Can an American be Christian?

This is a question that I have been struggling with throughout the life of this blog, it seems like – but the question became most acute to me during my time in Beijing, when I first dimly became aware of the Christianity of the Chinese social reformers whose perspective roots the work of Wang Hui and lends it a certain Grantian colour. I have since taken the opportunity to marvel that the Chinese who (quietly, often abashedly or seeming half-heartedly) embraced Christ – Jimmy Yen, Tao Xingzhi, even the half-agnostic Fei Xiaotong – were often far, far better at imitating Christ’s life in service to the poor, the downtrodden, the ‘least of these’ of St Matthew 25 than their American and British evangelical mentors were.

George Parkin Grant – along with his pupils John Milbank and Ron Dart – first confronted me with the problem that America, however loudly certain parts of it proclaim it to be a ‘Christian nation’, can be nothing of the kind. Our Christianity is too much Pilate and not enough Christ; and this is a problem rooted in our founding mythos. We are always jockeying like Cæsar and the princes of the world for global leadership and hankering after action when we need to be seeking the low places in humility and pursuing a less active policy. We are always extolling and applauding the great, rich and powerful – our Bill Gateses and Warren Buffets and Elon Musks – while we shame and exploit the widow with her mite.

This is not a problem of ‘right’ versus ‘left’. I have never been particularly convinced by the American right wing’s worship of markets and invisible hands – particularly when the hand becomes not-so-invisible. Even if it might occasionally be nice for folks to be able to trade in something other than kind, the golden calf idolatry of modern mainstream œconomics and its vulgar manifestations have never sat particularly well with me. (Don’t get me started on the American right wing’s disordered post-Charlottesville love of blood and soil.) Likewise, the increasing and accelerating Pelagian and Gnostic loopiness of the ‘woke’ American ‘progressives’ – with its utter contempt for the merely-human limitations imposed on us feeble mortals by basic biology, physics and common sense – is not endearing in the slightest to this leftist.

Moreover, this is not a problem of ‘modern’ interpretation of American institutions versus ‘original intent’. America’s very founding was deeply conceived in two interrelated heresies. Most of the élite Founding Fathers themselves – Jefferson, Franklin and Paine most openly; but probably also Madison and Washington as well – were Deists who disavowed the divinity of Christ. Most of the foot-soldiers on the ‘Patriot’ side of the War of Independence were, on the other hand, utopian Calvinists who believed themselves to be building the City of God. Neither of these factions had much use for the Prince of Peace, for the lowly Palestinian Jew and Incarnate God who came into the world not to conquer but to save. Even today there is not much use for Him, even among those who most loudly proclaim ‘Lord, Lord’.

As one who attempts to follow Christ, I find I am the child of a patria which is very difficult to love healthily or well from a 1 Corinthians 13 perspective. I don’t believe that the enabling stance that assures fellow Americans that we are the ‘greatest’ or the ‘indispensable’ nation is, in fact, love. I don’t think ‘support our troops’ while keeping them fighting abroad is love. I don’t think caging Central American migrants or shooting and gaoling black folks or drone-bombing Arabs or hating Iranians or Chinese or Russians is love. On the other hand, I don’t believe that the stance that conditions affection upon constant progress toward a disembodied Gnostic ideal is, in fact, love either. (Thank you, Berdyaev!) And unfortunately, on the fourth of July I see both kinds of disordered love displayed with a dismaying prominence in every public space and on every social media platform. On the fourth of July I all too often see ‘love’ which is not long-suffering or kind, and much less so all-bearing, all-believing, all-hoping or all-enduring. I all too often see ‘love’ which vaunts itself, which is puffed-up, which is unseemly, self-seeking, easily-provoked and which rejoices in iniquities. Many takes on what it means to be a ‘good American’ seem incompatible with a Christian understanding of love.

But does this mean America is unloveable? That’s a very different question, and I find myself incredibly loath to say ‘yes’: partly because that cedes way too much conceptual ground to the people who want us to kiss the Constitution, salute the flag and praise the greatness of the American Way. I believe Grant and Milbank are right, and I take it as a given, that you cannot love a piece of paper or an abstract idea as if it were family. But you can love your family (preferably with kisses more than with salutes). You can love your neighbours, too. You can love your backyard. In fact, go out on a limb and love your front yard, too – even and especially if you rent. Stretch out your toes in the grass and wave at the folks on the pavement. I love my parents and sister; I love my children; I love my parishes and their people; I love the tomatoes, peppers, basil, onions, fennel, dill, parsley, rhubarb and marigolds growing in my garden. I love the lakes and parks and rivers of my community, and want to keep them clean. I even love the creeping charlie and violets growing in the yard and the wild coney living under the shed. And if those are America, then yes – America can be loved, in the right way.

Otyrardyń kúıreýi: a Cassandra tale of power and pride

Unju (Doha Qydyralıev) in Otyrardyń kúıreýi

One of the seminal pieces of independent Kazakh cinema is the 1991 Otyrardyń kúıreýi (Отырардың күйреуі, The Fall of Otrar), directed by Ardak Ámirqulov. A sprawling, nearly three-hour-long historical epic, filmed mostly in black and white with a few sparse splashes of colour, Otyrardyń kúıreýi narrates, from a Qypshaq point of view, the fall of the city of Otyrar in Horezm to the Mongols under Sh‎yńǵys Han. This story also serves in part as the basis for Jin Yong’s historical wuxia novel The Eagle-Shooting Hero, but Ámirqulov’s focus is very different than Jin Yong’s.

Jin Yong, at least when he was writing the first book in that trilogy, was doing so from the perspective of a patriot, and his characters – particularly Guo Jing and Huang Rong – are exemplars of heroism. On the other hand, a certain wan pessimism hovers over the heroisms of the characters in Otyrardyń kúıreýi. The indubitable bravery and self-sacrifice of the main character, Unju (Doha Qydyralıev), is repeatedly met by his own shah with mockery, disbelief and a series of cruel tortures. And when Unju’s lord Qaıyr Han, the governor of Otyrar (Tuńǵyshbaı Jamanqulov), who basically sacrificed Unju politically to Shah Muhammad (Ábdýráshit Mahsudov) to save his own skin, is forced into making a brave stand from the walls of his city against the mighty and wrathful Shyńǵys Han (Bolot Beıshenalıev), we already know – or can easily guess – the doom awaiting him and his son. One scene in particular demonstrates Ámirqulov’s fatalistic outlook. One lone Qypshaq hero rides out from Otyrar to a single combat with a Mongol knight as Qaıyr Han watches from the walls; the Mongol taunts him about how he is about to die. Instead of the honourable joust the Qypshaq is expecting, though, four other Mongols ride up behind him, shoot him in the back with an arrow, lasso him from his horse and drag him in the dust behind them.

The entire film is shot in black and white, with only occasional sploshes of colour thrown in for effect, particularly around blood and fire, lending the film its epic – and at times dreamlike – quality. The cinematography choices (and, indeed, the sets) are deliberately claustrophobic, as though we are watching from the point-of-view of a prisoner or a victim of circumstance – much of the action in the first half of the film takes place in dungeons, cramped courtyards, halls, bedchambers, houses and crowded streets. The camera forces us to watch as various bodily tortures and executions are visited upon the victims of state violence – burning, branding, crucifixion, impalement, tongue-cutting. The world shown to us in Otyrardyń kúıre‎‎ýi is uncompromisingly cruel. Only a few brief glimpses of kindness and redemption that are shown to us, and these are emphatically not the result of brave last stands. In the end, only the weapons of the weak seem to be effective, and what little grace there is appears to be arbitrary.

Unju, the noble, selfless and brutally-honest Qypshaq ‘arrow of Allâh’ who served seven years as a scout among the Mongols, spends most of the film attempting to warn his superiors about the Mongol threat, but – like the Cassandra of distant Greek antiquity – he is constantly disbelieved, and he is subject to various tortures and punishments as a result. (The queen mother, who apparently owed Unju a favour, takes a different tack: telling him to save himself by lying, then sending him a Chinese girl to sleep with while keeping guards and spies posted around him.) Despite all this ill-use, even ending up exiled and stripped of his warrior rank because of his persistence, Unju keeps coming back to Qaıyr Han and Otyrar to try to save his people from their own destruction. We get to see the people he cares most about – in particular his old Russian servant who still dreams of going free.

