Varieties of Dignity (Ode to Instagram and the Art of the Selfie)

Photo: Fury in the Desert Series from Adela C. Licona’s rich, complex, brilliant photography @entremundista


In her beautifully crafted blog, Shawna Lemay has explored the nature of social portraiture, the nature of the selfie and the medium that gallerizes all of it. This small poem owes its inspiration (such as it is) to several posts from Transactions with Beauty.

Varieties of Dignity

“…the million-petaled flower of being here.” – Philip Larkin

You see them here, on these things called platforms.
Them? I mean our photographs, all our selves in repose,
at repast, in replays of holidays, getaways, birthdays,
sharing our pets, our haircuts, our pets’ haircuts.

And all the ways we pose for the world — withholding,
revealing, our mannered forms of ill-manner,
our outrage, tact, deference, brass,
our misery, joy, our heart’s geography —
are really just us,
            in our varieties of dignity.

So this is me, saying,
I see you in your wicker chair,
under languid light at the edge of the lawn,
raising your evening glass of wine.
And this is me beneath a tilted moon,
blue-checked cotton against my skin,
made-quiet by the art of a mist-clad night,
made-silent at seeing your self-in-silhouette
these loose and brief connections,
like silken awns soon torn from the cob of corn,
            yet nonetheless real.
Tell the ages! At this place, on this time, in this year,
            we were here.

Restless Sureness

Nobody told me there’d be days like these — strange days indeed.  – John Lennon
And were your feelings so terrible and dark they could not be turned into fuel?  – Franz Wright
Absence is the form God’s presence takes in this world.  – Simone Weil
Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.  – Psalms 4:4

Once, when the corner store sold us a bad pork chop we took the whole affair, rancid-chop-in-steaming-pan, marched back to the store and dropped it on the counter. It wasn’t a huge effort. We only lived two houses down. The proprietor was more than a bit surprised, but quickly gave us our money back. We called that justice. We scooped the money, bought some Royal Red and went home to read National Lampoon (which was just getting big then), listen to Dr. Hook, Blue Oyster Cult and a new Savoy Brown album we’d pooled our pennies for, called, Hellbound Train.

It was summer, Calgary Stampede, we drifted down 17th Avenue, jumped a fence to watch people. Then fell in line. The lot of us like livestock, rutting and running, lathered and lassoed, herded through shoots to make useless purchases. Fall came and the winds chilled down from the foothills, our heads cleared and we pointed the Rambler Ambassador to the west coast, taking with us those records, magazines and frying pan.

Riding the ferry to the island we could’ve been sailing the Aegean to Greece — even the rains seemed strange and holy. I read Siddhartha, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and A Separate Reality by Castaneda. I drew pictures, I began to write. I learned the chord progressions of every song on Neil Young’s Harvest. We mapped the edges of psychedelia. We were young, the terrain for excess was vast (as was the capacity for stupidity).

I wrote in secret, on discardable scraps of paper. Sporadic mornings, lying on my sleeping bag under pines above waves, I arranged words believing they could lead to conscious clearings of insight, fill some deep longing. Some want I couldn’t stop wanting. Was it blessed excess? Was it some cemented version of self? Was it God?

The land between stillness and wars in my head became my daily bread. I needed something like a monastic Rule, but settled for esoteric books, the music of The Doors, the movement of tides and the occasional high that glimpsed (I thought) something approaching St. Paul’s paradise. And yet, by such slipshod coordinates I found my way home.

Home? Or should I say here, there, beyond, between, as home now seems a fluid thing. For what I found in those molting years, through the dressing and undressing of selves, was the unfinding of myself. That is to say, the discovery that sureness of self is an illusion, its pursuit — delusion.

Here, decades hence, I still mistake islands for mainland, a lake for the sea, self for soul. But I can laugh, happily and purgatively, at this contingent-me — this roiling, rolling river with its collection of eddies. Happy to settle down to restlessness — a sureness, ready to be unsure, where longing is the heart’s lever, and void the divining rod for Love’s hidden presence. This life, it seems, is a means, not an end.

