Pain

I’ve had a nomadic pain ever since I arrived in Grinnell for the summer. It started in my jaw, an indistinct ache most of the time, but it flared whenever I put my mouth in the wrong position chewing. Then it settled on the bottom gutter between my gums and lips. It spread out as a few big spots of acne, straining against the skin. And then it became a raging irritation across my lips. After that it cycled between old favorites: jaw again, acne again, lips again, and just when I thought the pain had run out of ideas and was content to bounce across my face in familiar constructions, I dashed my knee on hard playground plastic while playing tag with students. I thought I could walk it off at first, but then my wandering pain settled into its new home in my bone and kept me limping for days. Then, a few nights ago, I woke up around one a.m. already scratching through my eczema and leaving bloody streaks across my sheets. I applied on ointment and put a sock around my hand to keep from touching it. It didn’t work, scratching just felt too damn nice, and I knew I’d never sleep with this temptation hanging over me. So I scratched, a little relieved when the joy turned to pain and I could get to work solving the problem instead of making it worse. Whatever demon keeps me hurting, he’s getting cleverer and crueler, now that he’s making me hurt myself. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t even close my hand into a fist.

I’m sure you think that I’m just creating this character for the sake of hyperbole and comic relief. And I think that too, for the most part. Still, it’s been eerie how none of my ailments this summer have gapped or overlapped: there’s always exactly one at a time. It got downright eerie, in fact, when I got up to walk to the bathroom to wash the blood off my hand at the start of my itching episode and found that my right knee walked without complaint for the first time in a full week.

I usually think that I don’t have a very high pain tolerance, but that’s not really true. I broke an arm climbing up a slide in first grade, a toe when my mom startled me on the stairs by suddenly turning on the vacuum in seventh grade, both wrists in an epic bike accident in ninth grade and another wrist in a much less epic running accident my senior year. For most of them I cried a little, but the pain was never really overwhelming. And usually the thrill of getting a cast put on a few hours later outweighed the minutes of sharp pain right after the accident. Anyway, I’ve run track and cross country for nine years (going on a full decade this fall), and even though the only real skill in that sport is enduring a steady layer of pain through a race, I’ve done decently well. So it’s not that I don’t have a high tolerance for pain, it’s just that I don’t like it very much. 

Or, more specifically, I don’t like lasting pain. The moment the bone breaks, even the twenty minutes and change it takes to run a 10-K, all of those are self-contained enough to endure. It’s the lingering kind that I can’t stand. The summer I broke my wrists my family went to Rome, and I couldn’t stand how the sweat pooled on the cloth lining my cast, feeling the itch and smelling the stink of it and knowing that there was nothing I could do to stop. That’s maybe the worst my body has ever felt, even though nothing actually hurt.

I’m wary of generalizing about the whole human population, many of whom have suffered worse than I ever have, but I’m inclined to think that the long and humiliating pain is always worse than the short and dramatic. There was even something kind of fun in that bike accident in ninth grade, in peeling myself up and examining my bleeding arms as my vision changed color in growing swirls. Maybe it’s like that in all pain, actually: what’s worst is the small things that persist. There’s a similar fun in stumbling into daylight after watching a horrifying or depressing movie, knowing that you were destroyed in the theater, but now it’s over and somehow life persists. But, about two weeks after I broke both wrists, my cousin Stephen died at eight years old. It wasn’t his absence that got to me, so much, just that I knew he was never coming back. That there’d always be a cavity in our family gatherings, an aching spot that never fills. That’s what I was mourning the day I heard the news: all the years he wouldn’t get, the years that we’ll keep counting for as long as we live.

I didn’t mean to make this about Stephen. I don’t know where the the last half of the paragraph above came from; I just wandered towards that point and the words wrote themselves. Maybe it’s inevitable, that he’d come up in my post on pain. But the problem with doing these things unplanned is I can’t make the parallels lead each other to the points I want. Because there’s a difference between Stephen’s absence and an enduring pain like a splinter, besides the obvious that Stephen’s absence is so much worse. Evolutionary explanations aside, the best you can say about pain is that, odds are, it will get better in time. Stephen’s death isn’t like that. I don’t want it to get better, because if it does, then I’ll lose the source of that absence too: the memories of joy that make him up in my mind. 

