1. This morning when I dropped off my boys at their day camp, a counselor remarked on how similarly we were all dressed. It was bold comment to make, but he was right. They were wearing shorts and sneakers. I was wearing shorts and sneakers. They were wearing band t-shirts (KISS for the 6 year old, School of Rock for the 10 year old, and Oasis for the 12 year old). I was wearing the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway silkscreen my wife gave me for my birthday. My oldest had on a baseball cap with a New York team on it (Mets), and so did I (Knights). Needless to say, I slunked back to the car feeling a little self-conscious. What I think of as my summer uniform is actually a forty-four year old dressed like an elementary schooler.
Well, Happy Fathers Day to you, too. Your gift is the same one that greeted me when I got into the office after drop-off. The gift of being seen — through the eyes of grace rather than condescension — via this gem of an essay on “The Meaning of Dad Aesthetics” by Matt Dinan, published on Bulwark.
When men of a certain age start opining about beauty, you can’t help but worry it’s a prelude to some humiliating expression of midlife desperation, a variation on the theme of the narcissistic and ineffectual “longing man,” as writer and critic Merve Emre typifies him. But the aesthetics of contemporary dads are less troubling than those of the longing man because they seem to grow from a healthier existential seed: uncertainty about our place in the world. To be a dad nowadays is to have put away or lost the traditional patriarchal scripts while having to figure out how to approximately fulfill the role for which those scripts were written.
So why do I dress so preppy? I suppose my pastel shirts and novelty socks (I’m trying to quit!) are something like an anti-business suit: If anything, I wish to downplay the imposing distance that age and experience can create. I want to show that I’m approachable — we can talk, you know? Some dads wear band t-shirts or ironic caps they hope someone will ask them about; others dress like they’re on a never-ending camping trip; still others don athleisure and Hokas because they’d rather be running than sitting on a bus, but since they’re sitting here next to you, they’d love nothing more than for you to follow them on Strava or ask for training tips. In the main, dad fashion expresses a desire to close the gap between a dad and his kids — and, ultimately, between himself and the world …
Dads are drawn to cultural productions, to art, that express and analyze loneliness through beauty … as dads, we are permanently trying to close the gap we feel between our kids and ourselves. The loneliness of fatherhood comes not only from this need to secure affection, but from the concurrent awareness of the brevity of childhood — of mortality. Whereas moms begin from a place of intimacy — often literal, physical closeness — dads start from an emotional distance, and as we make our way in to develop more robust relationships with our children, the experience changes us, leaves us different.
He might be flattering our tribe a tad, but who cares. Dads who ‘humble’ themselves to close the gap between themselves and their children, sacrificing their dignity to convey love and achieve closeness, sounds pretty biblical to me.
2. Zinan may not mention the man by name when listing specific examples of the dad-art (hate that term!) in question but surely if he were to give a full accounting, iconic author Cormac McCarthy would be on the roster. Which sounds like a put-down but isn’t meant that way, at all. Sigh. McCarthy died this past week, and I’d wager that most of the tributes have been penned by men with offspring. To wit, Dwight Garner’s low anthropology-drenched obit for the Times.
Towering as McCarthy’s stature may be, eulogizing him is tricky. I mean, “How do you compose a mournful remembrance for someone who scorned the whole notion of mournful remembrance?” That’s the question Brian Phillips poses over on the Ringer, and while I’m not sure the answer, I’m grateful he gave it a shot:
“The total immanence of the created world.” That’s what a friend of mine called the object of McCarthy’s vision. It was 2005 or 2006. We were sitting in a Friendly’s in North Haven, Connecticut, talking about Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West, the 1985 novel that’s sometimes considered McCarthy’s masterwork. My friend, who was serious and religious, was trying to explain the Christian theology he could detect in McCarthy’s novel. I, a light-minded person, temperamentally casual about the problem of total immanence, was trying unsuccessfully to drink an Oreo milkshake through a straw. My friend said, “He’ll write 10 pages describing the landscape and then some act of horrific violence will come out of nowhere and he’ll cover it in one short paragraph. And then he’ll go back to describing the landscape, and the whole time the tone will stay exactly the same, the tone won’t change at all, because if God created the world, then everything in the world is equally suffused with God’s presence. A headless corpse is as much an aspect of God as a cloudburst or a sleeping child.”
