Beauty

"Perhaps it is to prepare to hear some day the music of the spheres that I am always turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for men at all. Nature has a patient ear. To her the slowest funeral march sounds like a jig. She is satisfied to have the notes drawn out to the lengths of days or weeks or months. Small variations are acceptable to her, modulations as leisurely as the opening of a flower."

~Wendell Berry 

The Grand Mirror of Facebook

**I want to begin this blog post with a disclaimer: I am not against Facebook. On the contrary, I think there are many wonderful things about Facebook, and I used it to much good, I think, while I had one. Further, this post is not merely a warning about Facebook, which is simply the easiest example of an issue I have been thinking about for some time now, but a warning about a point of view that I think effects many people – myself not excluded. And that is all that this is: a warning. No more, and no less. All right, now on to the post.**

Several months ago I made the decision to switch off of Facebook for a while. At the time it was kind of on a whim to be honest. There were many reasons (which I can tell you if you want to know), but I'm not quite sure which one was the tipping point. At any rate, I just decided the cons outweighed the pros for me. And having been “offline” for some time, the distance has given me a bit of clarity.

In the last few weeks I have been thinking about Facebook in a new way. Quite a few ideas had been spinning through my head, but it wasn't until I was reading a certain chapter in Perelandra by C.S. Lewis that they all came into alignment for me, and I saw what I couldn't before.

To set the scene from the book, the hero, a philologist named Dr. Ransom, has landed on a beautiful and exotic planet called Perelandra (Venus). There he has met a woman whom he comes to find is the first of her kind on the planet - the first parallel to the story of Adam and Eve. When Dr. Ransom meets her he comes to find that she has lost a man whom she calls the King (the first man). He further learns that she is in direct contact with the God figure of the story, Maledil. But an evil has entered the world of Perelandra. The “Tempter” has taken over the body of a professor of physics, Weston, and is attempting cause the mother of Perelandra to disobey Maledil's instructions. One of his weapons is a tiny mirror that he has brought with him. Upon seeing herself, the lady is taken aback.

Here is an excerpt:

            “Things being two when they are one,” replied the Lady decisively, “That thing” (she pointed to the mirror) “is me and not me.”

            “But if you do not look you will never know how beautiful you are,” [replied Weston’s Body or the Un-man].

            “It comes into my mind, Stranger,” she answered, “that a fruit does not eat itself, and a man cannot be together with himself.”

            “A fruit cannot do that because it is only a fruit,” said the Un-man. “But we can do it. We call this thing a mirror. A man can love himself, and be together with himself. That is what it means to be a man or a woman – to walk alongside oneself as if one were another person and to delight in one’s own beauty. Mirrors were made to teach this art.”

            “Is it a good?” said the Lady.

            “No,” said Ransom.

            “How can you find out without trying?” said the Un-man.

            “If you try it and it is not a good,” said Ransom, “how do you know whether you will be able to stop doing it?”

            “I am walking alongside myself already,” said the Lady. “But I do not yet know what I look like. If I have become two I had better know what the other is. As for you, Piebald [her name for Ransom], one look will show me this woman’s face and why should I look more than once?”

            She took the mirror, timidly but firmly, from the Un-man and looked into it in silence for the better part of a minute. Then she let it sink in and stood holding it at her side.

            “It is very strange,” she said at last.

            “It is very beautiful,” said the Un-man. “Do you not think so?”

            “Yes.”

Now of course the story of the man who looked at himself in the mirror and fell in love with the image he beheld is as old as Narcissus himself, but this passage brought me back to a line that I remembered from Hannah Coulter in which Wendell Berry says, “A man’s desire is the most flattering mirror a woman ever stands before, and she wants to see herself shining in it.”

I began to think of a mirror as not only the physical object, but rather as a mechanism for viewing oneself when one should be looking outward; or rather of projecting what is inward into the outside world. Further on in the chapter from Perelandra, Lewis says, “The image of her beautiful body was offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy’s true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.”

This was when I began to think more clearly of Facebook and the online persona that we often give ourselves. With Facebook, we “upload” ourselves online, but we are very selective with what we show. We want others to see the best versions of ourselves. We quite literally become two out of one. And the frightening thing is that we can manipulate the image to a great extent.