Poetry Problems

The same way that a squirrel stockpiles nuts for winter, I spend my school year searching used bookstores and attending author readings to build up an arsenal of literature to read over the summer. My entire school year is basically devoted to reading too, of course, but there’s a certain pleasure in reading something you’ve chosen off a shelf or picked up on recommendation that never comes with following a course syllabus, not to mention that choosing my books helps me fill out my knowledge as a reader (some of which, I hope, bleeds over into my skill as a writer). But there’s never enough times for every book I want to read, so summers inevitably become an odd balance of reading slowly enough to enjoy something, but quickly enough to get on to the next. It’s an easy balance to make in fiction, which is usually well enough paced that one page leads on to the next. But I just finished reading Hai-Dang Phan’s* poetry collection Reenactments in one sitting and, I’m not sure it was a very good decision. I feel like I absorbed a lot of detail, much of it beautiful, but so much that I’m not sure I’ll remember any of it, and I may understand even less.

Feeling unmoored by poetry isn’t a new experience for me. I’m a fiction writer, so trying to understand some new sort of art always unmoors me a little**, but poetry is always particularly irritating because it’s so close to prose. Most writers at least dabble in both, and it doesn’t take much to blur the line between the two. But the tools for understanding prose just don’t translate. When I start reading a story, no matter how experimental, there’s always some sort of narrative to grab, and the experience of reading and understanding naturally flows naturally. For poetry, that kind of anchoring is never a given. Often in Phan’s collection, I encountered a stanza like “In the cracked and blazing lot / you stand like a sundial / searching for that good shirt / you wear like someone else’s life” and could only wonder what made it beautiful or meaningful. That kind of wondering isn’t exclusive to poetry, of course. It’s the core of any literary analysis. But in fiction, at least you have a plot and characters as a guide through those moments, a tool to understand them, and a failsafe means of enjoyment in case you can’t make sense of those more esoteric bits. In poetry, it’s anyone’s game. That’s why I appreciate reading poetry in class: at least when the students and professor pool our talents in discussion, we’ll puzzle out something meaningful to take away. I don’t have that security reading poetry on my own, and I guess that’s why I’m scared that I’ll forget everything I appreciated about this book, that my fifteen dollars and the hours I spent reading it will all be a waste.

Of course, when anything resists interpretation, there’s that frustrated temptation to reject it altogether. I’ve certainly felt that way about poetry before. I’ve often thought and sometimes said that it’s an elitist art form, since it demands so much more time to decipher than prose, and there’s never any promise that it means anything at all. But I can’t accept that, since it would be so much more elitist to insist that every written word with creative intent must have characters and plot. There’s a need that poetry fills and prose doesn’t, and I know because I’ve felt it too. Taking a break about halfway through reading Phan’s collection, I started thinking about a theory I heard in English class once, that humans are drawn to poetry and its rhythm because it matches the beat of our hearts and the inhale-exhale patterns of our breathing. After a little muttering to myself, playing around with different words, I came up with my first ever lines written in something approaching a real meter:

Deep in the dark red double-thump

Where all first poems were born

An explanation, simple, true,

Too secular to be warm.

I’m not saying that it’s great writing. It’s a first draft in a format I’m unfamiliar with. But it helped me understand a little about how it all works. How you don’t always need a person and a plot to make a set of words beautiful. There’s no character in my little amateur poem, just sounds and thoughts, and I like it well enough all the same. And maybe that solves my fear of forgetting too. Even if all of Phan’s words don’t stick with me and I don’t have the names or scenes to tie it to in my memory, there will always be lines that will persist. “The fern leaves floating on the surface arrange themselves into brittle continents.” I’m not sure why, if it’s the sound or the image or the memory rises in response, but that’s at least one line I know I’ll hold onto.

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* He’s an English professor at Grinnell, by the way, and one of my favorites.

** An idea I explored in another post a few weeks ago.

Some Jesus Thoughts

A couple weeks ago, during lunch at the summer school program where I work, some students were arguing over the best weapon in Fortnite. They threw around some obvious contenders, machine guns and flamethrowers and so on, but then, out of nowhere, one kid who had just been silently looking on at the whole conversation spoke up and said, “Pastor Bob says that the most powerful weapon of all is Jesus Christ’s forgiveness.”

That’s been my go-to anecdote when someone asks me about my summer, though it’s not exactly an all-purpose tale since I tend to end it differently based on who I’m talking to. If they’re not too religious and they take the kid’s unorthodox weapon of choice as a punchline, I wrap it up with something like, “And what was I supposed to say to that? Of course, the whole lunch table went silent until someone listed off another favorite Fortnite weapon, and we all went on like nothing had happened.” But if I’m talking to the more religious type (generally of the older, crankier, anti-Fortnite persuasion), I give an alternate ending: “And what was I supposed to do? I’m a government employee for this summer, so I can’t exactly go tell the kid that he’s exactly right. But I still wanted to give him some credit for saying something like that. I let it pass, though, and the conversation moved on.”