I realized at this moment that I was going to have to switch to a spoon. I fumbled with the plastic wrapper. My friend said, “It brings the paradox of faith to this unbelievably intense crisis point. The absolute indifference of the universe is a sign of the absolute fullness of God’s presence.”
The degree of difficulty required to take this Boys’ Own adventure milieu and turn it into a profound investigation of humanity’s place in the universe is frankly absurd; McCarthy did it again and again and again.
For a more targeted exploration of the theological overtones in his work, I’d commend Matthew Boudway’s tracing of “Cormac McCarthy’s Moral Imagination” in Commonweal.
McCarthy’s most memorable villains — Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (2005), a Mexican sheriff in All the Pretty Horses (1992) — tend to be certain about everything, and about themselves above all. Their absolute certainty makes courage unnecessary, since courage always answers to risk, and, for these characters, all of them paid-up determinists, there can be no real risk, for the outcome is never in doubt. McCarthy’s heroes, by contrast, don’t pretend to have all the answers. They often find themselves stumped or thwarted; they are subject to doubt and capable of regret. McCarthy’s heroes hope there’s a world to come but fear there might not be. His villains and antiheroes, meanwhile, are sure there isn’t one, and they’re glad of it.
Insofar as [the brief, consoling passages of McCarthy’s work] bear a theological interpretation, they would seem to insist that our experience of God is often, if not always, mediated by other persons, the spirits of those we loved or admired in this world. If we look again at the last line of that passage from The Road, we discover a related idea: “She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.” Human beings are a fitting abode for the spirit of God, both before and after their death.
McCarthy’s abiding interest in a category of characters we might loosely call “losers” — the alienated, the undesired and undesirable, the freakish and the forgotten, the terminally disappointed — may be the best evidence that he possesses an essentially Christian moral imagination.
Do we actually see any sign of the Gospel message in McCarthy’s bleak fictions? I think the answer is yes, once we know how to look for it. Again, it isn’t delivered to us homiletically by the author, though sometimes he will allow one of his Christian characters to preach. These sermons are often awkward, even clumsy, not nearly as shapely or polished as the fulminations of McCarthy’s monumental villains. When we do hear the Gospel proclaimed, it is likely to be the Gospel as proclaimed by some sinner who has just recognized how far short he’s fallen.
Now comes the part where normally I would share my own thoughts about Cormac. At the risk of having my dad-who-thinks-about-serious-things card yanked, I need to confess: I’ve only read The Road. Which I’ll concede is a masterpiece, albeit one that sent me into a genuine funk. No wonder Fleming Rutledge recommends it as essential Advent reading. The darkness is just so thick, the tone so existential. (FWIW, Alan Noble’s highly effective invoking of The Road in his new On Getting Out of Bed has gone a long way toward rehabilitating that book for me). But Boudway’s convinced me to shoot The Sunset Limited to the top of my reading pile. Jason Micheli is working on a McCarthy tribute for us that should be up next week.
3. “Apocalyptic” is one word that gets bandied about often in relation to McCarthy’s fiction, not just The Road. I imagine this has something to do with sparseness of his prose, the bursts of violence, the bleak settings, the overall brutality, etc. His books, in other words, are apocalyptic in different sense than Apple’s new Vision Pro headset appears to be. Writing in the Atlantic, Charlie Wetzel called the device, which was unveiled last week — right as vast clouds of forest fire over the East Coast were finally dissipating — “the Perfect Gadget for the Apocalypse.” Just so happens that a new season of Black Mirror is about to drop too:
Last week was an especially weird one to unveil a future in which people with enough disposable income can retreat from the physical world into the gated-face community of a 360-degree iPhone screen … It may be uncharitable to connect a marketing video to climate-disaster avoidance. Still, I struggled to watch the world’s biggest technology company lay out its vision for the future of computing and not find it cynical, even a bit apocalyptic.
