I acknowledge that the majority of my friends and acquaintances find this weird. I also know I’m not the only one who feels this and thinks this. But whenever I find myself in discussions with others about an assumed and seemingly common and pervasive desire to escape or retreat back to nature and the outdoors, I often feel obligated to reply by stating that my ideal conception of a retreat or escape is actually going further into the heart of a city. I find what is often described as “nature”- the woods, remote hikes, mountains, camping- to be stressful rather than therapeutic. What is therapeutic to me has always been experiencing and embracing a marriage of culture and environment.

I’ve been working my way through Christopher Alexander’s book The Timeless Way of Building. I’m loving it so far, described since it’s release as revolutionizing the way we think and theorize about archecture and city spaces, but it was a chapter dealing with the “nature” of building (or building’s) that shed new light on why it is I feel the way I do about this common desire to escape to nature,

It largely stems from his appeal to broadening our definition of nature. Rather than conceiving of it as non-human and non-human created physical properties, objects or spaces found in the world, or further spaces uncorrupted by and absent of human activity (as though we exist apart from or against nature), nature should be reapplied to mean, more appropriately, the true quality (or nature) of a thing. To speak of nature is to speak about what something is.

Along these same lines he makes a similar appeal when it comes to the concept of life itself. I remember reading a book by that same name (Life Itself) and coming to the realization that life has no accepted and agreed upon definition. In the world of academia and scholarship, and  similarly in the workings of everyday society and common understanding, the application and use of the word life is inconsistent and largely held captive by its culturally positioned usages. We use it and redefine it when it serves a functional purpose, but we cannot locate a singular, governing application that tells us where the line between what is alive and what is not, what is less or more valuable, gets drawn, or whether there is even a line at all. All we have are social constructions.

Alexander, then, utilizes the freedom this space affords to recontextualize life in a broader and more unifying sense. Even if we distinguish between the life of a space or building and the life of a creature, both things share the same universal qualities. Life denotes something that exists in relationship to the world it occupies, something with the power to both be transformed by it and to transform these surroundings. As such, we can speak of buildings and spaces as being alive, of having a presence. We can also speak of them, in cases of buildings and spaces that stand detached from their environment or those which are non-expressive in their nature, as dead space devoid of life.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of this theory is the idea that buildings and spaces can have a life of their own. This obviously evokes the fact that buildings and spaces are acts of creation, and as such cannot bring about their own existence. And yet, as subsequent chapters point out, acts of creation are imitations of reality, meaning they are always reflective of the patterns that we find governing reality as a whole and which are inherent to the world we are creating within.

This does not mean, however, that the creations themselves are static and uniform. He speaks of such things as having a dynamism that ensures each thing, for what it shares in qualities, also has a unique representation. This is in fact something we know intuitively, and exists precisely because creators of buildings and spaces each have a necessarily limiting and thus differimg and diverse vantage point and set of knowledge of the world. We understand, intuitively so, when these buildings and spaces become stripped of that perspective and become products of an established and governing system detached from this creative process- for example, suburbia, or strict enforcement of rules regarding new developments of neighborhoods and condos (where every blueprint is the same). We also understand this to be true in what we normally mean by nature. Nature is an act of creation, but it is also, in and of itself, constantly creating. What emerges from these acts of creation is diversity. No blade of grass, no tree is the same. The fact is, if it was all the same we would cease to see it as life giving or alive. The world would be perceived as dead.

Coming back to my happy place- sitting in a coffee shop connected to the sidewalk and streetside of city blocks infused with a mix of buildings, trees, parks and structures, all coexisting in relationship. Train stations, seaports, cathedrals and coliseums, old cities and sky scrapers bridges, rooftop patios and old market squares, grand old cinemas and modern arenas, quiet shops and bookstores and busy outdoor markets. These are the spaces where I find myself rejuvenated. The best of these buildimgs are creative acts that open the door to reshaping its relationship to the space that surrounds it. Where lakesides meet living, or where shared roadways lead to shared destinations, where reclaimed history leads to remagined lands of the living.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging the woods or dumping on the tranquility many find in the outdoors. It’s simply that I personally feel disconnected from the world in these spaces. I lose sight of where I fit within it, and it makes it harder to appreciate the patterns. I lose sight of that relationship and it’s transformative power. It creates this divide between where I feel like I am trespassing and where my own mode of living, as part of nature, is allowed to be and exist. It reduces humanity to the unwantedness and finds in nature some kind of unpolluted antidote. Which of course leaves me just as uncertain about the spaces I return to as well.