Neither of these stories are untrue, exactly. They just use the kind of omission essential to any story, because if I told you both stories at once, the kid as the punchline and as the hero, it wouldn’t make any sense, even though that’s how I felt in the moment. I saw it as I would if I were another Fortnite-obsessed kid at the table (an identity I’m not too far from, even if I’ve never gotten stuck on that particular game), half pitying the altar-boy’s poor social skills, half resenting him for ruining the fun with his God-talk. But also, isn’t what he said wonderful? Not to be anti-gaming, but when other boys were talking about the most effective methods of killing, this one child put a word in for forgiveness. Not some popular and easy virtue, like righteous anger or justice, but forgiveness. The opposite of violence. Isn’t that just wonderful?

This story and its different tellings has been on my mind for the past couple of weeks, and so has Jesus. You’d think He’d be on my mind a lot more often, being the center of my faith and all. But, if you grow up going to church six times a week, singing hymns of praise and hearing the story over and over again, Jesus sort of becomes taken for granted. Do I love Jesus for saving me for my sins? Sure. I also love the sun for providing our planet with a gravitational anchor and oxygen for keeping my brain and vital organs alive. 

Ironically, I think that doubt is essential for any real love of Jesus, otherwise He’s just something large enough to be forgettable. Luckily, Grinnell is an excellent place for doubt. I had a long conversation with another Grinnellian last night about whether or not Christianity was any different from Greek myths. I argued that, even if Jesus wasn’t the son of God, Christianity is still more real because at least Jesus was a real historical person (there’s actually quite a bit of evidence for this, though I sold off all the books from religious studies courses that would’ve let me back up that claim). But, even though my atheist Grinnell friend didn’t point this out, I’d argued myself into a corner. Because, if you consider Jesus as a historical figure, His godhood seems immediately suspect. Why him, and not the billions of people who came before or the billions who came after? Why should Jesus be a man if, as I believe, men and women are equally made in God’s image? Why Bethlehem? Why the apostles? Hell, if God is all-powerful, why did there have to be a human sacrifice to end the olds laws and offer forgiveness? Why not just forgive, free of charge? There have been so many religious leaders through the years, why pin my hopes on this one in particular?*

These inconsistencies have ended the faith of many smarter people than me. But I think, if you table these inconsistencies, the real beauty of the narrative begins to emerge. Jesus’s story, in my opinion, is that hardest to appreciate when it encompasses the whole world, and most powerful at its most human, its most particular. What often scares me about atheism, or more grim interpretations of Christianity, is the unfeeling, mechanical nature of the universe. But, in Jesus, we can see a God who knows what it means to be human, who weeps at the Garden of Gethsemane and lashes out in anger at the merchants in the temple, who relentlessly spoke out against the government and the church and pretty much everyone. A God who, if not sinning, comes awfully close to the least attractive of our human impulses. And yet, unlike most other cultural heroes or deities, he never kills anyone. He never even hurts anyone. He damages some property and offends nearly everyone (and lets a demon kills some pigs once), but never fights. That’s especially powerful when you consider that nearly everyone wanted Jesus to be violent savior, Judas most of all. I find it ironic (in a more sad than funny way) that so many Christians expect Jesus to kill everyone they disagree with in the second coming, when that’s exactly what the most famous traitor in the western world wanted. Instead, Jesus offers forgiveness and love. Mystery and pain and confusion and commandments that make us squeamish come with the package, of course, but forgiveness and love at the bottom of it all. If no one really knows where the universe came from or who controls it, then the only way to pick a god is with your gut, and I wouldn’t choose anyone or anything besides a fellow human who knows our pain but still doesn’t cave to our violence.

I forgot which kid in summer school said the thing about forgiveness being the best weapon in Fortnite, but I need to remember and find him and tell him he’s right. Screw separation of church and state, I’m only under the fed’s thumbs for one summer anyway, and this is worth it.

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* Of course, I’m overstating things for dramatic effect. I’ve been working through these questions since elementary school, as any pastor who’s been burdened with me can tell you. That conversation did open up a lot of question I’d forgotten about, though, so it still was important.

