A greater joy

Su Yin drew this:

“As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,
so will your God rejoice over you.”

This moment.

(White Stripes)
Well Holly I love you too,
but there’s just so much
that I don’t know about you

(Austen)
“What think you of books?” said he, smiling.
“Books – Oh! no. – I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings.”
“I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.”
“No – I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of something else.”
“The present always occupies you in such scenes – does it?” said he, with a look of doubt.
“Yes, always,” she replied, without knowing what she said, for her thoughts had wandered far from the subject.

(Proverbs 27:1)
Do not boast about tomorrow,
for you do not know what a day may bring forth.

Something that’s making perfect, happy sense, right now:

“Most things which are urgent are not important, and most things which are important are not urgent.”
- Dwight Eisenhower

Appreciating maps

C.S. Lewis unfurls another argument:

“In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!’
Now in a sense I quite agree with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to bits of coloured paper. But… the map is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary…
Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that maps is based on the experiences of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God – experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is why a vague religion – all about feeling God in nature, and so on – is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work: like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music.”

P.S. Will have something original and constructive to say about the closing of summer SOON.

Playing the villains

I saw The Dark Knight on Saturday at the Prytania Theater, which opened in 1915 and is the last remaining single-screen cinema in Louisiana. Am very glad that we took Alissa’s lead and didn’t go the Canal Street one – a student ticket at the Prytania costs $6.25 and shows before 6pm cost a dollar less! It is also located smack in the middle of a residential area, with complete disregard for generic city planning.

SPOILERS WITHIN.

The Office and other imaginary spaces

(Michael: I need to know who else is gay. I don’t want to offend anyone else.
Dwight: You could assume everyone is, and not say anything offensive.)

When Elizabeth’s parents were here over the July 4 weekend her mother insisted that we go back to the coffee shop Rue de la Course because the young men behind the counter were apparently the sweetest and smiliest people she’d ever met. They weren’t there when we popped in tonight but I did discover more fantastic things, like how you can tell it’s an old building because of the unusually ample space for lots of little wooden tables and chairs rather than a tiny cafe that pushes people out onto the sidewalk. Though many customers did voluntarily choose to sit outside. One of them was a lone girl reading a Michael Chabon book with a coffee by her side. On a Friday night at 10pm. Did I mention how much I love this city, again? Simply because of late hours, free wireless, and little green lamps?
I had a difficult day at work struggling with writing and the fact that I take so much time to cut, paste, cut, rinse, repeat and get things straight in my mind – each paragraph is patchwork – and that’s not really what promotional writing requires. Instead it’s efficiency, understanding what your supervisor wants to see, grasping the concept of a book by skimming a manuscript you’ve only just been handed, and then getting excited enough about it to write a good pitch letter in forty-five minutes flat without any copy for reference. Lots of people can do it, I cannot. I need two hours. Or three. It was frustrating to say the least.
And yet I know writing is one of the very few things that come instinctively and during which I am wholly content. (So it is my duty to push myself more.) Yesterday my first serious attempt at creative writing in about eight years surfaced. It grew out of a sudden memory of trying to determine a setting for a story when I was around twelve and literally randomly pointing at a place on the map. Springfield, Illinois. I didn’t know a thing about that city; it was an empty template to plug in imaginary items wherever and whenever I wanted (an ice-cream shop, a sidewalk), no matter how incongruous. Then it was the collaborative story with Mel, where the final revamp had us racking our brains about venue yet again. It was about the geographic distances that separated and defined us; it couldn’t take place in exclusively Singapore or Australia. So we came up with our own city again, I think we even gave it a totally fictional name. Do you see how this is like the fantasy genre, yet not really at all? Because it’s supposed to be reality, only with much more organization (and personal power).
I thought about how The Office (done with season 2, now chugging through season 3) managed to take Scranton, PA and make it the truly unapologetic epitome of US suburbia. I decided to revisit Springfield (via Wiki, OF COURSE) and reground my early imagination with concrete ideas about what the place would actually be like. I am learning the basics, like Maid-Rite, a sandwich fastfood chain that’s exclusive to the Midwest. (And today, a lady from the Boston missions team told me there’s a town named Springfield in every state in the US. Could there be a more accidental-appropriate name to capture generic America?) Another thing that bugged me for the longest time was how so many fail to portray Singapore without sounding trite and naming all the characters Mei Ling or Devi or Fatimah. I remember very clearly thinking to myself, I need to know a bit more about the world before I can write anything substantial. And I may have finally found the solution: to dare to say you don’t know that much, and so have a place from which to begin.

