American Life, Redux

I am back—both in the States and on the blog. Seeing as I'm unemployed, I intend to return to semi-regular postings for supercurriculum. I hope you find it worthwhile!

The new apartment address—in case of parcels, visits, or otherwise—is:


Martyn Jones
2707 N. Kedzie Ave.
Unit 2
Chicago, IL 60647
USA


Thanks for reading, everyone. You're the greatest.

Steaks on a Plane

"Excuse me, sir, could I please see your boarding pass?"

I looked up from my laptop, instinctively tightening my feet around my bag and placing a hand on my rollaway. A woman in my airline's uniform with disarmingly large Persian eyes stood waiting for my response.

"Um, yeah sure, just a sec."

I handed it to her out of my shirt pocket, and waited to be told that I would need to go back to American Customs Pre-Clearance to sort out the ambiguities I'd inadvertently penned into my information card.

She eyed my ticket. "Please bear with me for a moment, sir." Then she walked away. I closed my computer, watched the desk under the sign for GATE 105, and thought about what a great story I'd have if I were detained in Dublin for the whole weekend by customs agents perplexed by my inconsistent passport use on flights to and from the US.

I ended up with a different story, however. My flight attendant returned and looked at me with her huge eyes. "Sorry about the confusion, sir. You'd gotten an upgrade and we wanted to make sure it was printed on your ticket." She handed me my boarding pass and I looked at it, then back up at her. "Wait a second—I'm sorry, what does this mean?" I must have misunderstood the word printed in place of "Economy" in the lower right corner, next to the almost-certainly misprinted "SEAT 3G". She replied, "It means you are now flying business class." She turned on her heel and walked away.  I smiled, caught myself, furrowed my brow, and smiled again, unable to bury my excitement.

So it begins: the story of a wide-eyed midwestern boy's adventure behind the business class curtain. 

The Really Real and the Really, Truly, Indubitably Real

I went for a run today in the rain. By the time I got back to my building the sun had come out. With my contacts in, I was able to see a lot of detail in things that would otherwise be obscured by my glasses. I don't know if crumbled concrete and a rotting white door are proper objects of wonder, but here we are.

I was cooling down, walking and stretching, when my mind quietly seized. In the clouds and trees, even in the brick buildings and cobblestone parking lots, I saw a desert open up. Everything was a flat, consistent plane, each surface equally opaque and continuous with every other. There was a kind of inscrutable hiddenness in everything.

In this state I prayed. I asked God for a sign that this was his work. By the end of my silent prayer, everything had become a surface—not just the sights of things, but their sounds, smells, feels. My mind became a point suspended in something I know not what. I turned around like a baby in utero, looking at a world made strange.

I don't know if God answered my prayer in a way I could understand, but my heightened sense of alienation at least reopened a window that's been shut for a long time. Here's the view, familiar enough: my little brain does its best to dance over the surfaces of things, and is satisfied with a cursory knowledge of the contours they present to me. It cannot, however, open a door into a stone, or touch the life that animates an olive tree. My brain can only gesture at reality at a slant, and ponder it from a distance. Perhaps otherwise it would be consumed—or simply fall silent, like the collapsing body of the man who tried to steady the ark with his bare hand.

Maybe it really is true, that everything we think or say is essentially and most truly about what we cannot think and can never say. Who could know? And could she say it if she did know?

Glory Be

Once again, I owe an enormous debt of love and gratitude to a friend in the states. The way that a material thing can become such a tangible expression of an immaterial reality, such as a person's kindness - well, it's just something that seems to come under more satisfactory description in the terms of the participatory ontologies of centuries gone by.

the title already hints at the sequel

Last week, I received The Tree of Life as an early Christmas present from Josh, who is a great guy, a real class act. Josh was with me when I saw this movie for the first time, and also the third time, so he's seen me in all my brooding, teary-eyed glory. He is an all-around great dude, and a talented photographer to boot!

Oh man, The Tree of Life. This movie affected me like no other movie I have seen; it met me so perfectly that in weak moments I've been tempted to see film itself as a completed enterprise, as though the artistic and spiritual potential of the medium has been brought to perfect consummation. I don't believe this is really true, or even can be true on account of the ways that truth works through art, but I've been tempted to think it nonetheless. I was tempted anew a few days ago when I gave The Tree of Life a fifth viewing, this time in the company of Jack, Berthold, and my roommates. I am generally unaccustomed to tears so when I get them it makes my face tired. 