A small caveat here- I fully understand humanity’s role in neglecting and abusing it’s relationship to the world around it. This exists. I just don’t think the answer is established dichotomies. To me this actually makes the problem worse. Reimagining the relationship and building to feed this relationship is the solution. To find humanity in the world and a world with humanity in it helps to share my perspective of a world set in relationship to its different living parts

Some more thoughts on my journey through the book How To Read A Film by James Monaco.

Thoughts relating to how we see, how we know.

Monaco points out that a common artistic presence runs underneath all forms of art regardless of adaptations of technology and the subsequent  development of new technique. One can study painting, for example, without needing knowledge of oil. The single exception is film. Why? It is indebted to and a product of technology. In a sense, it acts and functions as a technological lens through which to see the entire spectrum of the arts as a unified whole.

There are two levels of narrative cohesion at play here. One anchors film as a uniquely modernist expression or creation (the lens). It locates its revelatory power in the myth of progress, having relocated the artistic process in our ability to capture and tame the mysteries of the world through the employment of physics. We have captured the laws of time and space that govern this world and use this to remake the world in our own image. Art is no longer imitating life, life is being formed through the employment of this structural and practical artistic process- life itself has become the mirror image of our technological advancements, blurring the lines between what is artificial and what is real, or creator and creation.

And yet there is another level of narrative cohesion at play here, and it lies with this simple question: can this technological advancement ever outrun its necessary foundation.

Or to put it this way- can this technological advancement ever render that common artistic presence obsolete.

I don’t think it can. The persisting critique of modernism is simply this- the promise that it can unify the world and make sense of the world through its singular lens of science and progess has left the world without a necessary foundation. The only world it can know is the world of its own making, reducing knowledge to a singular way of knowing (science) and seeing as a singular conception (progress). The danger of film is that it leads us to think that artistic progression is the point rather than the art. That the form is able to transcend the aim of its knowledge.

In truth, the form, properly understood and detached from the reality of art’s necessary progression and innovation, reveals that necessary narrative foundation, it doesn’t render it obsolete. To neglect this foundation is to find ourselves in a crisis of meaning, measuring reality as purely a matter of form and function rather than a reality that has any inherent value, meaning and defintion. This is the same thing we see in modernism’s gradual march towards redefining naturalism in opposition to appeals to the transcendent. Naturalism, once simply a concern for knowing the nature of reality itself, became a way of domesticating the necessary mystery within the structural confines of form and function- scientific progress renders the common presence of knowledge and sight obsolete. We lose that necessary foundation for knowing and seeing truthfully.

The strength of film is that it can awaken us to the reality that knowledge and sight is rooted in the necessary foundation that form and function help to reveal and to understand.

To set this directly within the practicalities of function and form, consider the film lens. As Monaco describes, there are two kinds of lenses- wide angle or telephoto (wide and narrow). These lenses are distinguished by their points of perspective, their specific angles which define how and what we see.

Monaco makes an interesting observation in pointing out just how bound these lenses are to the laws of physics. The camera cannot achieve the concept of depth purely by appealing to a singular form of perspective. It needs them both to create the illusion of depth of perspective. Depth comes from playing with both the wide and narrow lens simultaneously. As one gradually narrows the other gradually expands, establishing this sense of uniformity. In this sense, the modernist appeal to form and function as a primary interpretive lens actually creates the absence of depth, not greater knowledge. The same would go for neglecting function and form in favor of the wide angle lens, a fact that should counter responses to modernism that neglect or ignore the sciences,

There is one more aspect of the lens that becomes important here- the reality of light. Without light any such visual representation would become incoherent. We need light to see regardless of which lens we are employing, and a filmmakers primary role is to determine how much light is let in (aperture) based on how dark the space is.

Light is the illuminating source that allows us to see. No matter how much technology progresses, this basic truth remains uniform. It’s a reminder of our dependency on both form and meaning. A filmmaker can use a lens in relationship to the light to focus us on a particular image, but that image will always be purposed for the sake of revelation. Not of itself, as though a film sequence exists solely to reveal the details of its form and function, but of the meaning and nature of this reality. The foundation of art itself.