But Shah Muhammad and Qaıyr Han continue to be guided primarily by an overbearing pride. They not only fail to heed Unju, but they also repeatedly antagonise and continually underestimate Shyńǵys Han: first by ransacking the home of his caravan-merchant Yalbach (Záýirbıı Zehov); then by seizing the caravan itself, which Qaıyr Han is shown to do not out of greed but out of defiance against the Mongol leader; and finally by killing one of Sh‎yńǵys Han’s envoys and branding the other two. A war seems inevitable as Qaıyr Han is sent back to see to Otyrar’s defences. Much of the latter half of the movie treats the siege and sack of Otyrar itself. One really has to admire, despite the washed-out, sepia-toned black-and-white choice of production, the technical side: the props – horses, weapons, armour, blood, pyrotechnics – and effects that clearly went into this hour-long epic battle scene.

Because this film is historical epic, and also about as true to actual historical detail as one can reasonably expect from a film adaptation, we already know how it ends. But strangely enough, despite our basically following the perspective of Unju from the beginning and not really having reasons to feel any sympathy for Qaıyr Han (a cruel and cowardly tyrant for most of the film), toward the middle and the end he starts to take on a more human aspect, particularly toward his son whom he clearly loves. Also, despite his tyrannical order – and gruesome example – to cut out the tongues of any in Otyrar who murmur that Allâh has turned against him after the mosque falls, we start to sympathise more with the man himself. At the end, as Qaıyr Han himself takes up a sword, berates his dead troops and fights a one-man last stand, we can’t help but be dismayed when the Mongols capture him and drag him before Sh‎yńǵys Han to meet the end he’s earned. He is killed by having molten silver poured onto his face in a death-masque.

We at last see Unju riding through the ruins of his city, and he finds his old Russian servant, who was at the gates when the Mongols rode in. He lived because the Mongols thought he was the one who opened the gates, and they gave him a gold tablet they used to recognise their agents. He gave this tablet to a blind young Qypshaq girl who lived near Unju’s house, so she could save herself. Unju visits the ruins of a mosque and mulls over the irony that he was ready to be martyred for Otyrar but ended up surviving; and that Qaıyr Han who sought to save his own skin was martyred for his city anyway.

There is a fatalism and a definite undertone of political subversion to this film – notable particularly in the treatments of the court of the sadistic, torture-happy Shah and of Qaıyr Han’s heavy-handed despotism – that mark it out as a product of very late-Soviet glasnost’. It’s as though Ámirqulov fancied himself able to see the writing on the wall, and the result is a surprisingly-thoughtful meditation on timeless political realities. In an additional twist of irony – it’s very clear from the film that if Ámirqulov ever considered himself a patriot, it was in a starkly-realist sense, without any romantic or idealistic illusions – the grim political end he foresaw in his parable-laden treatment of his homeland’s distant history, marked the decisive creative beginning of a national cinematic vernacular for an independent Kazakhstan. The only complaint I have with Otyrardyń kúıreýi is that the copy I watched was overdubbed in Russian; and I’m not a particular fan of that method. However, it’s nonetheless a uniquely powerful film, and very easy to see why Otyrardyń kúıreýi is considered a masterpiece and a touchstone of Kazakh cinema; and also why it was particularly beloved by Martin Scorsese. This film can be pretty hard to take, but it is definitely worth the nearly three-hour sit-down time.

Ulzhan: an unlikely treasure-hunt

Ulzhan (Ayanat Ksenbai) and Charles (Philippe Torreton) in Ulzhan

Much as I have problems with it as a vehicle for imperialist self-definition and propaganda, there’s still something oddly compelling to me about orientalist art, when it is done in a self-aware way. Even after taking Said’s critique into account, Frederic Arthur Bridgman paintings can have a certain charm when their seeming-romanticism and even kitsch gives way to a hidden complexity, an exploration of the ways in which ‘West’ and ‘Rest’ are more alike or on the same wavelength than not. The 2007 French-German-Kazakh film Ulzhan seems to fall into this category.

To be sure, Charles (portrayed by Philippe Torreton), Ulzhan (Ayanat Ksenbai) and Shakuni (David Bennant) start out essentially as Western-movie stock characters – and the argument that they don’t particularly progress or grow seems to be a valid one: Charles, the mysterious stranger with a troubled past; Ulzhan, the supportive and selfless prairie schoolteacher who falls for him; Shakuni, the oddly-dressed vagabond who may be more than he appears. And at times one feels like the film tries to touch on too many themes, tries to be too many things at once. Yet despite borrowing from Westerns (and Osterns), neo-noir, road films and magical realism – its complex and often-frustrating story as it moves from a gritty realism of oil rigs, private security firms, dive bars and Soviet apartment blocks into an otherworldly shamanic venture into the realm of death. This broad arc, coupled with the vast backdrops of the Kazakhstani steppes, in the end create a mesmerising and oddly-compelling film.

In a certain sense, the character of Shakuni himself – a mercurial half-Kazakh, half-diaspora Soviet German fluent in French who embraces an eclectic mélange of Indian, Chinese and shamanic religious thought and acts as something of a medium for Charles and Ulzhan – is something of a writer/director avatar in the sense that the film tries to do something similar to what he does. One can argue that the film is tasked with relating certain shamanistic insights into questions of life and death and purpose through a ‘Western’ story structure and medium. But Shakuni himself seems to be a rather incomplete and not-quite-credible character, however entertaining; and the same could be said of the film itself.

Warning: spoilers to follow.

At the border of Kazakhstan, a frumpy Rich Hall dead ringer with a similar heavily-jowled middle-aged charm (but without the deadpan-snarky wit) appears in a car and presents his papers: Charles, a Frenchman. After driving off, he abandons his car, takes out his effects and starts hitchhiking over the steppe, though he refuses rides from everyone he meets. He goes off-road and finds himself in a town with a dimly-lit cowboy-themed nightclub. He drinks vodka, goes to a party in an apartment, and has awkward drunk bathroom sex with Olga, a Russian bar bunny from the club. He wakes up half-naked and hung over with all of his papers stolen, but the one thing he seems to care about – a canister with a map, a scrap of paper in a foreign script, a crumpled photo of a woman with two children and a postcard – he eventually finds, to his relief.

Charles continues walking, but gets chased and arrested by several Kazakhstani rent-a-cops near an oil rig; when he can’t present his papers to their supervisor he is accused of working for Halliburton or Gazprom, and spends the night in a makeshift trailer-prison. His identity is eventually confirmed by the French consulate in Astana, where he is sent via helicopter to pick up his new papers. Charles spends some time marvelling at this glittering, Las Vegas-type construction in the middle of the desert, with no towns or villages around. The French consul takes him to a lingerie / fashion show, but a visibly-uncomfortable Charles picks up and leaves after a few minutes, then keeps walking – no papers in hand. In an old abandoned building he has his first surreal, unlikely meeting at night with an odd-looking character, Shakuni, who seems to speak perfect French.

Passing through a town Charles sees a small herd of horses and asks whom they belong to. He is pointed to the school, where his odd appearance and fluent French make him an instant hit among the schoolchildren – though Charles answers their questions, one of the children in particular seems to make him sad and wistful. Their schoolteacher, Ulzhan, comes out and takes him back to her place for dinner, and we learn a little more about Charles’s backstory and his destination: Khan-Tengri, a tall mountain which is held sacred by the old shamans. Ulzhan’s mother tells him that is where they go to die. Charles buys a dapple-grey from Ulzhan, and sets out again on his journey – only to find that Ulzhan has been tailing him. He tries several times to send her back, but she keeps returning to him: in one instance even bringing back his horse and saving him from a sandstorm. Along their journey they visit an abandoned kolkhoz, as well as a nomadic village (where they witness Shakuni perform a yurt-blessing), an abandoned holy site with Buddhas carved into the steppe rocks, and a lone painter doing landscapes replete with mushroom clouds, at a radioactive nuclear weapons testing site. Charles tells Ulzhan that he has with him a fragment to a map, that shows the location of a buried treasure, left by the Chinese Nestorians on Khan-Tengri after the Tang Dynasty.

