EPISODE 408: AND YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
There’s this thing that professional God-people sometimes do where they feel like they have to explain why God made the universe. It’s better than when they feel like they have to prove God exists, or that their particular religion is “right” both because God is not math and also the whole “my religion is right” thing has historically almost always been followed by or led to “so these other people have to change right now and/or die”, and that is not much fun at parties.
Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk who puts out a thought for the day that often reminds me hey you, there is still a God and being in touch with him can be good both for you and everyone else who is forced to deal with you, likes to write about this whole question from time to time. And his take is that God is love; and what does love want but to share itself with others. He made the universe/people/insert your own version of an answer to “What is everything?”, so he could have something to love.
Some versions twist this around to say, Well actually, now that you mention it, God made the universe to love and adore him. Which always kind of freaks me out; what kind of a deity creates life and stars and subatomic particles just so that it’ll all advertise and/or pay attention to him? It feels like the kind of figure you’d find in an Indiana Jones movie, supping on human hearts with a soupçon of abject fear. Not that we shouldn’t love God. (“Priest denounces love of God; story at 10. His excommunication to follow.”) I just refuse to believe he needsit from us, or that he sits around waiting for us to love him. This is God we’re talking about, not a spoiled child.
The Rohr answer is a lot better – although is it me or does it still make God kind of needy. Like in my head I hear him saying to each of us, “I just want to love you.” Which is sweet and also the kind of thing that when by someone in normal life usually makes you want to take a few steps back and say, Whoops, there’s my Lyft.
But then I was thinking, what if God is a lover in the sense of being an artist? Love is about expression, it’s constituted in the creation of something that is beautiful and nourishing. So the universe and also each of us is this incredible work of art. Rather than being first and foremost the object of God’s love we are its expression. We are what love looks like. And like any work of art, once created the universe/we have a life of our own, so much so it can surprise even our creator. (I really love the idea that God might have created us but then can still be surprised by us, just as a parent can be bowled over and delighted by their children.)
What am I really saying? (Wait, in addition to actually putting words together in unwieldly run-on sentences I am also supposed to make sense? This is not my beautiful house.) Maybe just that it’s nice from time to time to step back and try to put all the stuff of my life in some kind of broader context. Like we’re a part of more than we generally pay attention to.
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I have no idea why writing that made me think of the Talking Heads’ "Once in a Lifetime", but it did and so as I was writing it I watched the music video and you know, it is kind of crazy, David Byrne in a coat and tie sort of seizure-dancing as he talks about someone coming to realize they have a perfect life and they feel totally lost.
Crazy thing is, it turns out most of the lyrics came from evangelical preachers he had been studying. And I think his “character” is one of them, a guy in a kind of trance as the good news kind of “takes him over”.
(Apparently when this video came out in 1981, no one knew Talking Heads yet. It was on heavy rotation in the early days of MTV, and created the sense of the band as these experimental innovators.)
I once lived with a very funny man from France. And sometimes out of the blue he would suddenly say, “This is not my beautiful house!”
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After spending last week chasing two stories pretty hard, this week has been spent in kind of a “Wait, not my beautiful house” fog. Probably the best thing I did was start to reread a book on screenwriting. I’m not going to give the title, because actually it’s not all that great a book. (Note to self: If you ever write a screenwriting book, don’t make it one of those filled with diagrams mapping out what every beat should be. It’s not how great films are written and it’s exhausting and if kids were ever to see it they would cry.)
But it’s amazing how just reading about storytelling of any kind immediately primes the pump. I walked away from a few pages of it totally obsessed with ideas about openings.
The other great thing I did this week was get up from a dinner that was Not Going Well and catch a Lyft home. Have you ever done that? It was totally new territory for me and just so liberating to realize you don’t have to stay and get beat up for no reason. You really can upon occasion just get up leave.
And you thought Jesuits always get along. Oh honey, not always…
Good times.
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Pretty much every newsletter I read this week mentioned this article about an American editor/mystery writer who has spent his life pretty much lying to everyone he’s met. Based on the recommendations I thought there was more to it – AND THEN HE KILLED SOMEONE. But no, it’s just a long very long very very long series of stories of his lies, interspersed with interviews with people who did or did not know he had been lying, and at the end the way those lies line up both with his first book and the book he’s currently producing (which ends up including the writer of the article we’re reading, because it’s not a good article if you the writer don’t get to be validated by being included in the thing you’re writing about).