The subject of memory became crucially important to me following an experience I had some years ago during a particular dark night of the soul. I detailed that experience in this space before, and I also talk about it with the Fear of God Podcast in a conversation about the film The Never Ending Story (part of a what scares us and what saves us series). At the heart of my story however was something that I called “my letter from God.”. That letter called me out of the darkness and into an act of remembering. Or more specifically, left me with the charge to remember my story rightly. I have been on a journey of remembering ever since.

In part 1 of this reflection on memory, i dialogue with the 2020 film Relic and the book Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting by author Lisa Genova. I cited Robert Vosloo from his article Time in our Time: On Theology And Future-Oriented Memory. Vosloo notes that the importance of remembering is an explicitly Judeo-Christian idea that emerges in conversation with the Greco-Roman world. At the same time he describes a larger cultural idea, one that pushes back on a history of turning forgetting into a virtue and an artform Michiel van Veldhuizen is anothef scholar who fleshes this out further in his article A Theology of Memory: The Concept of Memory in the Greek Experience of the Divine;

“Without sacred texts and dogmas, the Greek polytheistic system depends on the functional interaction between mortal human beings and the pantheon of immortal gods; and in a system of highly ritualized rules of reciprocity, the proper procedure is of defining importance… memory fulfills this role, in bridging mortality and immortality, life and death… the knowledge to which the Muses and Zeus have access, through their structural proximity to Mnemosyne, is the knowledge of the past, which is to be ritually commemorated through the performative powers of the Muses.”

In the Greco-Roman world, MNEMOSYNE was the Titan goddess of memory and remembrance and the inventor of language and words. 

“Mnemosyne sits at the heart of the pantheon, bearing Zeus nine children (muses), out of which memory plays out in the human experience.”

Thus, in the Greek goddess we have this established relationship between forgetfulness and remembrance built on necessary opposition.

“Forgetfulness seems to denote more than the simple absence of pain or grief; rather, it implies a state of being that belongs to the realm of divine perfection, while sorrow belongs to the realm of human misery, suffering, and mortality… the dialectic reciprocity of, for that matter, any Greek divinity… Mnemosyne provides access to a kind of knowledge that in itself resembles a religious initiation.”

In other words, to forget is divine, to remember is to be human. Transplant this into the enlightenment and it could read: forgetfulness is to progress, to remember is to regress.

Genova locates a similar discussion of how memory works in the sciences, suggesting, in this chasm that exists between remembering and forgetting, that our brains could not function if it remembered each and every detail of our lives. 

“Most of us paint forgetting as our mortal adversary, but it isn’t always an obstacle to overcome. Effective remembering often requires forgetting.”(Page 7)

In her view, forgetting is necessary because of the way memory functions as a relationship between different kinds of memory, be it conscious or unconscious, working memory (what we know right now) versus static memory (knowledge that decays), declarative or muscle memory, episodic or semantic memory. When we encounter a new piece of information or a new experience, our brains change, incorporating new patterns of information that are then stored and able to be either retrieved or formed into an unconscious function of memory. This retrieval is not like “replaying a home video”. Rather,

“remembering is an associative scavenger hunt, a reconstruction job that involves the activation of many disparate but connected parts of the brain… Whenever we remember something, we are reactivating the various elements of the information we experienced, woven together as a single unit.” (p23)

Memory, then, is a matter a stimulation and association that begins with something we have either inadvertently or intentionally payed attention to /experienced by way of living in this world, information that our brains subsequently filter through deciding what to keep and what to discard for our benefit.

According to scholar Matthew Potts, who argues in his book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account  for a redefining of forgiveness not as a forgetting of the past but as remembering it properly, Miroslav Volf in his work The End of Memory is cited as seeing

“…human memory as a constant interplay between the practical impossibility of total recall and the everyday reality of selective, often unintended, forgetting… to remember a wrong(doing) is to struggle against it.” (p188)

Further, 

“when remembered wrongly, the past metastasizes into the territory of the future, and the future, drained of new possibilities, mutates into an extension of the painful past.”

At the same time he suggests that “the absence” of memory “whitewashes” wrongs. (Volf, 81, 143) As Potts points out, we are, all of us, “composed of our histories.” So, “if forgiveness is forgetting, then don’t we risk losing ourselves?” And if memory hinges on an act of forgetting, as Genova suggests, how do we then find ourselves without devolvimg into an existential crisis?