American Monarchy and the Fourth of July

Since the program I’m teaching at this summer has a four-day weekend for the Fourth of July, to give the kids a treat we cut back on normal classes this week and instead had them rehearse and perform a couple scenes and songs from a classic movie; in our case, The Lion King. The performance was cute and wonderful, though if you take our version of the script as a one-act play in its own right, it’s horribly depressing; we end as the lion prince Simba is happily on his way to the liar of the Hyenas, ignorant that it’s all part of his evil uncle Scar’s plot to murder him, so for all we know he gets eaten immediately and Scar takes the throne. Real downer*. But, before we started rehearsal, we had to watch the movie in class first because a lot of the kids had never seen it. And, aside from watching the Spanish dub once when a kindergarten teacher ran out of ideas, I hadn’t either. The whole story struck me as sort of morally dated. It’s about a Lion named Simba, born to be the king over all the animals, but his jealous uncle Scar kills Simba’s father and tricks Simba into running away, leaving no king and no heir so that the throne becomes his. So the real core of the story is Simba reluctantly growing into his role as a king and overcoming cowardice to confront his uncle Scar. It struck me as deeply emotional in parts, contrasting Simba’s childhood fantasies of his future kingship with the grim reality of facing his father’s killer and governing a devastated land. But why is Simba the only one who can face Scar anyway? Temperamentally, he seems like the worst candidate: whiny, entitled, self-centered. It’s a nice journey of emotional growth to see him overcome those qualities, but it seems like the least efficient way to actually solve the problem. The reason why it has to be Simba and only Simba, according to the movie, is that the animals need to be governed by a lion, specifically one  who is strong, male, and descended from a royal bloodline. This casts the allegorical world of the film as an innate hierarchy, one that gets balanced in death, sure (ergo the famous “Circle of Life”), but a hierarchy all the same.

I bring this up on my Fourth of July post because it seems like a distinctly un-American idea. In the land of democracy, we’ve got an odd obsession with royalty and human hierarchy**. The Lion King is a Disney movie, of course, a company that is maybe the standard-bearer for U.S. cultural influence around the world, yet they made a name for themselves with movies about princesses and now run the Marvel universe (which is infested with kings and royalty) and Star Wars (where fans rioted when it turned out Rey wasn’t from the Skywalker bloodline). Tolkien and C.S. Lewis might be British, but Americans really like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia too, both of which tend to favor rightful kings. And then there’s the “chosen hero” trope in Harry Potter and Percy Jackson (one British, one American, but both loved in the U.S.) where destiny works as a kind of divine right to choose heroes. I hope I’m not complaining too much, I really like a lot of these stories. But it just seems weird that we all seem to love kings so much, when our most famous achievement as a nation is ditching one and making sure we’d never have another.

To generalize way too much, I’d like to suggest that Americans only half-heartedly accepted our own values. A lot of what we think of as mainstream American culture and identity came from European immigrants and their children, of course, so it’s only reasonable to expect that they’d be reluctant to let go of their kings and queens and the notions that came with them. I heard once that most vegetarians actually eat meat when drunk, and I think Americans and democracy work in much the same way: we respect all people as equals, but only on our best behavior. And if alcohol is to people as literature is to nations, then we kind of have a drinking problem.

You can see it in Fourth of July celebrations more than anything. Americans tend to celebrate the founders not as people (many of whom chose to own other people) but as cultural heroes above critique. People tout the Declaration and Constitution, but treat them like sacred texts rather than human creations in the same way that some Christians seem more fond of waving Bibles in the air than reading them. Generalizations abound in this synopsis of our culture, and I’m sorry about that, but I think anyone living in the U.S. can understand what I’m getting at, whether they agree with my conclusions or not. The real irony is that everyone seems to agree on our nation’s best idea: leveling out an unfair world and giving everyone a voice (even if it took us a really, really long time to make any real movement towards that goal). But a lot of people celebrate that good idea by raising up symbols and long dead people, not the American population as it is today or as it ever was. The Trump administration seems like the best and most disgusting example of this American royalty: prioritizing an individual ego above human rights or basic reality. 

Which isn’t to say that I don’t love fireworks or parades as much as the next guy***. But I think they represent the wrong things to too many people. Our land was made and blessed by God, but so was every other country. And so was every other person, political hero in 1776 or random person in the world today. We should take today to celebrate that our society has come so far towards real equality, and recognizing how far we have to go.

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* Not as dreary as the first graders’ depiction of Annie, though. Their plot goes something like, “Annie is an orphan living a miserable life at a cruel orphanage, holding onto a desperate but ultimately naive hope that her parents are still alive and will find her someday. The end.”

** And, to be clear, identity is a big factor here. You don’t see many depictions of divine right that aren’t white, male, cisgender, able-bodied, and so on and so on. But, in the worlds of these stories, even most winners of the identity lottery end up unimportant commoners.

*** Actually, I hate parades. Unless I manage to exploit a loophole to get my underground satirical newspaper a float, which I actually did once and loved.