And so. In addition, of course, to freaking out about my thesis proposal, which is due on the 15th of this month, I have started work on what could become a two- or three-part review of The Tree of Life. Not a real review (because [1] it's too personal, and [2] I don't have the technical and historical knowledge of film that would help me to write a real review), but an essay, perhaps. There will also be a sort of prolegomena intended to help contextualize my response to it. We'll see how personal it gets. 

Anyway, my last word is to Josh: thank you, Josh, you are an amazing friend. 

Axis and Allies and the Best Night Ever

My roommates and I have made two friends here in the past month. Berthold is a Dutch medical student working at a hospital here in Leuven; his English is excellent and he's been so kind as to start helping us learn how to speak Flemish, so that we might at least know how to distinguish the times when people are swearing at us from the times when people are just enthusiastically greeting us and asking us what our names are and how we are today.

Jack is our second friend, as well as our Anglican priest. God's gifts to him include height, volume, and charisma. The fact that he was the dean of a college at Cambridge for over a decade—and by natural extension, of course, that he used to ride out on the fox hunt every Saturday morning, and captained a rugby team, and ate dinner alongside Stephen Hawking for years—sounds extraordinary on paper, but spending time with Jack helps one to see just how much it makes sense. He is the sort of person who seems to be made of tea, biscuits, and tweed. At his apartment a couple weeks ago, I thumbed through his hardbound 500+ page doctoral dissertation, written in French. Seeing it in my hands, he said "it is possible, boys," with an upward inflection on the last word, as British as the Queen. I laid it down on the coffee table, afraid its weight would break one of the wooden legs. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein was also a Cambridge don

Last night Jack picked us all up in a Mini Cooper and drove us to a house in the countryside of Wallonia, where he is taking care of the dog and cats for a few days while the house owner (a Dutch writer) and his family are away. We sat in front of a stone fireplace for tea and wine, and after answering the door to a group of trick-or-treaters (in the Belgian countryside, who would have thought?), we ate dinner in the kitchen. The house was huge, all wood and brick and cut stone, painted in warm colors and stuffed with candles and old books. After we finished off a loaf of bread with Bruge cheese and salmon, Jack fried steaks with an egg on top for each of us. In retrospect, I am quite sure that I hadn't eaten that much protein in the previous two weeks combined, a fact to which my visibly-increased muscle mass seemed to attest today. Unfortunately the effects were only short term and I didn't take any pictures of myself for proof because I am meek. 

I have new culinary experiences here every day 

After dinner, Jack treated us to a very special bottle of liqueur; it had been a gift from a congregant at a church in France where he worked for several years while completing his PhD. Illegally distilled and bottled in the early 80s (according to the handwriting on the yellowed sticker-label), the clear liquid burned from the throat down into the chest, but not before releasing a confusing blend of fruit notes and bits of partly-dissolved cork. Apparently they drink it by the mugful in the region where his church was. 

It was now after ten and we were only on the cusp of the real business of the evening. After another pot of tea, we transformed the finely-appointed living room into a finely-appointed war room for our game of Axis and Allies, the special promise of the night made possible by today's holiday. We unfolded the board, placed our armies, and breathed out whatever blessing the aroma of peach-flavored rubbing alcohol could bestow upon our violently opposed purposes before goose-stepping into the spring of 1942. 

Jack become a more reckless Joseph Stalin, I played Winston Churchill with steely-eyed confusion, and Dan took upon himself the venerable mantle of FDR. Across the table from us, Berthold commanded huge numbers of Panzers and Wehrmacht infantry with an amiability that astonished all of us while Jeremy presided over the empire of the rising sun. He chuckled to himself frequently and made no secret of the fact that he was keeping secrets from us. Berthold benefited from Jeremy's well-tested knowledge of the game, but the hapless Allied novices had to figure things for themselves. This does help to explain an opening Russian offensive. 