It becomes clear at several points, but particularly at the nuclear test site, that Charles has something of a death-wish. He goes charging with his horse onto the site. He also gets into a fight with two knife-wielding hoodlums over a dead Kazakh’s briefcase containing old letters from World War II – which he confides to Shakuni that he enjoyed. Ulzhan, fed up with Charles’s daredevil antics, correctly guesses that his coming this far, and his going to Khan-Tengri, has more to do with his dead wife and children than it does with his buried treasure – but she continues to stay with him despite suspecting he has come this far just to die. Shakuni stays behind with the dead Kazakh and his widow, and Charles and Ulzhan make their way up Khan-Tengri alone.

Near the top, Charles throws the saddle-bags off of his horse, abandons it and goes off on foot. Ulzhan takes the horses back down the mountain, but not before she silently hugs him. Charles, near the peak, takes out the postcard and the picture of his dead wife and children and lays them under a rock. He turns back to see Ulzhan tying up his horse and leaving it for him before disappearing from sight – offering him the choice to stay and die, or follow her and live. But in the last shot of the film we only see him sitting down on the mountain and weeping.

End spoilers.

Again, I have to wonder if the character of Shakuni isn’t supposed to represent in some larger sense the project of the movie overall: the overly-expressive half-German, half-Kazakh vagrant-hustler with his embrace of ‘dharma’ and shamanic lore. The characters are guided liminally out of a ‘realist’ situation and into the realm of the symbolic, where the dead and the living seem to talk to one another and even the difference between them is not all that clear. Indeed, it’s not all that clear that the ‘night life’ Charles experiences on his arrival in Kazakhstan (or the lingerie show in Astana, for that matter) is in fact ‘life’; and the figures of Charles’s dead family accompany him all the time, right to the very end of the film on the slopes of Khan-Tengri. The conversation Ulzhan and Charles have in the kolkhoz seems to underscore this point: if the life under the Soviets was a ‘zoo’ and life under capitalism a ‘jungle’, how are human beings supposed to live?

As with the other Kazakh films I have been watching recently, the scenery seems to take centre stage. But rather than being a broad expanse suitable to dreaming of the stars (as in Baikonur) or a climate both literally and metaphorically hostile to human life and comfort (Kelin), here it seems to underscore the peculiarly-Gallic preoccupation with a lack of meaning and direction and the difficulty of choosing life over various forms of apathy, despair and death. Again, though, the problems of this being ultimately a piece of orientalist art (in Said’s sense) come to the fore. Asian landscapes and Asian characters form a backdrop for telling a quintessentially-European story. Still, the fact that they seem to have gotten the gist and purposes of the elder shamanic tradition mostly right, with Charles’s personal tragœdy forming the basis for the entire quest, shows that the writer and director seem to be taking their thematic material seriously.

Again, I feel like this is a case of a 100-minute movie trying to do too much and be too much: as a latter-day Ostern with possible shamanic undertones, it almost works. But our protagonist Charles spends most of the film as a sullen, unlikeable grump, and he only starts to become an interesting character when the film is two-thirds over. We never learn that much more about Ulzhan than when she is introduced to us. And Shakuni – even though his backstory is fascinating and plausible – almost feels like a sketch or a caricature more than an actual character. I think I get what the filmmakers were aiming for with their cultural commentary, but the jury’s still out – at least for me – on whether they managed to succeed, or whether the thing collapses into a pretentious mess. I feel like I would have to go back and watch it again from the beginning, to decide if I would even want to recommend it.

A religious-philosophical meditation on a stir-fry

The material aspects of the Christian faith are – and have been for quite a long time – very important to me. Orthodox Christianity is wondrously sensual: in its iconography; in its participatory, harmonic hymnody; in its physical movements and processions; in its incense and censers; in its imparting of the Gifts. Through the Liturgy of the Church Orthodoxy approaches us through all five senses. What’s more, the material, the ‘stuff’ of the Church’s life, is not transfigured or symbolic; through the Liturgy, the liminal boundary between material and idea tends to become porous and fade entirely. (This is one of the points on which I find myself in thorough agreement with Fr Alexander Schmemann, let it be known and proclaimed far and wide.)

Let’s think materially, then. Here we are, two weeks out from the ‘high’ of Holy Week and Pascha. In my kitchen I have about eight skinless red onions in the fridge and a bottle of red wine vinegar left over from dyeing Easter eggs; a couple of uneaten heads of Lenten cabbage; Chinese cooking apparatus and condiments of various sorts left over from when my mother-in-law was here; and a good five pounds of spare ribs bought specifically for Pascha and Bright Week. What to do, what to do?

Prime pork spare-rib stir-fry à la Cooper!

Needless to say, this shamelessly culturally-appropriated (and literally-appropriated; this is equipment my mother-in-law gave us, after all!) Asian fusion dish made an instant hit in the Cooper household and there have been requests from certain quarters for encores despite its decided lack of political correctness. And so, I have been honing my technique a bit. This post-Lenten cooking has engendered some interesting meditations on certain material aspects of the art.

When you’re stir-frying, it’s necessary to be a bit sparing with the oil to start with – but you can’t have none. The pork has plenty of fat on it, and it’s usually enough to impart the flavour without making the veggies slippery and greasy while you’re cooking. Oil spits when it gets hot; the more of it in the bottom of the wok, the bigger a mess it tends to make if you’re not careful. And lastly: oil doesn’t evaporate (at least, not in quantities sufficient to matter for cooking purposes). The amount of oil you add to start is pretty much the amount of oil you’ll end up eating.

The same is very much not true of water. Again, the veggies have their own water, which is fine. So do the vinegar and the soy sauce. But the amount of water you add is not the amount of water that you end up with in the dish when it’s ready to serve. Water does, and is meant to, evaporate. It’s still a necessity: if you start by frying the vegetables and add the meat later when it’s still cold, you have to add water to the veggies to keep them from being overdone. It also helps brown the meat a bit better and carries the aroma better. But the main purpose of adding water to a stir-fry is to add time to the process: to give the cook more space to think, plan and experiment, to add other ingredients to taste. In this style of cooking, anyway, water is time.

Not for nothing were the first clocks – in ancient Ægypt – powered by water. The Ægyptians used them for sacral purposes: to accurately measure time during the night so that the appropriate times for sacrifices and offerings to Amun could be observed. These were people, it must be understood, who also fully appreciated that water – that of the great river, certainly – could lengthen or shorten men’s lives in very proximate and immanent ways. ‘Water is time’ had the same material immediacy to them that it would to a certain cook 3,500 years later. Thank the Alexandrians for one thing at least, for all they seem to have led us by the noses (and other organs) since the days of Saint Mark. This definitive attitude toward the elements they managed to impart also to the Orthodox Church in its various forms. The Red Sea water. The water of the Jordan. The water of baptism. The water that flowed from Christ’s side. Christ as the water of life. We are immersed in water when we are born. We die in it and are given new life. I’m not being ‘cute’ with this: of course there is something definitively Ægyptian about this whole relationship of the Orthodox Church to water – where else do you think Christ spent His infancy and youth?

It is therefore in a similar material immediacy that the Orthodox Church uses and demarcates water as (not just a ‘symbol’, not a ‘transfiguration’ of) time, but also æternity – whether in baptism, or at Theophany, or in the blessings of houses. The material, the temporal and spatial ‘stuff’ of the world, is fully present and fully participating in the worship of the Church; all of creation is glorified – it is not the stuff but rather the logic of the world that is broken and overturned when it encounters Christ. Christ, the living water, is not exhausted by use. He doesn’t evaporate as the water does when I’m cooking. There is not less of Christ to go around when His body and blood are ingested, but rather more.

