the room in a big rectangle. Everything was visible from everywhere, and it all felt very public. It created a distinctly different atmosphere than this place, which has some high booth walls set to create the feeling of a little privacy, not the paranoia someone was always looking over your shoulder to your laptop screen.

If nothing else, think of a cathedral. A beautiful, Romanesque or Gothic cathedral, tall, marble, reaching for the heavens. Now think of the last few church buildings you've visited.

I'm not saying we should abandon the average modern church building, or that there is necessarily anything wrong with those structures. I am saying the architecture matters, the space matters. Craftsmanship matters. Someone deliberated and loved and cared for this space. It is not a feeling I find often, and it is a balm to the soul when I stumble into it.


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*I'm looking at you, Plotinus.

**Which, I've just been informed, is Italian, was the first of its kind to make it to Dallas, and originally priced around $18,000.

***The same kind of coffee used in my coffee house of choice in Waco, coincidentally. It's the little things.

Sayers; Words; Kim Kardashian

"At the present time, we have a population that is literate, in the sense that everybody is able to read and write; but, owing to the emphasis placed on scientific and technical training at the expense of the humanities, very few of our people have been taught to understand and handle language as an instrument of power." - Dorothy Sayers.

Sounds familiar, right? I can't pin down the exact date this essay was composed, but Sayers mentions the scarcity of eggs elsewhere, so I'm assuming this can be traced to World War II, or the period very shortly thereafter. We're talking sixty-five years ago. Now we live in a world with Twitter.* (I would love to get Sayers's take on Twitter. She possessed a biting wit bordering on and often traipsing into acerbity.)

Words have immeasurable power, but they are only tools;  they are not possessed intrinsically of any particular morality. The purpose toward which they work is dependent on the person utilizing them. As things stand, most people use words for trivialities. Most do this simply because they have never been shown or understood the forces with which they play. This, on the surface, is tragic.**

The possible implications are more terrifying. There will always be some people keenly aware of the power they can hold when they write or speak. Some of these people will have moral objections to using this power in a manipulative fashion. Some will not. Those in the latter category will not hesitate to run roughshod over people who do not recognize the power of words. These people will be flattered, inflamed, and manipulated, with little recourse.

I could really go on here and start rambling about words as symbols and the connection to real meanings and Forms and Plato.*** But I won't, because I cannot even begin to do justice to the topic in a blog post.

Thoughts?

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*I must confess, there is a Twitter account that perfectly encapsulates this phenomena of which Sayers speaks. The account contains the "philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian." It tweets jewels such as "Sunglasses & Advil... Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? How did I come here? ...last night was mad trill."

**It's like most college kids driving around carelessly in obscenely expensive sports cars they do not need and that their parents procured for them. This is not the best analogy, but the point's there.

***I do mean "rambling."

In which I remember I like school

I know it's time for school to start when my map directions read "Commerce St Crowdus", and I immediately wonder who Crowdus was and why the church canonized him.

Seriously, though, I'm starting to miss writing papers - that building excitement when you finally ask the right question for your thesis. The silent cheer when you stumble across the perfect passage for your argument that you hoped existed but couldn't quite remember. The confusion and tentative self pat-on-the-back upon re-reading a cogent and artful paragraph you never recall having actually written.* I'm almost to the point of missing research and libraries and electronic databases, but not quite yet. I had a few bad semi-manic moments due to the sheer amount of time I spent in library cubicles last semester.

I think academia is stuffy and overblown. I also think the experiences it can provide, when managed well, are singular and extraordinary. It is a shame many of the books read in a well-rounded university education are only read in universities. It's all a matter of balance. Becoming too absorbed in academics leaves one incapable of dealing with real life, but there are many things discussed in academics that matter. Good, evil, beauty, love, friendship, ethics - these are important and need to be considered.

On a completely different note, I finally saw Dark Knight Rises. Selina Kyle and I would be friends. Good friends. Tom Hardy sold Bane, Alfred was good old Alfred, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robin - well, I want one, please. Dadgum, he was adorable and driven and just...a good guy. And that "Rise" scene. And the army of cops. And the ending, really. I can't believe Nolan got away with that ending without excess sentimentality or triteness. Who writes like that?** *runs off to watch Inception again*


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*To borrow from Gaiman and Pratchett, in the back matter of Good Omens, oftentimes one's work starts to generate text on its own, with no authorial input.

**Wow, I just wrote a paragraph about Batman with no spoilers. I didn't know whether I could manage it.

Lands.

Well, it's been a while. The afternoon after my last blog post, someone broke into my car, taking my purse, wallet, and phone. It's taken a while to recover from that, and I'm still not mentally settled about it at all. (On the plus side, I had some graduation money that covered most of the costs of getting the car window and phone replaced. iPhones are pretty cool. Just saying.)

Relocating to a new city is rough. I've moved many times in my life, but this is the first to a place I've never lived, completely on my own. I know about half a dozen people. While I'm making a lot of connections, I simply haven't been here long enough to have roots. It's making me think a lot about both sides of it - the importance of having a few people you can trust, and the importance of having a healthy amount of self-sufficiency. We need other people. It's an inescapable fact, one I don't care for on some days. On the other hand, leaning on others to the point of codependency is unhealthy and one of my least favorite character traits.

I don't have much of an argument or point to be made here. I'm just a little spiritually beat up at the moment, and writing is therapeutic, hence this little disorganized snippet.

On the plus side, Doctor Who Series 7 is slated for September 1. Who's excited?