Wednesday, February 3, 2010

One Body

"It must needs be that there is an opposition in all things. If it were not so...all things must needs be a compound in one: wherefore if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having neither life nor death."
-Lehi

"For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of parturition between us...for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace...From whom the whole body fitly joined together, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love."
-Paul

Lehi and Paul both speak of the idea of "one body," but while Lehi's vision is of an undead zombie-like being, Paul praises the peace and perfection, the edification in love. Why are they so different?

Originally, we are one body but to stay that way is a dead end. This is the body Lehi speaks of, our premortal formlessness where we are everything and nothing, where light and dark mush together and all is fuzzy. The endless, unified ocean of precreation. We must break free from this infantile urobouros and enter the world of opposition in order to come to know ourselves and to grow.

In this world of opposition that Lehi sketches, everything is fragmented and alienated. We are broken to bits by this world, divided from God, from others, from ourselves. It is a painful process, but it's through this that we come to know who we are, who we were, to discover all that was undifferentiated in us before and bring it to light. We go through life and come upon moments of recognition, when we realize that we've discovered something that we never knew was lost until we found it. People, places, art, music, poems, animals, anything can trigger these startling recognitions, and give us a glimpse of a piece of ourselves.

And so we wander through the world, gathering ourselves back together, like Egyptian Isis painstakingly gathering up the body parts of her dismembered husband. And as we piece these fragments back together we become whole again, a whole body, the twain made one. This is the redeemed body that Paul speaks of. We restore the original unity, not through a regression into comforting oblivion, but through the active union of the parts of ourselves we have discovered and reorganized. William Blake called it Organized Innocence--the edenic, golden innocence of infancy is lost to us forever, and for good reason. The new Innocence is achieved through gathering, loving, recognizing, seeking, organizing, creating.

The life-in-death and death-in-life body of Lehi is our unsustainable past; the reintegrated, self-aware Body of Paul is our possibility.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Mountain

His eyes were as a flame of fire; the hair of his head was white like the pure snow; his countenance shone above the brightness of the sun; and his voice was as the sound of the rushing of great waters
-Doctrine & Covenants 110:3

In Joseph Smith's vision of God, God is depicted like a snow-capped mountain in spring. His head, His mind, contains stored energy, snow, frozen thought, heated by the fires of the sun and melted, transformed into the mighty rushing of great waters that is His voice. He is the God of nature. The God of eternal stasis (immovability of the mountain) and eternal mutability (ever-changing seasons, water cycles, etc.), the interplay of which creates Eternal Life. The Fountain of Living Waters. Stillness, frigidity, and warmth, combine to create energy, eternal delight. The voice of the Lord is action and a source of eternal satisfaction for our thirst, for our longing.
The Lord contains opposites, and created a world of opposition. It's the tension between opposites that produces the energy of creation, the movement of Life.The Lord is still at His center, moving and spinning quickly in His actions and exterior.

Moses sees the Lord as a mountain shrouded in clouds, when he appears on Sinai. The certainty of the mountain and the nebulous unknown of the clouds.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Top 30 Movies of the Decade!

In no particular order, my 30 favorite films of the decade.

Subject to change without notice.





Spirited Away/Ponyo




Let the Right One In




No Country For Old Men




Where the Wild Things Are





Pan’s Labyrinth







Bee Season







Synecdoche, New York







Little Otik







Grizzly Man







Saraband







Sita Sings the Blues







The Fountain







Big Fish







My Winnipeg







Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind







The Fall







The Hurt Locker

 


The Departed







Up








Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story




 Hot Fuzz







Gran Torino







Happiness of the Katakuris/Gozu







Once







The Proposition







Assassination of Jesse James







Happy-Go-Lucky







There Will Be Blood







Blood Tea and Red String


Fantastic Mr. Fox

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Top 10 Books I Read in 2009

In no particular order, here are ten books I greatly enjoyed discovering this year:



1. Elective Affinities, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Geometry infused with passion. A Mozartean book in which a tightly ordered structure of ideas is illuminated by sheer beauty of sentiment. Every word seems to count in this book, in an almost claustrophobic way. The story of four people who love and interchange lovers in accordance with scientific principles. Elegant and disturbing in its implications.





2. The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence



Lawrence's cross-generational epic of the relations between men and women. Observed with a coldly penetrating eye and sometimes hard to take, but revealed with such fire that you become caught up in the wonder and pain of it and experience excitement as the characters begin to discover themselves.



3. Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neoscientific Novel, by Alfred Jarry

An amazing title. Concerns the surreal odyssey of one Dr. Faustroll who, among other things, sails in a sieve with his baboon and visits a series of bizarre and satirical islands (all apparently located within downtown Paris) before transforming into an astral body and attempting to calculate the surface of God. Along the way he invents "pataphysics," which is described as "the science of imaginary solutions." It's all very Rabelaisan and loads of fun. (This is my own cover design, by the way. Just for fun)



4. Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, by Dennis Covington

Another irresistible title (particularly the subtitle). I started this one expecting a wild ride through Southern grotesquery and redneck madness. I got all that but so much more, as the book opens up into authentic spiritual territory and refuses to condescend or ridicule. Genuinely moving and profound, a real-life Flannery O'Connor novel.



5. Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, by Angela Carter

Fairy tales, surrealism, puppets, axe-murder, Jan Svankmajer, feminism, werewolves, and reams of gorgeous prose. This is a book bursting with wonders. Carter was an amazing writer and I'll need to read some of her novels now.



6. The Driver's Seat, by Muriel Spark

A disturbing little book that has had a surprising staying power since I read it in the spring. A "metaphysical shocker," it concerns the holiday of Lise, a young woman whose grisly fate we are told of very early in the story. This lends an inexorability and startling amount of suspense to this bleak, harrowing, savage little tale. Could easily be called "Lise and the Devil," like the splendid Mario Bava movie I also discovered this year.