It’s important to be careful here. I still need to cook. I still need to eat. My body is still seventy percent water – and the rest of it is literally made up of the stuff I eat. Christ is Risen indeed, but I’m still going to die. The overturned logic of the world at Pascha doesn’t do away with or destroy the world proper or with its material dimensions; it doesn’t whisk us away into the world of the Platonic Forms; it transforms and subsists in what is already there. It is only by the mystery of baptism and by the Gifts that the living water, that æternity, becomes present in us – physically, materially, spatially and temporally. But this overturned logic of Pascha is something we get, along with Saint Thomas, to not only see, but touch and taste, every week. It looks us in the eye. Not in a symbolic way; not in a metaphysical way; not according to some abstract doctrine – but materially. It requires a true heart of flesh and blood, a heart of love, to be sensible to us, but the stuff, the matter of it, is all still present and in us… Anyway, that’s what a Saturday afternoon stir-fry conjures.

Holy Friday – ‘The Word Himself is no more’

Icon of the Crucifixion

It is difficult for me to come up with anything to say on this Holy Friday. Contemplating death – even my own, let alone that of the Son of God today – is a truly frightening and humbling thing. Just as theodicies are no good to those who suffer pain and heartbreak, in the end even philosophies are no good to those faced with death. And for a philosopher, that’s really hard to face with; even impossible. And so I go searching – in the poetry of Christian poets, in the hymnody of the Church. But silence seems to be the theme, and that is the directive of this day of Christ’s death and of the Holy Saturday which follows. הס מפניו כל־הארץ – ‘Let all the earth keep silence before Him.’. In the end, what could be more fitting than to dwell on the homilies of Holy Father Filaret of Moscow, on the need for silence before the face of this dread reality, this ontology which no human thought or word or project or life can escape? The following is from one of Saint Filaret’s homilies delivered on Great and Holy Friday.

What would you now, brethren, from the ministers of the word? The Word Himself is no more!

The Word, co-æternal with the FATHER and the SPIRIT, born for our salvation, the Author of every quick and powerful word, is silent, dead, buried and sealed up. The more plainly and convincingly ‘to show man the path of life’, this very Word came down from heaven and put on flesh; but men would not hearken unto the Word, they tare His flesh, and lo, ‘He is cut off out of the land of the living’. Who then shall now give unto us the word of life and salvation?

Let us hasten to confess the mystery of the Word which shall disarm His persecutors, and restore Him to souls ready to receive Him. The Word of GOD is not bound by death. As a word from the lips of man dies not entirely away at the moment its sound ceases, but rather gathers new strength, and passing through the senses, penetrates the minds and hearts of the hearers; so also the Hypostatical Word of GOD, the SON of GOD, in His saving incarnation, whilst dying in the flesh, ‘fills all things’ with His Spirit and might. Thus when CHRIST waxeth faint and becometh silent on the cross, then is it that heaven and earth raise their voice unto Him, and the dead preach the resurrection of the Crucified, and the very stones cry out. ‘And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.’

Christians, the incarnate Word keepeth silence only in order to speak unto us with greater power and effect; withdraws, that He may the more inwardly ‘dwell among us’; dies, that He may grant us His inheritance. Assembled by the Church to hold converse with the departed JESUS, listen ye unto the quick and powerful word of the dead; listen ye to the testament He has left unto you; ‘And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as My FATHER hath appointed unto Me.’ But lest any untimely dreams of the greatness of that inheritance should turn away our gaze from the Crucified JESUS pictured to us in these solemn days, let us, Christians, the more carefully observe that His immediate heirs found no other treasure after His death than the wood of the cross upon which He suffered and died, and it was this same cross which they offered as a pattern for imitation to all who desired to partake in the inheritance of His kingdom.

What does this mean? It means, that as ‘CHRIST ought to have suffered,’ in order ‘to enter into His glory,’ which He ‘hath with His FATHER,’ so also does it behove the Christian, ‘through much tribulation, to enter into the kingdom of GOD’ which CHRIST hath bequeathed unto him; it means that as the cross of CHRIST is the gate of the kingdom of GOD for all, so is the cross of every Christian the key of the kingdom to every son of the kingdom. This then is the epitome of the sublime preaching of the Cross, so incomprehensible to the mind, so easily accepted by faith, and so powerful through GOD. Let us offer it as a drop of myrrh upon the sepulchre of the quickening Word.

Saint Filaret does not spare us the full implications of what he is saying here, which is what makes his homily so powerful. The Word is gone from the face of the earth; all the earth is gone mute and dumb. The entire weight of the Cross upon the shoulders of the blameless Christ, though borne gladly, still results in His mortal end, the mortal end which He shares with us in our fallen nature. And we are silent. We have to be. Without the Word, we have nothing to say. We may know what is coming, the Holy Pascha that awaits us. But Filaret would not have us jump blithely from this present sadness to that comfort and consolation, without first looking firmly and fixedly into the abyss of ‘darkness, sorrow, terror, labour, sickness, death, misery, humiliation, the enmity of all nature, all powers of destruction’ before us, the one which Christ Himself faced. Saint Filaret would have us look to Christ even as He cried out ‘Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?’

We can’t help but flinch from this, and tremble with fear, if we fully understand the implications of what is said. We fear to go there; we fear to take up this cross; we do not have the strength. Christ does, though. As Laozi said in the Daodejing, chapter eight (Richard John Lynn’s translation):

The highest good is like water. The goodness of water lies in benefitting the myriad things without contention, while locating itself in places that common people scorn.

Note how the Word, water flowing from His side, does benefit the ‘myriad things’ (wanwu 萬物, a figure of speech denoting the whole of creation) while locating Himself in a place where He is scorned by all, and more than that, a place which is avoided by all if we can help it. We do not want to go there; and yet this is where Christ and the Church carry us – before His cross, where we keep silence.

Come, let us all sing the praises of Him who was crucified for us,
For Mary said when she beheld Him upon the tree:
Though You do endure the cross, You are my Son and my God!

The paradox of personhood and selflessness

Laozi 老子

One of the great benefits of reading Berdyaev in conjunction with Eastern philosophers like Laozi 老子 and Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, and poets like Qu Yuan 屈原 and Wen Yiduo 聞一多, is that you get a clear sense of the complementarity of the truths offered by the Russian tradition (which is really to say: the Greek Academic philosophical tradition always already filtered through a Christian lens) and those offered by the still more ancient Chinese philosophical tradition. The book Christ the Eternal Tao by the Serbian Orthodox Hieromonk Damascene is one I have been mulling on for a while now; eventually I will have to go back to the Daodejing 《道德经》 and look for the points of contact in greater depth.

But one thing that struck me about Hieromonk Damascene’s book (and he is one excellent writer, by the way), is how adeptly he sorts the genius of Western wisdom from that of Chinese philosophy. My father-confessor at St Herman’s and I were discussing this book the other day. I cannot take credit for a lot of the insights that follow; those must go to Fr Paul or to Hieromonk Damascene. In any event, Hieromonk Damascene avoids both the sillier, shallow forms of New Age jargon and jumbling, as well as the blinkered, chauvinistic view of Derrida (or Žižek) that Chinese people are incapable of philosophy.

Instead, he focusses on the ability of Western thought, in conjunction with the Hebrew prophetic tradition, to grasp the importance of the personal. Moses and Elijah beheld (though they were not and could not be aware of the full truth of it) the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God. The Hebrew God—is a personal God. Not an idea or a concept or a mental construct. We human beings are each a crafted icon, an image-and-likeness, of the Divine. This is precisely the Mosaic-prophetic intuition. However, the difficulty in the West is in attributing to the personal God those aspects of self-will which we manifest in our fallen state. At worst, the Hebrew prophets interpreted their God as a stern lawgiver, a monad and a grim Lord of vengeance; at their best, they could see within God the patience of a loving Father, but these glimpses were rare. The Hebrews were expecting, not Christ, but a Saviour of a very different sort.