Or, is it as Paul Ricoeur writes in Memory, History, and Forgetting: “memories do not reproduce the past, they reconstruct it.”

They, in fact, “interpret” it. Which means we are, at first glance at least, the primary interpreters of our own stories.

It is worth saying here that this conversation about memory is intimately related to a further question about the nature of consciousness. Without getting into the weeds of that scientific, academic and philosophical interest, what’s clear to me is that the main point of contention comes from debating which direction consciousness flows from. Does it emerge from the material function of our memory as a constructed reality, or do we best understand it as something that shapes our ability to remember from the top down? Are we appealing to something true, something with the authority to afford us identity and personhood, or is identity/personhood a construction that then becomes our truth.

These differences in ontology say something about the idea of consciousness, suggesting in their own ways that a person either emerges from or is found in the unique vantage point of our positioning in this world. Our memories might function in the same way on a biological level, but it is because we see and experience this information within the confines of our own bodies that they exist uniquely as part of ourselves.

If this is the case, how do we then process memory as a measure of this self, this personhood? If forgetting is necessary to who we are, but also an impediment to knowing ourselves, or in the light of my own personal story to knowing God, and if remembering rightly seems equally critical to this act of knowing, how do we move from this apparent conflict towards saying something true about ourselves?

Robert Vosloo in his article Time in our Time: On Theology And Future-Oriented Memory, suggests that 

“Memory is connected to our understanding of phenomena like identity, time, knowledge, and history—personal as well as cultural… (equally so) classical antiquity itself has provided us with the ruins that stir up memories of a distant ‘other.”

In other words, crucial to understanding who we are, or who we remember ourselves to be, is the idea that memory shapes us in relationship to this world and to one another. It connects us to what otherwise would remain distant, and rather than leaving memory mired in contradiction, it connects us through an act of remembering (trauma) and forgetting (triumph) rightly. To remember and to forget rightly means to situate these processes in the act not simply of living, but living in connection to something true, something that sees from a vantage point beyond our narrowed point of embodied perspective.

The way the film Relic, to return to that discussion, imagines cutting through the tension of this seeming contrast is through this same notion of togetherness. We are forced to wrestle with the idea that we are what we remember, a sentiment that turns sharply on this even more precarious notion that we become what, or who, we are remembered to be. With this sentiment comes a sense that perhaps we have far less control over who we are than we realize, and at the same time we have far more agency in shaping who we see others to be than we often realize, a fact that, I think, can also speak as well to those who’s ability to remember is compromised or limited in biological terms. It is at this crossroad that the act of forgetting and remembering meet. In the story of Relic this becomes a way for the daughters to remember for their mother when the only thing she can do is forget, but this involves the painful process of remembering rightly by facing their tendency to sweep her disease under the rug of the relics nostalgia.

Perhaps it is, then, that memory locates the story of who we are in the here and now, but this story exists only in relationship to the tangible experiences of this world that we share together. This is what makes a memory true. And it is in this truth that we are then freed to remember rightly.

ElieWiesel imagines it this way;

“The Talmud tells us that without the ability to forget, man would soon cease to learn. Without the ability to forget, man would live in a permanent, paralyzing fear of death. Only God and God alone can and must remember everything… Faith is essential to rebellion, and that hope is possible beyond despair. The source of this hope was memory, as it must be ours. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”

If this is true then I could restate it in this way: This memory is shared and therefore is true. This means it is always something afforded to us by an other. And it is here, in relationship to the other, that we are then free to become. And to become is the measure of our hope.

This is the essential point of remembrance that we find running rampant within the Judeo-Christian Tradition, specifically where it sits in conversation with the second temple and Greco-Roman worlds. Memory marks the journey from creation to new creation. The central story of Israel- the Exodus- is marked by the call to remember. It is equally marred by the continual act of forgetting and simultaneously swept up in the hope of a promised renewal. When Christ takes up the Exodus as a way of articulating His own ministry, His liberating work is likewise marked by a call to remember in light of this forgotten past and a promised future. Only in Christ are past and future seen to collide in the memory of the present. To remember rightly in this sense is, in line with our working brains, to reconstruct the Christ event into our present moment as a way of remembering rightly the true nature of God and creation, which is then able to inform the darkness, the messiness, and the perceived wrongs which continue to occupy the stories of our lives in this world.