There is a moment in Apple’s demo where we see an exhausted-looking woman on a crowded airplane. A baby is wailing in the background. She adjusts the Vision Pro: The chaos of the plane fades to the background as she becomes one with her premium content. This full immersion has an obvious appeal, but it also represents “a total concession to the screens,” as New York’s John Herrman put it. I see the Vision Pro as a play for the last available acreage of pixel real estate: Your peripheral vision […]
There’s a final-frontier vibe to it all — total sensory colonization. But it’s also a rather depressing turn away from Apple’s previous vision of its products … It is not a tool meant to help navigate the physical world: It is a way to tune it out.
For a more redemptive and beautifully #fathersday take on the same product — and eye contact in general — check out Jordan Griesbeck’s wonderful “Eyes in the Age of Apple Vision.” Jordan relates how his son’s aversion to eye contact was an early sign of autism. (A particularly difficult one, as a parent, to absorb). Thankfully, the interactions Jesus had with those around him point a hopeful way forward. “There will be times when we want to look at our children, and they will want to look at screens, and that will have to be okay. We can continue looking at them and loving them — even if they do not want to look at us.” Amen to that.
4. Next, we turn to the moms. In a recent newsletter Heather Havrilesky shared a principal lesson she’s learned from a lifetime of being her mother’s daughter, namely, “People Aren’t Problems to Solve.” I wish I’d had this passage on hand when I was writing Low Anthropology (out in paperback on 7/25!), as it captures the premise of the book far more approachably than I ever could.
Sometimes the more right you are, the more lonely you are. And real life, real love, real closeness require much more from us than that.
When someone isn’t capable of giving you what you need — maybe they even tell you that clearly! — and you insist that they could, they should, they’re just being stubborn or selfish? That can feel frustrating, enraging, impossible to overcome. And a ‘people are puzzles to solve’ mindset will keep you locked in a position of trying to fix things, figure it out, make your broken appliance start functioning correctly.
But people don’t respond well to being treated that way. Even if you’re careful and watch what you say, even if you try hard to accept them as they are, if your overall goal is to jimmy the lock on the love they’re denying you, nothing is likely to change. Love might look different for them than it does for you.
This will sound very reductive and simple, but when I finally got tired of myself, and tired of my fantasy of the perfect mother, and I decided that my mother was way too old to be expected to change her entire personality for me and me alone, everything in my life improved. My marriage improved, my friendships improved, and my relationship with myself improved. When I stopped treating my mother like a big problem to solve, I stopped treating MYSELF like a problem to solve. I tried, for the first time, to accept myself as I was and accept her as she was, too.
And now I’m almost ashamed to say that my mother sometimes does act like the mother of my dreams. The less I pressure her, directly and also without words, to BE DIFFERENT than she is, the more space she has to offer her special, unmatched gifts.
5. Would that we were all more like the Puritans? Christianity’s most caricatured, and least understood religious movement gets a more balanced hearing from Graham Tomlin over at Seen and Unseen. Though we might associate Puritans with mercilessness and joylessness, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. Yes, they embraced a heavy emphasis on moral rectitude, but they also held forgiveness in high esteem — far higher than many today. Or you might say, the Puritans of history were puritanical about the Law and the Gospel. Contemporary “secular” puritans lack that second category and are therefore only puritanical about the little-l law.
Perhaps the problem is not so much that we have become too much like the post-reformation Puritans, but that we are fundamentally unlike them. Puritans were a group of Protestants who first emerged in the 16th century, who wanted to ensure that Reformation in England was carried out thoroughly, broadly according to the agenda of John Calvin in Geneva, and not (as they saw it), half-heartedly. The word ‘Puritan’ was in fact invented by the group’s enemies, accusing them of a joyless obsession with purity, an insistence on keeping rules, confessing sins and avoiding pleasures. As always, caricatures tell half, or less than half, of the truth. Of course there were censorious and frowning Puritans, but they also had a profound and ambitious notion of grace and goodness alongside a nuanced moral ecology that we have largely lost.