One inevitable result is that this image becomes how we really see ourselves, and it is divorced from who we truly are. Because we begin to see this image as outside ourselves and other, we can begin to admire it. To take this to a bit of the absurd, we can begin to see ourselves as an amalgam of status likes, picture comments, and friend counts.

Another problem that arises is that we cease to see our friends for who they truly are, eternal souls created in the image of God, and begin to see them as a distorted reflection of ourselves, or a means through which to see ourselves.

Because we live in a culture that blurs the line between what we desire and what we deserve we are constantly being told that we are the gods of our universe – that we are the ultimate deciders and deserve the ultimate praise. But I know myself enough to be thankful that God is completely other than me. Like Chesterton, I would much rather be the man who tries to fit my head into the heavens, and not the man who tries to fit heavens into my head.

But what if I could delete all of the imperfections that remind me of my place of subservience to my Savior? What if all I saw were the carefully selected and very few virtues (dim reflections of the ultimate good) that God allows to shine through me? Perhaps then I would be tempted to look inward to the reflection and not outward to the origin of all Good that ever has been and ever will be.

Berry, Malick, and the Power of Love

Yesterday I went to see The Tree of Life for the second time. This viewing was a bit less overwhelming (last time I had watched two of Malick's films that day in preparation), but I was still a bit shaken after it. I also saw the film through a bit of a different lens this time, as I had just read Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter and one of his books of poetry, Leavings. 


Both Coulter and Life are stories told through vignettes, which, together, sketch the life of a family. They tell the story of a family that is held together by love, but eventually, when the kids grow old, dissolves into the city of "a better place" as Berry puts it. Both also tell the story of the awesome power of nature - its beauty and power to heal. 


Malick takes the idea of nature in a bit of a different direction than Berry. He juxtaposes the destructive power of nature, its "war with itself, and need to be pleased," with the ever domineering father figure, played to perfection by Brad Pitt. Even with this picture of nature, magnified by countless images of nature combatting itself, there still is a feeling of immense awe at the beauty and harmony of nature. This also comes from one of Malick's trademarks of filmmaking, which is that he rarely if ever shoots any of his films inside, and he likes to use the natural sounds of the environment as much as possible in his scenes. This graceful side of nature is found in the mother's character, played by the wonderful "newcomer"Jessica Chastain. In the words of her character, "Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries." And later she says in a voice over, as beautiful images of nature are being shown, "Love. Wonder. Unless you love, your life will flash by." So Malick's answer to brutality is found also in nature.


For Berry, in Hannah Coulter, this brutality is found in the trenches of war. He sees war as a thing alien to nature, in which finds only peace and solace. In the words of Hannah, the novel's narrator, "The stream and the woods don't care if you love them. The place doesn't care if you love it. But for your own sake you had better love it. For the sake of all else you love, you had better love it."


While Berry is an outspoken Christian, Malick is not much of an outspoken anything. However, I do think it is somewhat safe to view him as such (it would at least seem so from all of his films). Berry often times (in the two books I have read) takes the side of nature, and points to man as a fallen creature. Malick, on the other hand, is willing to point to nature as having been effected by the fall just as man has (and in seemingly similar ways). Both do also find their answer in nature, though. For both artists it is the grace and love of and from nature that heals all wounds.

A Word Fitly Spoken

Sabbaths, 2007

V.

Those who use the world assuming
their knowledge is sufficient
destroy the world. The forest
is mangled for the sale
of a few sticks, or is bulldozed
into a stream and covered over
with the earth it once stood
upon. The stream turns foul,
killing the creatures that once
lived from it. Industrial humanity,
an alien species, lives by death.
In the clutter of facts, the destroyers
leave behind them one big story,
of the world and the world's end,
that they don't know. They know
names and little stories. But the names
of everything are not everything.
The story of everything, told,
is only a little story. They don't know
the languages of the birds
who pass northward, feeding
through the treetops early
in May, kept alive by knowledge
never to be said in words.
Hang down your head. This
is our hope: Words emerge
from silence, the silence remains.

~ Wendell Berry, Leavings