And I just find myself wondering, as John Oliver likes to say, Why is this a thing? What is it about a good liar that is so thoroughly appealing? Is it the hutzpah, maybe, their sheer willingness to keep saying things that are audaciously untrue knowing that that ship cannot sail forever, in fact you are literally pounding holes into your hull as you sail? (#LookatMeGettinAllNautical) There is maybe a bravery to a willingness to risk so much, even if the “for what” in this case is not much and the cost is people getting hurt.
Or maybe it’s the slow motion car wreck of it all, the sense of anticipation. We know it’s not going to end well. But specifically, how is that disaster going to come about? We know the killer is in the house, but WHERE?
And speaking of infamous liars, this week I watched Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened on Netflix. It’s a documentary about what happens when this handsome up and coming entrepreneur convinces thousands of rich millennials to come to the Bahamas for an ultra-elite music festival (the word “influencers” is used a lot), and then when they get there it’s a total scam and they go pretty near full Lord of the Flieson each other. I remember watching that all play out on social media in 2016, as these wealthy 20 and 30 somethings FREAKED OUT about how disappointed and angry they were. And if there were a good Schadenfreude-Fyre pun I would be saying it right now.
The villain in question is kind of an enigmatic figure in the film; he never does an interview, so we’re constantly just hearing about him from others who were involved with the project. But what’s really great about the film is how it eventually turns the camera toward the local people who were not paid for their work, and how devastating that was for some of them. As entertaining as it is to watch young New Yorkers shriek because the half-moon tent they’re supposed to sleep in has wet mattresses (get this, it rains in the Caribbean!), the heart of the story is how completely forgotten and dismissed these laborers were.
I also heard about, but have not yet had the stomach to watch, HBO’s Leaving Neverland, about two men who have come forward to report they were sexually assaulted by Michael Jackson. Not an easy piece from what I’ve heard, but a story that it seems like we’ve all kind of known for a long time but few have really wanted to face.
Lying, it’s so mysterious how it can work on us, even when all the evidence is really right there.
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Stevie Nicks did an interview with Rolling Stone which features a description of the climate controlled storage units in which she keeps her shawls and also how when she performs "Moonlight" she puts on a this white coat and imagines she is transforming into a Dire Wolf from Game of Thrones and it was actually all that I needed from life the day I read it.
For years now I’ve had this long read article waiting in my queue about families in Brownsville, Texas trying to survive after all the big industries leave. And as I was reading it this week, this quote stunned me with its beauty:
The stillness of a thirty-three-year-old woman being interviewed at a downtown Brownsville chiropractor could easily be mistaken for stupidity. Lupita longed to have at her command, in any language, “those big round words that explain better what goes on in your mind, and which help people know who you are. I mean, those proper words that come from the deeps of a person, and that burn a little when they’re spoken.
If you happened to see The Favourite, whose actress Olivia Colman beat out Glenn Close at the Oscars, the New Statesman had this wonderful article about the film’s subject, Queen Anne, and how she was constantly objectified as fat and ugly both by critics and historians, completely ignoring the significant tragedy and illness in her life, and generally using those descriptions to imply she was incompetent.
The Guardian also did this crazy piece on the myriad preparations that have been worked out for Queen Elizabeth’s death. At first it seemed like just an interesting cultural curiosity. But the more I read, the more it got me thinking about the complexities of the UK at this time, and the challenges the Queen’s death will pose. (Fun fact: The staff of the palace who will be responsible for implementing all the plans surrounding the Queen’s death will also be in the process of losing their job to Charles’ own.)
Lastly, here’s the best sentence I read this week, which as far as I’m concerned applies not just to comics but life:
I do know that comics should always have a scattered coterie of nomad lunatics who are just running towards the horizon, leaving little signposts and monuments on the way, all about the strange pleasure of the journey and putting off the destination for as long as they want to.
People want to tell you to fly right, i.e. the way they believe. Don’t let them fool you; they don’t know what they’re talking about. You’re a beautiful work of art, your lunacy is needed, and if others can’t handle that Lyft will pick you up pretty much anywhere.