Here I tell Dan a joke while Jack reconsiders his decision to attack on his first turn

By the end of the war, Los Angeles had fallen to the battleships of the Japanese, most of Europe had traded hands multiple times, Moscow was still holding fast as Moscow is wont to do, and the sun was just barely starting to rise outside. The Axis powers had won the day, but apparently a new day was already forcing itself upon us so there was no time to mourn the outcome. Jack drove us back, and we returned to our building at roughly the same time as a number of high-endurance partiers. Berthold retrieved his fold-up bicycle from our apartment and pedaled home. 

Getting into bed at 6am this morning, I willfully emptied my mind of strategy and alternate history just long enough to think, "is this really my life?" Getting out of bed in a groggy haze a few hours later, I willfully suppressed my thesis anxiety just long enough to think, "well it sure isn't anyone else's." 

Annie Dillard and Innocence

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

On Sunday mornings I usually like to read scripture and sections from a book of practical theology, such as Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure by the man for whom I was named. Today I decided instead to pick up Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

"Ecstatic" might be the most apt word for Pilgrim, a series of deeply meditative and wide-ranging reflections that the author composed while spending a year in solitude near the eponymous creek. Like no other writer I know, Dillard has a remarkable talent for transfiguration. What is familiar to us—assumed, casually passed over, thought to be unremarkable—takes on an unsettling and foreign dimension as she recasts the familiar in her own terms. Insects become horrific voids of meaning, a tree caught in the light at dusk throws open a door to eternity, and the whole world of nature reassumes a majesty and transcendence that the disenchanting movement of modern culture has all but shut out.

In light of themes running through the David Foster Wallace quotations I put up recently, I can't help but share an extended section from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; here Dillard reflects on self-consciousness and its opposed state which, interestingly, she calls innocence.

Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. In fact, it is only to a heightened awareness that the great door to the present opens at all. Even a certain amount of interior verbalization is helpful to enforce the memory of whatever it is that is taking place. [. . .]

Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities—looking over my own shoulder, as it were—the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot and flung out of sight as if it had never grown. And time, which had flowed down into the tree bearing new revelations like floating leaves at every moment, ceases. It dams, stills, stagnates.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people—the novelist's world, not the poet's. I've lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, "next year . . . I'll start living; next year . . . I'll start my life." Innocence is a better world. 

Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit's good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares: singlemindedly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains, hurling itself from ridge to ridge over the valley, now faint, now clear, ringing the air through which the hounds tear, open-mouthed, the echoes of their own wails dimly knocking in their lungs. 

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn't be, shouldn't be, reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I'll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I'll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present. 

 A good lady. 

I'll Show You a Package Covered in Stamps, Its Contents Even

Another day, another act of international kindess.

 This is how to cover an international postage charge using only thirteen-cent stamps

"Yo young poet!" - Rainer Maria Rilke

My wonderful friend Ryn sent me a copy of a book I once loved so much that I gave it away. Thank you, Ryn! Reading through the first few letters again has reminded me of why I loved Rilke so much in the first place. If you haven't encountered any of his work before, I would recommend the pictured book, Letters to a Young Poet, and perhaps Sonnets to Orpheus (if you're familiar with the myth) or The Book of Hours (if you're a person of faith). Themes and motifs in Rilke's poetry anticipate Heidegger's phenomenological perspectives on being and language! Which is to say, Rilke is an exciting and brilliant observer of life. Thank you again, Ryn! 

A Pictorial Play in Two Parts

THE BOX

by Marty Jones or whatever 

also, Photo Booth

* * * 

 A box with my name on it! What!

Inside the box, there are things, delicately wrapped in paper! Whoa!

 A heartwarming personal note! 

The handwriting is elegant, but doesn't make me feel bad about my own!

 A card from a buncha dudes that has a cat on it! Classy and deeply felt!

Tea supplies! My fingers look strange in this photograph!

They are attempting to hold too many different items!

A camera! It can zoom, or not zoom! Depends on what you want!

BUT THEN

WHAT IS THIS MARIJUANA OR SOMETHING GUYS

WHY WOULD YOU SEND ME THIS MARIJUANA

Smelling the marijuana...

 That is potent marijuana you guys! 

Just kidding, it's looseleaf tea. Tea is a drug you can drink. 

* * * 

And that's the story of my afternoon. My friends are the best!

To Rachyl and company, thank you, thank you, thank you. I am amazed by your kindness and intentionality; shipping a package internationally is no casual undertaking. I don't take it lightly, and I appreciate it. Thank you.

And now for some apartment pictures!