Just as in Relic, where the daughter strips away the mothers skin so as to be able to remember who she is with alziemers, an act framed by the powerful phrase “I am loved” as someone with this disease, so do we remember Jesus through the cross, an act of remembrance that flows in both directions; we find God in remembering the suffering of Christ, and Christ remembers us in our suffering, calling us to this movement towards transformation in relationship to God and one another; shaping memories, shaping identity, together.

Could it be then that forgetting rightly has less to do with erasure of the past and far more to do with this act of becoming? If memory is an act of interpretation, with our brains acting as interpreters reconstructing the past in light of a present newness, then forgetting rids us of the pasts constraints and resists its control over our ability to be properly transformed by an act of remembering rightly. We aren’t our memories, we are who our memories allow us to become. That this happens in the context of family (Relic) and community (Christ), is simply a reminder that becoming is an act that inevitably binds us to an other, justifying our stories as ones which have been inevitably shaped by the past. Perhaps the best way, then, to deal with the problem of memory is to simply say this; we are remembered, therefore we are; we remember, therefore we become.

Google the question “can we trust our memories”, and the answer that comes up is an emphatic no. Despite memory being the only tool we have to recollect the past, it is notoriously untrustworthy in the way it reconstructs facts and conceals the truth.

My earliest memories reach back somewhere into the recesses of my childhood. I have vague imprints in my mind of old houses and neighborhoods, old faces and experiences from around 4 years of age. Beyond the persistent and chronic nightmares of my preschool self though, which linger in my mind with a striking degree of clarity, my earliest and most vivid memories come from grade 1 and 2. I can remember one particular morning riding to school in the backseat of our old station wagon. My younger brother had just started attending school, and on this particular day was excited to bring his hula hoop to play with during recess. Only, as we both exited the vehicle he promptly realized that he had left it in the car. The devastation on his face was immediate and palpable, and my instinctual reaction was to take off down the street after the car. To no avail of course. Perhaps most acute is the heartache I carried with me for the rest of that day. As his older brother I had failed to solve the problem, and it is a moment that remains imprinted in my memory to this day.

In her book Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, author Lisa Genova notes that 

“most of us will forget the majority of what we experience today by tomorrow. Added up, this means we actually don’t remember most of our lives.” (P3)

Which of course begs a further question in light of my noted experience above; why do we remember certain parts of our life and forget others?
At least one thing seems obvious; experiences that hold the most emotional weight seem to stick around the longest. Genova does a great job in her book of answering this question with observations and insights from science, ultimately rooting the ebb and flow of this remembering/forgetting exercise in the necessary narrative of our lives. She suggests that

“memory is the sum of what we remember and what we forget, and there is an art and science to both.”(p9)

The science then is the observation of brain function while the art is the act of rooting this function in a sense of identity and story. Both of these things together can help us locate the why of our inherent human need to both forget and to remember, while also helping us to understand the how. Genova writes,

“The significant facts and moments of your life strung together create your life’s narrative and identity. Memory allows you to have a sense of who you are and who you’ve been.” (P2)

And yet this still doesn’t solve the essential conundrum of personhood and identity when it comes to the unreliability of our memories. Echoing this problem, Genova writes, 

“Much of what we do remember is incomplete and inaccurate… our memories for what happened are particularly vulnerable to omissions and unintentional editing.” (P3).

So if memory is necessary to who we are, how then do we reconcile this with the idea that who we are seems to be reflective of a false version of reality? Genova asks the question this way:

“So where does that leave us with respect to our relationship with memory? How should we hold it? Do we revere our memory as an omnipotent monarch, or do we throw rotten tomatoes at it, denigrating it (and by extension, ourselves) for its inconvenient shortcomings and foolish mistakes?” (P228)

What seems clear is that this problem is made more complex when we consider our relationship to both positive and negative memory. As scholar Robert Vosloo writes in his article Time in our Time: On Theology And Future-Oriented Memory,

“Narrative memory is never innocent. It is an ongoing conflict of interpretations: a battlefield of competing meanings.”