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. (James 1:22)

Last Sunday I went to a potluck at my pastor’s place, where one cute old man sank back into his armchair and monologued his joy. He’d been a Catholic for most of his life, so all aspects of Christianity like obtaining salvation by grace not by works were all still new and amazing to him despite his age. It was quite something hearing a completely open and innocent profession of faith from someone you’d expect to be jaded about these concepts. And you wonder why I worry that any one of my Lynchburg girls could have recited this without a blink. Then he decided to go home so he stood up to leave, unfolding his long but fragile frame very carefully because he’d misplaced his cane, which he said he does a lot.
After the hurricane, this church was reduced to a congregation of fifteen people because of the number of members who had to relocate. Did that stop them from growing for a second? Who am I doubt him for a minute of my time?

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“Port Lazo”
Philip Charles Jacquet

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Here are a few more New Orleans favourites while I’m at it. Magazine Street is the best place to live if you remember you’re an unpaid intern and properly stick to window shopping.
That’s why art galleries are lovely (though you need to carefully avert your eyes if you want to enjoy art and not talk about it). Philip Charles Jacquet is an un-googlable artist with vision I can only gape at. “Le vent du large” – which I am not putting up here because the online replicas are lousy beyond belief – is very simple, an unmanned boat in the middle of a windy field. Though it seemed at first glance to depict a foolish and abandoned hope of voyage, he liberally uses fantastical blues and greys and the sky fills up two thirds of the painting. It swells comfortingly and seemed to say: I am going somewhere beyond this.

In twos

a)i) I spent my first day at work going over manuscript submissions! One of them was a children’s book proposal from the ex-VP and treasurer of the World Bank. Yes, it came on one of those papers with a letterhead from his office in DC. (It wasn’t very good.)

a)ii) These things happened almost simultaneously yesterday evening when I was standing outside the B&B waiting for my ride: one, an immensely beautiful boy cycled by and he looked over his shoulder and smiled; two, the side of the roof of the building connected to the coffee shop across the street collapsed with a boom and a shower of broken brick. (There was a man sitting directly underneath the awning when this happened but all he did was calmly shift to another seat and continue reading his paper.) Ominous, much?

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b)i) Dirty Coast – T-shirts New Orleans style, like Threadless, only cooler. I am particularly interested in their alternative gifts, such as the Constance anthology. You can choose to donate to Katrina relief efforts when you make a purchase.

b)ii) National Public Library Book/$ Donations – The New Orleans Public Library was hit hard by Katrina and the flooding that followed. Eight of twelve branches were destroyed. Revenue loss forced layoffs of 80% of the staff and total damage may be as much as $30 million. The community’s access to books, discs, computers, and the Internet continues to be very limited – when searching their online database do not be surprised if you find a book that used to be in the system but is currently listed as “lost/damaged in Katrina”.
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c)i) Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart.

- C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

c)ii) What a promise! So large, so Divine, that our little hearts cannot take it in, and in every possible way seek to limit it to what we think safe or probable; instead of allowing it… to enlarge our hearts to the measure of what His love and power are really ready to do for us.

- Andrew Murray

The Big Easy

Rooftop of St. Michael Special School for Exceptional Children (no joke, look it up) on a blazing hot day, Chippewa Street, New Orleans. (You are with me everywhere.)