7. My Life, by Lyn Hejinian




A beautiful autobiographical prose-poem, and, like any life, a continuous work in progress and revision. The original book, written when Hejinian was 37 years old, contains 37 chapters of 37 sentences each. The revised edition (which I read) was written when she was 45, and contains 45 chapters of 45 sentences each. So not only are there 8 new chapters, but there are also 8 new sentences added within each of the original 37 chapters. A wonderful way to depict the way life expands forward and backward at the same time, and written with luminously evocative wordcraft.



8. Spring and All, by William Carlos Williams


I'm not sure how I made it into my mid-twenties without discovering William Carlos Williams. This is one of the most exciting books of poetry I've read in a while, and it really must be read as a volume. I never much cared for the brief snippets of Williams I had encountered in the past, but in context, strung out one after the other, the book is luminous and astonishing.  (It's contained in the volume "Imaginations," along with "Kora in Hell" and something else, if I remember)



 9. The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson


One of the most perfect books I've ever read. The story is about the relationship between a young girl and her grandmother and is suffused with the glories of the natural world, the humor and pain of childhood, and stripped of any cloying sentimentality. Tove Jansson was a really incredible writer, and this book sings. It's a book to celebrate, and to remind you that life is delicious and that the world is overflowing with wonder.



10. Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age", by John Daverio

A great biography and a fascinating appreciation of Schumann's work. Schumann was one of the great musical geniuses of the Romantic movement. Daverio is especially adept at pointing out the mastery in Schumann's often overlooked large-scale later works like "Scenes from Goethe's Faust" or "Das Paradies und die Peri", finding no loss in quality due to Schumann's supposed mental illness. Ear-opening and thought-provoking, delves into Schumann's literary interests (Jean-Paul, Hoffmann, Goethe, etc.) and illuminates the ways in which he endeavored to create a new musical-literary poetics. Made me think differently about the way I create art.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Books Read in 2009

    

Steve's 2009 book montage


 

     
Fairy tales of Wilhelm Hauff;

     
Admonitions

     
Collected Books of Jack Spicer

     
The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Vol. 1

     
ROBERT SCHUMANN: Herald of a "New Poetic Age"

     
Mirrors of Venus; a novel in sonnets

     
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

     
Goethe Selected Poems

     
White Buildings

     
Christ in Flanders

     
Selected Prose

     
Klingsohr's Fairy Tale

     
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa

     
The Summer Book

     
Kora In Hell: Improvisations

     
Spring and All

     
Imagist Poetry: An Anthology

     
Les Fleurs Du Mal

     
The Ubu Plays: Includes: Ubu Rex; Ubu Cuckolded; Ubu Enchained

     
The Koran

     
La Vita Nuova

     
My Life

     
The Blue Flower

     
Rock and Shell: Poems

     
Worstward ho

     
Geography III: Poems

     
The Driver's Seat

     
The Cherry Orchard

     
Elaine's Book

     
The Winding Stair And Other Poems

     
The Bridge: A Poem

     
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

     
The Lover

     
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

     
Song of Myself

     
Fatal Interview: Sonnets

     
Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

     
Fur

     
Benito Cereno

     
Saints and Strangers

     
Washington Square

     
Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia

     
Birds Beasts and Flowers

     
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

     
Amphigorey

     
Exploits And Opinions Of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel

     
Revelations of Divine Love

     
The Quest of the Absolute

     
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

     
Locus Solus

     
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

     
Holy Bible: King James Version

     
The Rainbow

     
Mythologies

     
Henry Von Ofterdingen: A Novel

     
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

     
The Nag Hammadi Library

     
Troilus and Cressida

     
Macbeth

     
King Lear

     
Chinese Whispers: Poems

     
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon

     
City of God

     
A Voyage to Arcturus

     
Nightmare Abbey & Crotchet Castle

     
Collected Poems of John Wheelwright

     
A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems

     
The Triumph of Love

     
The Orchards of Syon

     
Glass, Irony and God

     
Elective Affinities

     
Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

     
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

     
The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley

     
So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic

     
Why Read the Classics?

     
Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers

     
Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945

     
Strindberg's Ghost Sonata

     
After The Fire

     
Fast Food Nation

     
Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journeys

     
The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism

     
The Chamber Plays: Thunder in the Air, After the Fire, The Ghost Sonata, The Pelican, The Black Glove

     
The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories

     
Cat's Cradle

     
A Book of Music

     
The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic Versus Classic Art

     
Political Self-Portrait

     
The Complete Works Of Michael Drayton V2

     
Prometheus

     
Venice Preserved

     
A Passion in the Desert

     
The Elixir Of Life

     
Pterodactyls Soar Again

     
Transformations

     
Walpurgisnacht

     
The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel

     
The Days of Abandonment

     
Poems: North & South - A Cold Spring

     
Moderato Cantabile

     
Nightwood

     
The Complete English Works

     
Child of God

     
Aucassin & Nicolette

     
Arnold Schoenberg's Journey

     
Ariadne's Clue: A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind

     
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self

     
The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works

     
Nadja

     
Blue of Noon

     
Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum.

     
Much Ado About Nothing

     
Charlotte's Web

     
Thunder in the Air

     
Malcolm

     
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

     
David and the Phoenix

     
The Finnegans Wake Experience

     
She

     
Lots of Fun at "Finnegans Wake"

     
Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation

     
Black Ship to Hell

     
Collected Ancient Greek Novels

     
Little Kingdoms

     
The Continuous Atonement

     
Milton, A Poem

   

Steve's favorite books »