Vosloo points out that remembering is, historically speaking, a Judeo-Christian idea. With the Greek gods, and in the long standing myths that precede them, remembering and forgetting are in fact expressions of gods at war, relating specifically to how we engage what we perceive to be positive and negative experiences in contest. In this light, positive memories do not so much hold a true correlation to reality as much as they exist to control the negative. This is how we live forward through forgetfulness. If for Genova we forget so that our brains can process, forgetting reveals something crucial about how we process and what we process. Memory seems deeply tied to meaning making, and meaning making wrestles with the negative realities of our existence.

In fact, Vosloo also argues that acts of forgetting have come to define the modern landscape as a sort of virtue finding that guards against the past and helps feed progress. Thus,

“the apparent power of this thought, namely that memory of the past impedes our wellbeing, points in the direction of the necessity to ask about the rightful place of memory in our moral and theological discourse, particularly when one argues that the past is not dead, but is present as triumph and as trauma, as gift and as ghost.”

In other words, to speak of memory in a theological sense means to remember differently than our nature seems to allow. Memory becomes a necessary spiritual discipline.

Elie Weisel in his annotated Nobel prize speech, offers his own observation on the subject of memory, suggesting that,

“Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history… And yet it is surely human to forget, even to want to forget. The Ancients saw it as a divine gift. Indeed if memory helps us to survive, forgetting allows us to go on living. How could we go on with our daily lives if we remained constantly aware of the dangers and ghosts surrounding us…”

He then affords the conversation this subsequent question:

“How (then) are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is (or seems) essential to life?”

Natalie Erika James’ film Relic is a film I have long championed as an underseen gem, and i think it has a lot to add this particular conversation about memory. The reason this film is important to me is because of the way it tackles the theme of memory from the vantage point of its decline. It tells the story of two daughters moving back home to care for their ailing mother who is sick with alziemers. As they return home we see the daughters engaging in an act of remembering, which contrasts with the mothers struggle with forgetting. This becomes a powerful juxtaposition that leads them towards a crisis of identity. In a very real sense their act of remembering leads to a need to forget what is a painful reality, while the mothers act of forgetting leads to a desperate need to remember in light of her painful decline. In both cases this posits a discussion of identity; what does it look like to still be a person in the absence of memory.

It is here that this quote from psychologist Alexander Luria emerges, echoing the struggle while attempting to cast it in a fresh, redemptive light. He writes, 

“People do not consist of memory alone. They have feelings, will, sensibility, moral being. It is here you may touch them and see profound change.”

In other words, people are located in the act of living in the present, not in the echoes of the past. A present that is nonetheless shaped by the past. All memory serves the present. Thus is why our brains continually rewrite our memories to serve the narrative now. It’s far less important for those memories to be accurate recollections as it is for them to be necessary applications

As Weisel suggests,

“If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future. Does this mean that our future can be built on a rejection of the past? Surely such a choice is not necessary. The two are not incompatible. The opposite of the past is not the future but the absence of future; the opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other.”

There is far more to flesh out here in terms of how these different voices see a way forward through the challenges that memory presents, especially when it comes to our indebtedness to it as persons, as ones seemingly needing this notion of a true and real identity.. But I wonder if Weisel ‘s theological wonderings about the meaning of memory and Genova’s detailing of the science of memory is less about the accuracy of facts we remember and far more about our ability to say that something simply is. We experience something. We come to know something. Therefore It means something when it comes to declaring who we are now in light of the past. And if there is a place to begin in rooting this in some sense of a truthful reality, in beginning to learn what it means to remember differently, or to remember rightly, perhaps it begins with an even greater concept and realization- the idea that we remember together. This is an idea I will explore further in part 2 of this post.

A previous post in this space mentioned I was reading a book called How To Read A Film by James Monaco. Some of what I read yesterday has been inspiring more thoughts

There’s a historical note that describes the formation of film as a specific artform that exists uniquely in relationship to the whole. Film begins in neutral space- pictorial forms relating to media. It then develops into an artform through the “process of replicaton.”

As noted in my previous post, Monaco describes art as imitation- it imitates reality. Here Monaco expands on this thought, noting what is called the “spectrum of abstraction”, a spectrum of modes or forms that “describes the relationship of art to raw reality.” The spectrum of abstraction has practical on one side and musical on the other. Inbetween is environmental (architecture, sculpture) pictorial, dramatic (stage, oral), narrative (written)

He breaks it down in the following equation: modes of discourse explain the transmission of the arts from artist to observer, structure defines the shape of art, the equation of artist plus observer provides new angles of critical approach.