The intuition of Laozi, on the other hand, is that the divine Being, or Way, or Dao 道, is perfectly selfless. It makes no demands, it does not stand on its own rights, it does not force itself, it does not ratiocinate or justify or excuse itself, it does not inflict violence or destroy the other to build itself up. It has no self-will, no ego. It simply is. The idea of wu wei 無為 supposes an absence of will, a selfless simplicity. However, this too has been broadly misunderstood and misinterpreted. The Daoist ideal of selflessness was applied to rulership, and ended up bolstering a kind of Legalistic doctrine wherein the personal characteristics of ruler and minister are both obscured as heavily as possible. Alternatively, the Daoist principle of wu wei has been politically misappropriated to support liberaltarianism and anarchism of various shades, even though all of these interpretations involve political assertions of desire, egotism and self-will that are in fact contrary to wu wei. When one thus de-emphasises personality, ideology begins to take hold. Small wonder the 18^th-century Yijing 《已經》 scholar and Daoist master Liu Yiming 劉一明 complained:

七十二家炉火事，三千六百淫邪功。
以盲引盲迷正路，阻挡学人入牢笼。

There are 72 schools of material alchemy, and 3,600 aberrant practices. Since the blind lead the blind, they lose sight of the right road; they block students and lead them into a pen.

The dangers of overemphasising independence (which leads to egotism, judgmentalism, and ultimately a kind of dead legalism), and overemphasising nothingness (which leads to an emptying of the content of life and a reification of bureaucratic forms, another kind of legalism), are thus made apparent. Both truths have to be held simultaneously, a paradox beyond the grasp of classical philosophy, whether East or West. Equally fascinating, though, are the trinitarian presentiments which Hieromonk Damascene attributes to Laozi in the Daodejing. Hieromonk Damascene puts a particular emphasis on Daodejing 42, which begins:

道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物。

The Dao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things.

The idea is that Laozi had an insight into the triune nature of the Divine. But here Laozi approaches them as though they are something akin to Platonic numbers; they are not treated as persons. The operation of the Trinity was intuited by Laozi, however the personal nature was not seen, only intuited. As the Chinese Daoist philosopher and teacher of Hieromonk Damascene and Fr Seraphim Rose, Gi-Ming Shien (or Shen Jiming 申紀明), put it, the Three of Laozi represents ‘the reconciliation of opposites’, that it is ‘the principle of order’ which ‘produces all things’.

However, the primary thrust of the book – a philosophical insight common to the personalism of Orthodoxy and shared by the Desert Fathers, Nikolai Berdyaev, Dr Martin Luther King, Rowan Williams and others – is that the person can be selfless. This is what Hieromonk Damascene calls the ‘paradox of personhood and selflessness’. The person and the individual are not identical; the person is not merely a rights-bearer; the person and the ego are not the same thing. The personhood of the Trinity is not only unselfish but in fact selfless, non-monadic; it is erotic and kenotic: it begets and it proceeds out of itself; it pours itself out and is continually renewed. This continual dynamic self-emptying as a cosmic principle of order is something that Laozi himself intuited:

道沖而用之或不盈。淵兮似萬物之宗。

The Dao is (like) the emptiness of a vessel; and in our employment of it we must be on our guard against all fulness. How deep and unfathomable it is, as if it were the Honoured Ancestor of all things!

We thus come to the nub of the argument. There really are only Three Persons in one single substantive Being, and we among the wanwu 萬物, the myriad things produced by this Three-Persons-in-One-Being, are all icons of that Being and those Persons. But insofar as we are fallen; that is, insofar as we insist on our selves, our individuality, our sufficiency unto ourselves as little gods and little idols, our personhood is actually diminished. The paradox of personhood is that it can be realised only through selflessness: the selflessness of the Dao, the selflessness of the Way in which we were created. In our darkened state we become substantive, we become person, only by losing our selves, and by loving others in the way that we were loved when the Lover of Mankind made us.

There is a great deal of philosophical truth worth pondering and discussing in Christ the Eternal Tao, and again it strikes me that I need to re-read the Daodejing in order to get more out of the centrepiece and commentaries of the book. That said, I certainly invite my readers to take a stab at reading Christ the Eternal Tao as well.

Imagination, memory and personhood: a belated look at Inside Out

I watched Pixar’s recent movie Inside Out when it first came out in cinema (largely on account of the voice talent of Lewis Black), and thought it was an excellent film and a worthy addition to their corpus. However, the depth of its psychological, anthropological and even theological engagements hadn’t really managed to strike me on that first watch; the more fool me, I suppose! It took Matthew Tan’s brief but excellent treatment of the film over at The Divine Wedgie to clue me in that the movie might be saying something deeper than that it’s healthy for children to feel sad sometimes. In a film whose story takes place on two different levels the way this one does, it is probably not surprising that there’s actually a lot more going on than we might think at first!

Riley Andersen, a 12-year-old Midwestern homegirl from Minnesota, is actually a fairly happy kid, as we learn from hearing the emotion Joy inside her head essentially narrate her life from an ‘insider’ perspective. Joy essentially runs the show from ‘Headquarters’, alongside the emotions of Fear, Disgust, Anger and Sadness; at first Joy doesn’t really know what to do with Sadness or how to get her on-board, despite her being the second-oldest emotion on the scene. It’s clear, however, that Riley is fairly well-adjusted, to start with, in any case. We learn that she’s kind of a ‘goofball’, she plays hockey well, she has at least one very close friend, she’s very honest and that – most importantly as far as the film is concerned – she loves her family. But her mother and father decide, apparently without telling her, to uproot themselves and move to San Francisco; which is the precipitating event of the film’s main story.

It becomes clear at once that Joy is out of her depth. No matter how she tries to keep Riley happy, the realities of San Francisco (the filthy house, her parents being busy, broccoli-covered pizza, a new school where she feels isolated and alone, being removed from her old friends and hockey team) quickly overwhelm Joy, and Joy is too busy fighting with Sadness over Riley’s memories that Riley finds herself at the mercy of Fear, Anger and Disgust. When Sadness almost touches one of Riley’s Core Memories (defining memories which shape her personality), the fight between her and Joy gets them both sucked out of Headquarters and into Long-Term Memory; the rest of the film concerns the internal struggle by Joy and Sadness to get back to Headquarters, and the external story of Riley’s running away from home.

There are a number of excellent sight-gags and puns throughout the film, but also a number of very astute and subtly-made observations about how each of us persons operates essentially as our own full world, with its own vast geography and hidden treasure. (It would be difficult to imagine, for example, that the internal structure of Riley’s brain isn’t influenced at least indirectly by the labyrinthine and often dangerous warren of shelves and trap-filled secure rooms in Warehouse 13, that ‘world of endless wonder’. They even have Joy and Sadness reuse Warehouse 13’s running ‘read-the-manual’ gag!) The entire perspective of this movie, in fact, is deeply and inescapably personalistic; everything is seen through the eyes of one individual pre-teen girl (Riley), but at the same time we understand that Riley can’t be Riley unless she has the right relationship with her family and with her friends – in short, with her social context. As far as the story itself goes, the film has a particularly important poetic ‘point’ to make about the roles of imagination, memory and emotion in producing a fully-functional, socially-adept and responsible (in short, virtuous) person.

When Joy and Sadness get lost in Riley’s Long-Term Memory along with all of her Core Memories from Minnesota, they find themselves completely lost without having a guide. That guide, in fact, turns out to be the film’s personification of imagination – Riley’s imaginary friend Bing-Bong, who (at least as far as Joy and Sadness are concerned) is still ‘real’ enough to help them save her. Bing-Bong helps them store all of Riley’s Core Memories safely inside his Bag of Holding +2 (‘What? It’s imaginary!’). It is actually Bing-Bong who helps Joy start to realise the correct role Sadness has to play in Riley’s personality, when Sadness successfully comforts a distraught and despondent Bing-Bong over the loss of his imaginary rocket, by sitting down and remembering with him all of the adventures he and Riley had together. However, Bing-Bong does have a knack for trouble, even if well-intentioned. He leads Joy and Sadness (over Sadness’s protestations) through the Abstract Thought machine, which almost successfully gets them fragmented, deconstructed, flattened, denatured and nearly abstracted out of existence. Even though the entire scene is an extended sight gag that plays with concepts from modern art, it also manages to make a serious point about the dangers of subjecting reality, and especially those realities pertaining to personality, to needless abstraction.