The Puritans had a strong notion of the nexus of sin, confession, grace, forgiveness, absolution and the possibility of moral reformation. If your conscience tells you that you had done something wrong, you had best confess it sincerely to God (and possibly to other people as well), which would be followed by the promise of divine forgiveness, which in turn had the potential to bring about a deep change of heart and habit, so that the fault was not repeated again. They had a strong notion of divine grace which interrupts normal human processes, unlocks hard hearts and kindles new desires in twisted souls.
Now we have lost most of this. If you confess a sin in public, you are very unlikely to receive absolution in the court of Twitter or public esteem. The passing of time may mean people forget what you did and enable some rehabilitation, but forgiveness? Never.
Back in the day when more people went to church, they at least once a week had an occasion where they were invited to reflect on their sins of the past week, to confess them and receive absolution. That pairing is perhaps the key to the whole thing, and why saying sorry is so hard in contemporary life — because we have not only lost the ability to say sorry, we have also lost the ability to forgive.
Don’t get me wrong: the Puritans were challenging for all kinds of other reasons. It’s just that the alternating mixture of moral laxity, strictness, and all around absence of forgiveness would likely strike them as odd, blasphemous even.
6. Speaking of modern-day puritans — or ‘ascetics’ might be the better term — the popular new podcast The Turning: Room of Mirrors casts an investigative eye on the highest echelons of the ballet world, and let’s just say Black Swan may not have been much of an embellishment. Those not ready to dive into the series itself can glean the gist from Emily Liebert’s piece in Jezebel, “Does Ballet Have to Be Like This?” which reads almost like an extended rumination on McCarthy’s assertion that there is no such thing as life (or beauty?) without bloodshed:
At present, there are so few blisteringly honest accounts from modern retirees that it may be decades before we have a clear picture of the mental and emotional toll of contemporary ballet on its artists. Former NYCB corps member Sophie Charles (née Flack), however, is one of the handful of former dancers openly talking about it.“We were systematically lied to since childhood that the skills that we acquired in the ballet world would serve us in our next endeavor, and for me, it was the opposite,” says Charles, now a writer and mother of two whose voice was featured on The Turning. “I tried applying what worked for me in the ballet world to being a mother for the first time, and it was completely catastrophic. My perfectionism, my determination, my hard work, my self-sacrifice … all the things that make a great dancer completely wrecked me mentally and physically as a mother.”
Pre-pubescent was the most sought-after look in mirrored ballet studios. Markers of womanhood — large breasts, hips, or bellies — were discouraged. Body types that skewed from the sinewy ideal with its protruding bones were dealt with as a question of morality or a lack of work ethic. “I think there’s always that voice, being a dancer, which is drilled into you,” Morgan says. “You could have worked harder, you could have eaten less, you could have done more.”
7. Time to lighten up! I chuckled a few times at this list of “Names for Your Middle-Aged Dad Band” (The Who Left This Light On?, Cialis in Chains). Reductress nailed yours truly with “Woman Most Creative When Finding Excuses Not to Pursue Her Art.”
“I would pursue my art this week,” Haley told reporters gathered at the scene. “But there are so many other things on my to-do list right now that take precedence: finding a new desk, shining my shoes, getting a small hat for my cat, oh and of course, renewing my TSA Precheck before I go to Greece next summer, where I will hopefully pursue my art.”
Sources confirm that coming up with these excuses not to write a chapter of her fiction novel is the most Haley has applied her creative brain in months.
But what’s kept me laughing hardest lately is the new season of I Think You Should Leave on Netflix. Interested parties should read the ‘interview’ with Tim Robinson that the Times ran a few weeks ago. I dig how this guy’s mind works.