What makes film unique is the way in which the once neutral mode becomes a lens that is layered over the whole spectrum. In doing so it formulates its own language, it’s own codes, now able to converse with the different parts of the whole by way of its tropes.

What’s interesting to me is how this mirrors the process of formulating a worldview. Worldviews are not only a lens through which we explain and interpret the whole, they allow us to establish a relationship with the different parts of the whole, to dialogue with the different parts of the whole. Further, worldviews aren’t static and unmoving. This dialogue, this relationship begins in neutral space- the world we observe- and it develops AS we apply it as a lens through which to make sense of the observed world.

There’s an even further corellation- the relationship between art, artist and consumer. If you look at the breakdown above (third paragraph), a critical approach requires this initial transmission between artist and observer, with art itself being the thing being transmitted. And what, again, is art? It’s relationship to “raw reality” is its imitation of it. It imitates what it sees to be true about reality, giving us the necessary symbols (language) to dialogue about it, and to relate to it.

In other words, it translates our “experience” of the world/film we observe. As Monaco states, “Experience of art comes first, abstract criticism is a secondary activity.”

Criticism=participation. As someone who adheres to participationist philosophy/theology, knowledge comes not through a list of data points or rules or facts that we observe, but by living, experiencing. We then overlay the criticisms as a way of connecting our experience of the world to the world we observe (or our experience of a film to the film we observe). All part of formulating that interpretive lens. It’s in this sense that we can be better or worse consumers of art. It’s also in this sense that the artist is engaging in an act of transmission, not of themskeves but of an experience that exists external to themselves.

One final tought: Monaco suggsests that conceptual structures, which all abstract systems are, exist in relationship to the art, artist and consumer. In this way they “are dialectical and in continual flux.” He makes an interesting corelation to the Protestant reformation. If art used to be the domain of the figurative priest (artist), art is now handed to the individual or collective consumers as an unfinished product meant to shape and formulate according to one’s experience. What once was an act of entering into a sacred space (engaging the transcendent), has now become a question of the sacred spaces we make for ourselves. Not unlike the shift from priest to people in the Protestant reformation. 

Is there something lost in this shift? Likely. Gained?  Probably. Part of the discuaion perhaps should be parsing out what that is. I suspect that part of what was lost relates to the loss of that sacred space, and with that the inability to recognize the role art plays in the formulation of our worldviews. Or perhaps the loss of our ability to know what a worldview even is. The more we relegate our experiences to a constructed self, the less connected we are to the reality of cultural formation. The less connected we are to the world/film itself.

I have a confession

Back in June I decided to join a number of facebook atheist debate/discussion groups. The words debate and discussion being contained to a necessary air quote variety of terminology.

As a few of my friends noted upon vocalizing my confession- “everyone’s got a calling I guess.” I’m still trying to parse out whether these were words of judgment or absolution.

In any case, I knew what these spaces were before I joined. I guess I now know what they still are. They represent the lowest form of rational discourse (proof arguments), they obsess over uninteresting questions and demands (can you prove a god exists), and every post follows the same inevitable pattern- two sides calling each other idiots until one or both block the other.

I knew this. I know this. And I got sucked right back into it. For 6 straight months. I’ll be honest- better to be distracted by the mind numbing, soul sucking, time wasting threads than deal with my anxieties the second half of 2024 represented. Or so my subconscious told myself.

The first order of business for the new year- unfollow/unjoin (times 10)

It’s been 2 days. I can feel the detox already.

Why do I bring this up? Because I can also feel the natural instinct raising it’s ugly head when I come across a decent piece or quote or idea and immediately want to go and tandem post. I had such a moment today breaking open one of my Christmas presents- the book How To Read A Film: Movies, Media and Beyond (Fourth Edition).

I’m 10 pages in to tackling the 700 page beast and I’ve got two pages of notes reflecting on how the history of the word art mirrors the history of modernism and the enlightenment, shedding light on how it is we have come to see and know the world we observe and experience (these 700 pages are clearly going to take a while). Which of course connects directly to our ability to give langauge to the abstract and parse out how it is knowledge relates to our ability to interpret the abstract using symbols (art, at its core- imitating reality)

I’m hooked. I wish I could sit down and talk with someone about these 10 pages into the late night hours.