In the meanwhile, without Joy or Sadness to balance them out, Riley’s Fear, Disgust and Anger begin to alienate her from her friends and family, and even begin to rationalise her into running away, back to Minnesota. Unwittingly, they derail her Train of Thought and cause Joy and Bing-Bong to fall into the Memory Dump.

This is one of the most existentially-poignant parts of the entire film: Joy sitting forlorn among the forgotten memories of a past that is literally fading, dying and blowing away in the wind, remembering the parts of Riley’s personality that made her who she is, and weeping over the doomed memories she had been protecting. As it turns out, it is only imagination that can save Riley from forgetting joy. The imagery of Hades and Heaven, and the immeasurable gulf between the darkness of the Memory Dump and the brightness and colour of the Personality (‘We may as well be on another planet!’), lends itself at once to a theological reading. In short, though Christ is never mentioned explicitly, we get to see Him partially, in type. It takes two acts of self-sacrifice to ‘save’ Riley from running away and becoming emotionally-numb: one by Bing-Bong to get Joy back up to where she needs to be in the Personality; and one by Joy to relinquish her control over Headquarters, and to let Sadness restore Riley’s Core Memories, so that she can help to remember with her parents a past that she felt in danger of forgetting altogether.

There are likely more than a few problems with taking Inside Out’s ‘internalised’, psychologised view of salvation (which other authors have tackled with greater acuity than I could), but these are balanced out by what they manage to get right. The entire dramatic and emotional weight of the film rests on the conceit of the person as an entire world contained in herself, of immeasurable complexity and value. We get invested in Riley Andersen’s life by seeing things not only through her eyes, but from inside her head; by being awed at the depth of even a 12-year-old girl’s personhood, and by investing ourselves even in what little fragments of her memory and imagination that we get to see.

This is a point that we might do well to dwell on. It is entirely possible that the abnormal and unhealthy outworkings of disgust, fear and anger in our own society, of the sort that result in poisoned political discourse and mass shootings, reflect our own inability to process memory correctly. Sadness is not something foreign to us, but it does not always find welcome in a New World psyche that is eternally focussed on technological progress and liberation from a poorly-imagined past, and that unbalances us. The idea that we can and should grieve over a past that is gone, that we can and should (as Sadness does) ‘listen for the intimations of deprival’, and that we can and should engage our moral imaginations to ‘live critically in the dynamo’ and reconstruct in the right way a place for remembering – is actually a pretty radical one for an American audience to consider. For that alone, Inside Out is not only worth watching twice or more, but also worth deeply reflecting on.

The Shoah, through American eyes

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we should remember that there are several ways for an American to remember the Shoah, some of them helpful and others far less so. World War II is a living memory for some, but it is a living memory which is rapidly fading. As a millennial, my grandparents lived through the War – at least one of them witnessed the Pacific theatre firsthand. But of these grandparents, two of them are now dead. And my Jewish grandmother was lucky to have been born to immigrant parents in Wisconsin rather than stay in Europe, where she would have been forced into an Austro-Hungarian ghetto or into a Nazi concentration camp. As such, my experience of the Shoah is the same as that of any American Jew whose family immigrated early: I know of the Shoah only intellectually, through films and through books, and not through a personal narrative. But insofar as it was an attack on specifically ethnic, not religious, Jewishness everywhere, it nevertheless has a personal impact that does echo down to this day.

So what do we do with it?

First off, not only Jews suffered in the Shoah. The suffering of the Jews was particular and unique in terms of the full social and historical depth of the animosity toward them drawn upon by the Nazis and in terms of the symbolic value the death of the Jews held for their persecutors. But in the end it was a shared suffering – shared with Poles and Russians and Serbs, shared with trade unionists and political leftists of all sorts, shared with Romani, shared with the disabled and mentally-ill, shared with homosexuals, shared with all manner of social outcasts and scapegoats. One unproductive way to look at the Shoah is to wrongly essentialise the suffering of one’s own group, and to use it as a totem against others who were hurt and whose communities were destroyed.

On the other hand, there was a unique dimension to the Shoah, unlike any other event in Western history. To look at it as an atrocity like unto all other atrocities committed by world powers throughout history also is reductively relativistic, and therefore wrong, because it excuses all the people who do not deserve to be excused. The spiritual rot of anti-Semitism took hold at the very heart of the Western world, at the very pinnacle of the most intellectually-advanced Western society, and culminated in an industrialised bloodshed of such enormity that, for a brief time, it shocked the Western world into introspection about its own commitments. In this, the Shoah was very much unique, and Jewish suffering in it was unlike unto anything else in the history of the West. That the Germans in their utterly blind, Nimrodic spiritual pride, were so convinced of the superiority of their civilisation that so many of them were seduced by Hitler’s poison, deserves to be marked off. The Nazi hatred of the Jews itself masked a hatred of all godhoods but their own. There is an example there that now needs to be rightly understood by the modern West.

Whether it actually is so understood is another matter.

The Holocaust was born of the first and gravest of sins – hubris, the sin of the Evil One. We must take care that its remembrance does not do the same. It is actually not as clear to me anymore which is worse – the denial of the Holocaust or the manipulative use of the Holocaust to justify further acts of Western civilisational hubris (the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine), and to indulge in the idea that the world and its people are ours to reshape in our own image. The former, though it goes without saying that it is a morally repugnant wilful blindness and deserves the highest censure, has at least the virtue of being a direct reactiveness, a pride expressed in the bluntest of possible forms: ‘I could not have done that’.

The latter, on the other hand, though its intentions are sincere – ‘never again’ as a battle-cry in the name of human rights and democracy – nonetheless masks the same spiritual illness that had taken hold of the Nazis. The pride takes a subtler turn. For the civilisation that understands itself as the ‘thousand year kingdom’, or in terms of the neoconservative and democratic-idealist discourse the ‘end of history’, dissent is tantamount to an existential threat and must be utterly erased. It is no accident that the cheerleaders of the war in Iraq compared Saddam to Hitler, or that Gadhafi, Assad, Putin and Xi have all come in for the same utterly-undeserved comparison from precisely the same people. It was a psychological need to highlight the cosmic and world-historical consequences of the failure to act to stamp out the dissenters from our designs and calculations. The same hubristic spirit of the will to power, of the self-justifying drive for mastery over man and nature, that drove the Nazis to their spectacular fall into the most animalistic depravities against the Jews, still wriggles like a worm around the very heart of liberal, democratic Western civilisation. Thus, to take the Holocaust as an object lesson in the self-justification of the merits of liberal democracy, rather than as an indictment of our spiritual disease, ultimately strikes me as equally wrong.

For this reason alone, the Holocaust ought to remain close to our minds. We as Westerners stand before it – not as the prosecutors, but as the accused. The fact of Jewishness places an additional burden upon those of us who are Jewish as well as Americans, because even though we have not personally suffered in the enormity of the Shoah, we have been chosen inescapably as witnesses for the prosecution. And we will remain witnesses. But as the beneficiaries of American civilisation and military action, we are very much not exempt from the indictment upon which the Nazis have been judged. We need to remember the Shoah, but we need to remember it rightly. Contra Nietzsche, memory must not yield to pride. We must attain from the Holocaust that spiritual knowledge that comes only through our willing repentance, or the battle-cry of ‘never again’ will ring truly hollow indeed.

