Commentary
Poetry and other arts commentary
The Unexpected Rabbit
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/01/2017 - 08:54Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Happy New Year. Recently, I asked my friends what they thought I should resolve for the New Year. I am facing great uncertainty this coming year, especially around my spiritual journey and our political climate. Will 2017 be a breakout year, in some unexpected way?
Kim, Fiona, and I have gotten tickets to go see Amelie when it opens on Broadway. So last night, we watched the movie. Will this be the year that I find an old tin box full of childhood keepsakes? Will it be the year that I set off to help others in my own quirky way? Will it be the year that I build up enough courage to let something truly wonderful happen to me?
I already have a wonderful marriage, a wonderful family, and a wonderful life (to bring in a different movie title), but is this the year that something gets added to that, in terms of life ambitions, the spiritual journey and the work (much more than my job), that I am to do?
I didn’t get a lot of responses to my blog post asking for suggestions, but one that did stick with me was a reference to #OneLittleWord. The starting point for me in thinking about #OneLittleWord is a blog post by Deanna Mascle whom I met through a community of connected learners. Last July, she wrote Write Your Future in #OneLittleWord.
What is my one little word? Perhaps, it stays with the blog post I wrote at the beginning of last year. Unexpected. 2016 certainly had some unexpected twists. It looks like more of the same may be in store for 2017.
Let’s hope for some unexpected joy this year as we, like Amelie, find the courage to let something truly wonderful unexpectedly happen to us this year.
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Random Thoughts about my Christmas Reading List
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/27/2016 - 09:28Recently, I wrote about some books I got for Christmas, including Colin Cremin’s book Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari: Towards an Affective Theory of Form, Upstream by Mary Oliver, and Parker J. Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. They are all, perhaps, interconnected in unexpected ways. To illustrate this, here are some quotes from these books, woven together in to a fragment of a found poem. Can you tell which quotes are from which books?
“We have a strange conceit in our culture
that simply because we have said something,
we understand what it means”
“untidy approximations
of what they are about.”“It is an invitation to take flight
that also extends to the reader,
to explore different worlds
and create new ones".“Now I become myself”
“No, not a place: a becoming.
A becoming that exceeds image, analogy and metaphor.”
“Attention is the being of devotion.”
“The mind acts like a filter
to retrain only
sensations useful to it.”“Sometimes the desire to be lost again,
as long ago,
comes over me
like a vapor”
“adaptive to the task of liberating desire –
desire being a generative force.”
As I’ve thought about this, I wrote another poetic fragment, this one is my own musings on what I’ve been reading, and isn’t “found”.
We are the characters in a cosmic video game.
We find our meaning
and purpose
in doing
what we were designed to do.We live and move and have our being
seeking the Designer
not knowing the moves,
the rules,
or the way
and only finding them
by exploration
and experimentation.
One final thought for today. As I read about Deleuze, Guattari, and video games, I am struck by the discussions about realism. Many of the most complex video games are the highly realistic first person shooter games. Often, it seems, realism is something people aim for in video games. Yet other games, especially casual games, tend more towards abstraction without being visually compelling or complex. What might an abstract visually compelling complex video game be like? What might it be like as a multi-player game, an abstract community art video game?
Elections, Poetry, and Prayer
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/06/2016 - 07:27For the past few months, I’ve been advocating filling social media with poetry as an antidote to much of the vitriol in the U.S. political discourse. Some friends have been sharing poetry. I especially enjoy it when they share their own poems and when the poems are focused on the beauty of the world around us.
A couple weeks ago, the American Psychological Association came out with a survey about election related stress: APA Survey Reveals 2016 Presidential Election Source of Significant Stress for More Than Half of Americans. The press release makes some suggestions about dealing with the stress.
“If the 24-hour news cycle of claims and counterclaims from the candidates is causing you stress, limit your media consumption”. I get most of my news online and I try to read enough to be informed, but not enough to stress out. I try to fill my time with poetry and prayer instead.
“Avoid getting into discussions about the election if you think they have the potential to escalate to conflict.” There are two thoughts I have on this. First, if joining the discussion is unlikely to have an impact, which seems to be the case in most political discussions, just avoid it. However, three are times that you need to speak up, just because the voice needs to be heard.
A quote from Thomas Merton comes to mind:
"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself."
Indeed, concentrating on “on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself” seems key. Yet it also seems lacking in many of the discussions about the election.
“Stress and anxiety about what might happen is not productive. Channel your concerns to make a positive difference on issues you care about.” I’ve seen people post, things like, “If you check FiveThirtyEight constantly, but aren’t phone banking or door knocking, you’re doing it wrong”. Many of my friends have travelled this weekend to battleground states to get the vote out. Pundits have said that at this point, it is all down to the ground game. The candidate that can get the most people out knocking doors will most likely win. This gives me some reassurance, but that doesn’t always work out to be the case. Door knocking gets people to the polls that might not otherwise make it. It rarely, at least in my experience, especially this late in the game, changes people’s opinions.
“Vote. In a democracy, a citizen’s voice does matter.” If you don’t go out and vote out of your hopes for our country, at least go out and vote as a means of relieving stress.
With this in mind, let me share a poem. My choice has probably been affected by the current political climate. Here’s an annotated version of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
Here are links to various chances to pray with others for our nation and the election
Moral Revival Watch Party - A Call to Action and to Vote at New Haven Peoples Center 37 Howe St. New Haven CT, Sunday, November 6 at 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM EST
Prayer Vigil for the Election at Zion Episcopal North Branford Nov 6 at 12 PM to Nov 8 at 7 PM EST
Collect For an Election (Book of Common Prayer, pg. 822)
Almighty God, to whom we must account for all our powers and privileges: Guide the people of the United States in the election of officials and representatives; that, by faithful administration and wise laws, the rights of all may be protected and our nation be enabled to fulfill your purposes; through Jesus Christ ...
And, a final link, Taize - Stay with me
Lectionary
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/13/2016 - 15:58These are the poems written in 2016 related to the revised common lectionary.
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Discernment
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/04/2016 - 07:21Poems about the discernment process
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