8. Lastly, Cormac McCarthy gave precious few interviews during his life. But when the Times cajoled him into one back in 1992, they asked him why he spent so much time among scientists, and what accounted for his curiosity in theoretical physics. He shot back with “but why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” Thank you, Cormac, for a perfect segue into “You Can’t Create Curiosity” by Mbird contributor (and brilliant conference speaker!) Sarah Hinlicky Wilson over at Faith+Lead. What starts out as a tribute to a bibliophile family friend named Michael turns into a reflection on the unbounded nature of curiosity and freedom and the Holy Spirit. Ballet dancers be warned — you’re about to enter foreign territory:
There was another reason Michael made such an impact on me. He never told us to be curious. He never invited, encouraged, or harangued us to be curious. He just was infinitely curious himself, and so inadvertently became a model of curiosity. Not because he was trying to, but simply because he was that way.
Curiosity is not something you can program or engineer—not in someone else, but not in yourself, either. You can’t make yourself curious about anything. It happens or it doesn’t (as any good friend who has patiently listened to an unending recital of the minutiae of a hobby can attest).
And actually, in this way, curiosity bears striking parallels to faith. Luther protested the received scholastic account of faith as something that the will generates by its own decision. No, Luther countered, faith lies at the level of the will itself, and one of the most robust human experiences is the will willing what it wills regardless of what one wants to will! The will can’t will itself into faith. So… now what?
Now… the Holy Spirit! Something outside yourself comes upon you, steals over you, overtakes and transfigures you. It’s from the outside in, not from the inside out. The Holy Spirit captivates you by the gospel and so faith is brought into being out of nothing. You don’t create or generate faith: it is rather the response evoked by something outside of you. There is a strong structural analogy here to curiosity.
It is such a joy to watch curiosity unfold in children: to watch just what it is that comes along and raptures them, to follow the unfolding of that openness in any number of unpredictable and controllable directions. When Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven,” I think he is paying honor to this very openness, which in the domain of creation is curiosity and in the domain of justification is faith.
Strays:
- Our own Stephanie Phillips was interviewed on Pilgrim Radio talking about Tim Keller.
- Sarah Hinlicky Wilson was also interviewed on the wonderful All About Agatha podcast for her piece on Miss Marple’s Low Anthropology. This is the first I’m hearing about an Agatha Christie Christmas story, too. Very intriguing.
- George Orwell: Closet Anglican on Covenant taught me much I did not know about the famously atheistic author.
- Those looking to play church hooky on Fathers Day might get their sermon fill over at 1517, courtesy of none other than Gerhard Forde, “Sin Will Have No Dominion.”
- T-Minus six days ’til Asteroid City!
- Finally, serious question: does anyone out there know (anyone who knows) an actual human being who works at Facebook? Mbird could use your/their help. Email us at info@mbird.com for more details.
COMMENTS
4 responses to “June 10-16”
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Speaking of Cormac, have you read Karen Swallow Prior’s chapter on The Road and the virtue of Hope in her book “On Reading Well”? Some really good stuff.
Thanks for this round-up, Dave. I’m finally willing to give Cormac McCarthy a try!
I also enjoy seeing ballet mentioned. It’s obviously important, both for professional dancers and young dancers considering ballet as a profession, that
problems in the ballet world can be spoken of openly.
That said, they have been. The stress caused by the pressure to be slim, and the physical and psychological damage this can cause, have been topics of discussion and concern for decades.
But the stage ‘adds pounds’ — dancers look heavier onstage than they do off of it — and on average thinner dancers simply look better and show the choreography clearer than do heavier ones. Being relatively slim isn’t a moral ideal, but it is an artistic one in this case, and that matter, ballets often portray ideals.
One more thing: I’ve been a devoted balletgoer since the mid-70s, and very few female dancers actually look prepubescent. Some contemporary and recent stars — Misty Copeland and Veronica Part, for example — have quite ‘womanly’ figures. throughout the history of the art form, there have always been many like them.
But thanks again.
How did I know this weekender would prominently feature Asteroid City!!
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