Black Lagoon

I really can’t say I’m as much of a weeaboo as I used to be. Politically I’m not a Japanophile at all. Actually living and working in East Asia – China and Japan – cured me of that. And going to college pretty much turned me off from most Japanese cultural exports. There’s a plasticity and sterility to them which, to tell the truth, kind of rubs me the wrong way. Nowadays I mentally sort Japanese anime and manga into four broad categories:

• Art. Anime and manga with endearing characteristics that can pass for a soul on something deeper than a cursory inspection. Generally has one creator with a consistent, clear creative vision, who wants to do his own thing regardless of what the market pressures him to do – which in Japanese culture makes him or her essentially a megalomaniac or a crazy outcast bastard. Generally also has a storyline which doesn’t succumb to plot clichés and cardboard-cutout characters. Examples include: Last Exile, Jûni Kokki, Cowboy Bebop, Hakujaden, Samurai Champloo, Haibane Renmei, basically anything with Miyazaki Hayao’s name attached to it (and possibly anything by Studio Ghibli generally).
  
  
• Cheap, hackish commercial schlock. Anime and manga that blatantly and shamelessly ride the crest of some popular trend or obviously try to cash in on something. Usually accompanied by a collector card game or a line of overpriced plastic toys. Generally has a predictable paint-by-numbers plot populated by paint-by-numbers heroes fighting villains-of-the-week. Often accompanied by unrealistic huge piloted robots. Or unrealistic huge piloted robots capable of space travel. Or unrealistic huge piloted robots that can join together to form even more unrealistic, huger piloted robots. Or katanas. Or katanas that can destroy in one swing unrealistic huge piloted robots capable of space travel which can join together to form even more gAAAAHHHHHHggguurrrggggl… you get my drift. Basically heartless, soulless brightly-coloured crap, made as cheap as possible and animated, directed and produced by committee for maximum possible payout. Examples include: One Piece, Naruto, Yû-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, Fushigi Yûgi, Full Metal Alchemist, Cardcaptor Sakura, Transformers (the originals and especially the Michael Bay remakes), practically anything with Gundam in the title, practically anything that played on FOX Kids, and so on. Yes, I’m prejudiced. Go cry me a river.
  
  
• Cheap, hackish commercial schlock with a certain sense of comic self-awareness. Plays the irony factor occasionally. Slightly hipsterish in orientation, or at least comical in a certain sense. May have cardboard-cutout characters but at least plays them off each other, breaks the fourth wall for laughs, or undermines them in certain ways which are amusing for the viewer. May or may not have certain mo lei tau tendencies. Usually authored by at least one artist with a sense of humour, though probably also with a profit motive and a massive ego. Examples include: The Slayers (self-aware low-budget D&D-styled schlock par excellence!), Excel Saga (utter mo lei tau brilliance), FLCL, the original Dragon Ball (not any of the sequels), Dr. Slump and Rumic World.
  
  
• Pretentious poseurish bullshit. My very least favourite form of anime and manga – truly the bottom of the barrel. Tries to be deep. Fails miserably. Clearly influenced by the original run of Eva. Too much so. In all the wrong ways. Often to the point where it may include quotes by or allusions to Greek, German, French or Danish philosophers it clearly doesn’t understand (bonus points if it uses the original language in a flowery cursive font; triple points if it has Engrish misspellings; tenfold points if at any point it includes sakura flower petals floating by). Tries to be dark and edgy. Comes off as boring, mopey and emo. Features plots which are needlessly drawn-out, don’t make sense, or both. Features characters which are cardboard-cutouts but which tries its hardest to convince us they aren’t. Probably has an intentionally-misspelled title, a title with capital letters in the wrong place, or over- or misused punctuation marks. Has a single artist or author on medications, who is also possibly a suspect in multiple child molestation cases. Textbook example and my personal nemesis: DeathNote – which holds the distinction of being the only anime ever to make me actively root for the Chinese state censors. Other examples: SaiKano, any of the spinoffs or remakes of Eva (the original is debatable), Witch Hunter Robin, Rurôni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal, Code Geass.

Which leaves me with the question of what to do with Black Lagoon, which I just recently watched. After having watched it, I still can’t decide if what I watched fell into the category of art, pretentious poseurish bullshit, or maybe a new category – self-aware pretentious poseurish bullshit.

What it is is remarkably entertaining and darkly funny. If Quentin Tarantino (complete with his brand of vaguely left-wing politics) directed Pirates of the Caribbean set in modern-day Southeast Asia, with an artistic style that is clearly trying to ape Cowboy Bebop, the result would look very similar to this. And one of the main characters is a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, blue-streaking, dual Beretta-wielding, hotpants-rocking tattooed Chinese-American badass raised on the wrong side of Manhattan. How badass, you say? Put it this way: anytime she opens her mouth or twitches her finger she can roundhouse kick Chuck Norris before shooting him in the damn face.

Citizen of the fucking year.

The series can’t avoid being political, though I’m not decided yet whether it’s a good thing or not. And because of its following the main character Rock, who as a low-ranking young Japanese salaryman is a minnow thrown into the shark pool that is Tortuga the fictional Thai port town Roanapur, its politics come off at first as vaguely quasi-anarchist. He gets kidnapped by pirates and his bosses essentially try to get him killed in order to prevent the pirates from completing their contract, but after he learns of and then foils their plan, disillusioned with the Japanese corporate world he turns pirate himself.

And, not to give away spoilers, but the ranking superpower on the world stage often makes its weight felt in this series. When the main characters aren’t Tarantino-ing neo-Nazis in the style of Inglourious Basterds, that is. Or getting into fights with unstoppable Colombian ex-mercenaries, busting the heads of Philippine Islamists, protecting a one-woman international counterfeiting ring from Cuban-American Mafiosi or abetting the massacre of entire yakuza clans by ex-Soviet gangsters. It’s a real mixed bag that way.

Where it gets into the pretentious bullshit territory, though, is when Rock ends up in a sort of pointless existential crisis on account of a sympathetic Heidegger- and Sartre-quoting villain-of-the-arc. Philosophically it is literate (unlike so many of Eva’s countless imitators) and it makes sense both for him and for the villain, but in terms of the story I’m not entirely sure it tells us anything we didn’t already know about Rock – and it certainly doesn’t resolve anything. (Though maybe that’s the point. Argh.)

I’m not undecided on the quality of this series. It is remarkably well-made. Gratuitous? Gleefully so. But even the gratuitousness has a point to make. And the characters really do grow on you, even the ones who would be the most unlikeable in real life, and that’s all to Rei Hiroe’s credit. The artwork is pretty derivative, but the story is better than decent! I’m giving it my recommendation.

Encapsulated in DC, the modern world

One of GK Chesterton’s best-known quotes goes thus: ‘The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.’ It is among his best-known simply because it is one of the best-evidenced. And nowhere is that evidence prevailing more than in Washington, DC.

The Affordable Health Care Act is a manifestly bad law. It’s an utterly convoluted, technocratic mess whose benefits are not readily visible even to those it purports to cover. It lacks the sort of public insurance option (something like Britain’s NHS) which could have helped most to ensure competitive costs – and the evasion by the Administration that the political capital to pass such an option didn’t exist doesn’t pass the smell test, because the Administration expended exactly zero effort to build it.

But more distressingly, it is little more than a bandage designed to hold together a centralised rentier system, and deepens the collusion between insurance companies, service providers and big pharma in ways which, even though they may cut costs for care in the short-term, will nonetheless fail to control them in the long run. In essence, it is a taxpayer-supported direct subsidy to private insurance companies, who will continue to leverage their status under the law to derive profit. The insurance companies depend upon a base of customers who share costs, and the AHCA essentially assured them a much broader base than they already had. This, in turn, opens up a far broader consumer base for the large pharmaceutical corporations which already do multi-billion dollar business in the United States alone. There is no reason to believe this is a bug rather than a feature.

A law which could break the stranglehold of big pharma and big health insurance over our current health system on the one hand, and ensure protections for local options for direct service provision (a guild system for doctors, perhaps) on the other hand, would have gone a long way in the right direction. This wouldn’t entirely solve the intractable problems of the sort of tremendous medical school debt which drives doctors into the arms of big pharma in the first place, however, or our broken patent system with its insane absolutism regarding intellectual property, which keeps generics from becoming widely available. The American health system is something of a Gordian knot that way, and a comprehensive fix will have to involve a sea-change in the culture such that more focus is placed on preventative care and direct community involvement. And for that to happen, costs have to go down first, which requires a change in the culture towards care… and so on, ad nauseam. But there are good fixes and bad fixes, and the AHCA cannot be said to fall into the first category.