A Theology of Prayer (Or Reasons Prayer Goes Unanswered)

Brief note: Raised in a conservative evangelical tradition, sermons on prayer were as common as “Amens” from Deacon Ted or Betty’s scalloped potatoes on potluck Sundays. We were Sunday-schooled by: “God has established prayer as the means to receive his supernatural help…so to live a life worthy of the gospel (John Piper).” We were sprinkled, dipped and baptized into the importance and imperative of prayer. And yet I’m not sure if we (well, me) understood it. I studied it, I practiced it, but never made sense of it. Still, despite the oddness of prayer, despite my beliefs that have angled away from evangelical currents, I’ve never really quit praying…I’ve just quit calling it that. Now, sitting quietly in an attitude of lovingkindness (with someone’s name) seems the best I can do, perhaps the most I should do.

While this poem is a response to my old beliefs about prayer, I think it ends with an opening — that is, the notion that to pray is not a thing.


A Theology of Prayer (Or Reasons Prayer Goes Unanswered)

Perhaps it’s absence of patience,
my insistent ‘now’
that prevents a response.
More righteous or virtuous?
certainly room there, but
more is a bucket with a hole in it.
Frequency may be my undoing: failure
to heed that bidding — pray without ceasing,
not unlike the way my old Ford Econoline
kept stalling on every incline.
Maybe it’s place and attendance:
forsaking-the-gathering? Guilty.
Which reminds me that there could be
something unconfessed — a sure non-starter.
Perhaps doubt is the problem; my belief,
the swinging doors of an old saloon.
Or more formally: my focus is faulty,
as it’s not to God’s glory.
Then there’s [His] will,
either knowable or inscrutable, which,
should my plea land beyond,
I’m pretty much screwed.
Maybe it’s worry (which the faithful say
is a form of unfaith) that gets in the way,
my daily anxiety over someone’s healing,
like some badger borrowing at the base of my brain
Possibly [He’s] answering a bigger petition,
so you can grow, as I’ve been told,
because your way isn’t [His] etc., etc.
Could be pride’s march to hypocrisy
or exhaustion leading to lethargy,
or one of the remaining five.
Then again maybe it’s just my ignorance.
Like the day, all those years ago, I went outside
and hung my prayer on a low branch
and waited, season upon season,
for the tree to take it up —
only to be mistaken about the way a tree grows.

While wondering about our current existential and pestilential state, a small memory comes to calm the psyche

Chico

(Alternative title: It’s summer, but some of us need therapy)

Having spent this much time inside the bubble of ourselves,
given aperitifs of news through slots in our cells,
the mind’s gone mercenary
and the belly’s backed up with worry.

Those in the fold say, “It’s a test of faith!”
Others say, “It’s Nietzsche’s mad parable!”
Still others say, “Eat your chicken paprika
and forget your exercise regime;
drink your frozen daiquiris
and forget your laundry, your legacy, your eventuality;
for the longer the life the lonelier;
the nearer the mirror the darker.”

As for me,
I still do my stretches
and send out prayers.
(I’m told they’ve arrived, but have been put on hold.)

Tell me counsellor,
what is a human?
what is the soul?
what is spirit?
where’s the heart?
where shall I point this tumbling longing?

My neighbour builds additions to his manor
and spends his evenings looking over the fence.
A cousin posts God on the internet
and supports the man holding up a bible.
In the end, my aunt and her opinions
gentled into happy dementia,
like it was a fresh start.

Me, I wield my self-help tools, yet
the beast in me is blessed — I meditate
until the melt of me couldn’t fill a thimble, and still,
this idling engine of apprehension.

But I remember boyhood summers
dreaming on the porch steps,
with my collie Chico,
watching the chickens giving themselves dust baths
beside the grain bins
and feeling entirely lovable.