All of the above being said, though…

Shutting down the government over a refusal to fund the bill is simply not the proper response. Not only is it infantile. Not only does it demonstrate to the public a dearth of ideas on the part of the GOP. But it encourages the perception – and therefore influences the reality, in that curiously cable television- and Twitter-influenced postmodern way that ‘seeing is believing’, and therefore ‘being is but being seen’ – that American partisan politics is an existential zero-sum game. What’s more, it is seen to be an existential zero-sum game between institutionalised caricatures of what Americans actually believe and want. The only reason the GOP thought that they could get away with this sort of thing was because they were given the impression that it would win them votes.

And while good people – as many as eight hundred thousand of them, including members of the military – who do honest and productive work in the public sector (yes; such a thing does exist, as do the people who do it) are being furloughed, the same people responsible for this entire mess are still drawing their six-figure paychecks.

A slightly less well-known quote by GK Chesterton – but one which, if this sort of nonsense continues, is likely to become much better-known in the near future – is: ‘It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.’

EDIT: Although, it appears I may have spoken too soon, and some clemency may be in order; the House has voted to give furloughed federal employees back pay. Still doesn’t excuse what brought about the need for it, though.

Know thyself

GK Chesterton, the great man of letters of the last century, said in his introduction to the Charles Dickens book ‘American Notes’:

This old Anglo-American quarrel was much more fundamentally friendly than most Anglo-American alliances. In Dickens's day each nation understood the other enough to argue. In our time neither nation understands itself even enough to quarrel. There was an English tradition, from Fox and eighteenth-century England; there was an American tradition from Franklin and eighteenth-century America; and they were still close enough together to discuss their differences with acrimony, perhaps, but with certain fundamental understandings. The eighteenth-century ... was an age, in short, in which the word “progress” could still be used reasonably; because the whole world looked to one way of escape and there was only one kind of progress under discussion. Now, of course, “progress” is a useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined direction; and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree.

Do not let us therefore be misled into any mistaken optimism or special self-congratulation upon what many people would call the improved relations between England and America. The relations are improved because America has finally become a foreign country. And with foreign countries all sane men take care to exchange a certain consideration and courtesy. But even as late as the time of Dickens’s first visit to the United States, we English still felt America as a colony; an insolent, offensive, and even unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony; a part of our civilisation, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I have said, under all its bounce and independence, really regarded us as a mother country. This being the case it was possible for us to quarrel, like kinsmen. Now we only bow and smile, like strangers.

The thing is worth reading in its entirety. My own worldview being as it is a haphazard mishmash of 18th-century classical conservatism, 19th-century Tractarianism and Christian socialism and 21st-century interpretations of the theories of EF Schumacher through Bill McKibben, John Cobb, Jr and Herman Daly, I still have a strong identification with an English-speaking culture, even as that culture is being disavowed to varying degrees (whether knowingly or out of ignorance) on both sides of the Atlantic.

So in the wake now of 4 July, the date when (according to British history) a group of terrorists and misguided political malcontents broke their ties to their closest benefactors and geopolitical guardians, or if you prefer, when (according to American history) a group of idealistic freedom fighters threw off a tyrannical monarchy to found a grand experimental Republic which would shape the world anew, it is worth asking ourselves what ideals of ‘progress’ we truly hold to. What sort of nation do we want to be? Where are our values? Where are our commitments? Where is our treasure stored? What we will do when our ‘bigness’, as renowned British biologist (and contemporary of Dickens, to boot) Thomas H Huxley once put it, no longer distracts us from ‘the great issue... and the terror of overhanging fate’, namely, ‘what are [we] going to do with all these things?’

Ultimately, to ask these things is to begin to ask what it means to be American.

Pointless video post - ‘Again Will the Fire Burn’ by Lost Horizon

A recent discovery, I like these guys only a little bit less than I like their fellow Swedes Falconer and Tad Morose, which, coming from me, is no mean compliment. A melodic power metal band originally founded by the people who would become the members of Hammerfall, they straddle that fine, fine line between ridiculous and profound (their lyrics are pretty heavily influenced by existentialist philosophy) which leads straight to awesome. The fact that they have delivering the vocals Ethereal Magnanimus [Daniel Heiman], one of the best ‘wailers’ since Geoff Tate, merely adds to their heavy metal panache. (Also, I don’t know about the other members of the band, but the drummer Preternatural Transmogrifier [Christian Nyqvist], leans pretty firmly toward the left, politically, in a way which it seems influenced the lyrics of their first album, Awakening the World.) This song, however, comes from their second album, A Flame To The Ground Beneath. This is some top-notch power metal, folks; enjoy!

Pointless video post - ‘More Than Meets the Eye’ by Testament

Testament’s another one of those names in American (particularly Bay Area) thrash that deserves to be hailed alongside Slayer and (early) Metallica - but which has sadly never achieved such recognition (in spite of having solidly outclassed the recent output of both bands). The blend of thrash metal instrumentation with Chuck Billy’s more death-growly vocals never really caught on with the listening public when they were all abandoning the genre in droves to go listen to Pantera, and when nearly every other thrash band decided to sell out. Still, these guys show that they can (and do) kick some serious arse.

But I watch this video and... damn if it isn’t the trippiest, weirdest, most visually confusing and overdone music videos I’ve ever seen - and I’m including the music video for Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’ in that, by the way. True to its word, though, there really is more than meets the eye... which is a good thing, because what meets the eye is: Photoshopped cartoon skulls in transparency effects, an automated portcullis which looks like it came out of a late-90’s arcade shooter, Force Lightning emanating from Alex Skolnick and Chuck Billy (yeah, you guys are awesome - but not Jedi) and more bats than one would care to count.

Still, awesome song. And awesome album. 2008’s The Formation of Damnation is actually fairly broad-ranging and heavy in theme, even for a thrash album - from the War on Terror (‘The Evil Has Landed’) to scathing criticism of Bush (‘The Formation of Damnation’), religious extremism (‘Dangers of the Faithless’) and the oppression of innocents (‘The Persecuted Won’t Forget’) to good old-fashioned fun biker rock (‘Henchman Ride’) and existential, religious questions (‘Afterlife’). The last actually appears to be pretty personal for Billy, a lapsed Catholic whose close call recovering from cancer led to his renewed appreciation for the big questions (though now from an American Indian perspective).

And did I mention the whole album is solid and unrelenting thrash, front to back? Definitely worth a listen or ten. Very, very fun stuff.

A brief meditation on being 25

Yesterday was my twenty-fifth birthday. It’s rather boggling to the mind that I have now been present on this earth for a quarter of a century – the tricks time can play are sometimes rather cruel. I can remember a time when Bill Clinton’s hair was a colour other than white. I can remember a time when Al Gore was a politician rather than a voice in the wilderness warning modern society of its ecological danger and calling for us to repent. I can remember a time before the 11th of September, 2001. Much as I dislike saying it, we’ve changed. And we’ve not always changed for the better. I suppose I could say the same of myself.

I’ve lived in six houses, one apartment and three college dorms, across three countries and six US states. I’ve said hello to a very friendly cat when he was one, and said goodbye to him when he was fifteen, only to say hello to two more cats (not as friendly). I’ve visited more national parks than I’d care to name, and I’ve stayed at home more than I should. I’ve been a member of a Mennonite church, a Lutheran church, a Church of the Brethren, a Congregationalist church, a Methodist church, a Friends meeting and three Episcopal churches (which I have made my home-on-pilgrimage). I’ve become an ardent metalhead. I’ve attempted to figure out where I fit into this world, and I suppose I won’t stop now.

Anyway. Here’s to the next quarter-century. Here’s hoping that it may be more hopeful and humane generally than the last, but every bit as memorable.