I can also tell you exactly what the response would be if I posted any of these observations and reflections for consideration in these groups. Then again, never mind, i won’t go there. That’s in the past. This is now. The second order of business- remembering that I have this space to get these thoughts out of my head and on to the page where, at the very least, I know they are somewhere safe and I can feel free to continue on.

So about this book:

It starts with a quote by Robert Frost

If poetry is what you can’t translate, then art is what you can’t define.

And yet what is an investment/interest in art (or the arts) but the attempt to do precisely that, always with the knowledge that such interpretations can only ever remain subjective, not objective.

Isn’t this how knowledge of the world, of reality works though? After all, if reality could be reduced to a handful of data points derived from the scientific process we wouldn’t need art. And yet art remains as critical for our modern world as it was for the ancients. It has simply become a present casualty of that modern development. The book talks about how the boundaries for what is seen as art has progressively expanded, while that expansion has simultaneously narrowed and diluted it in other respects. Much in the same way modern society has narrowed and diluted its relationship to culture here in the West.

An important observation from the book- for the ancients the arts could be broken down into 7 categories (History, Poetry, Comedy, Tragedy, Music, Dance, and Astronomy). These categories were unified by a “common motivation: they were tools, useful to describe the universe and our place in it… the performing arts celebrated the rituals (of human existence), history recorded the story of the race, astronomy searched the heavens.”

So what changed precisely? The arts got coopted by the enlightenment. The arts were reconstituted as a purely “practical” means of making sense of the world, following this movement in the West towards reducing knowledge and truth to the scientific process. Art becomes the social sciences, the modern sciences, historical criticisms, mathematics, “structural” sciences.

The only two that remained unchanged- music and astronomy. More on this in a bit.

Art becomes so diluted that it gets applied to nearly any practicality- hence the moniker “artistry” or making. What ultimately emerges- a separation between art/artist as one who studies and gains knowledge of the world and the scientific disciplines that reduce this world into utility and function. Along with this comes a differentiation within the category of the arts as well, between the one who creates (artist) and the one who makes (artisan). The artist held the lower standing, the sciences and the artisan held the higher standing. And even within the arts this hierarchy took hold (the visual makers versus the abstract creators)

As the book states,

The arts were no longer simply approaches to a comprehension of the world; they were now ends in themsleves.”

And even then, the entire existence of avante garde, an idea that sees art as necessarily progressive in line with the enlightenments allegiance to scientific progress as the sole proprietor of knowledge and truth, ensured that this separation would persist- art had to become something, it had to conform to a set of visual and structured rules in order to coexist in this new world of practicalities, and eventually this new world of politics (modern art can almost be reclassified as political discourse).

Remember when I said that music and astronomy were the only two that remained unchanged? Here’s what’s interesting about that. The book notes how both astronomy and music occupy the same prersistant grasp on the abstract and the same stubborn refusal to let go no matter how much “progress” we find. They are artistic elements that cannot be tamed or reduced by nature of being fluid and requiring movement, and thus they anchor, on both ends, this notion of the arts in the experience of the abstract. They require artistic interpretation the same way it did in the ancient world. Pick up an astronomy book and you can see this to be true. They often read like religious texts. Try to grasp and understand what music is and how and why we experience it the way we do as a transcendent, religious type of encounter, and you see this to be true. As the book quotes, citing Walter Pater,

All art aspires to the condition of music

The condition of music- the pure abstract being formed into knowledge.

As I stated above, historically art imitates life. In the modern world, life increasingly imitates art. What’s the difference? One is seeking to understand the world by way of applying symbol (interpretation) to sign (observation). The other conforms our symbols to the sign, effectively collapsing sign and symbol together into a singular way of knowing and seeing the world (science, or form, function and utility). It’s the difference between seeking to understand the image of the world and believing we can make the world in our own image. After all, what is science but the accomplishments of humanity.

And yet, what does it mean to encounter a film. To be moved by a song or a score. To be transformed by a story. To reflective on and ponder the grand mysteries of the universe. It means the barrier between art, artist and participant has been transcended. It awakens us to knowledge and truth that we did not obtain ourselves. It seeks to make sense of that which we cannot make sense of ourselves.

It reminds us that this world is not reducible to simple matters of form and function. Even to say that it is would require art- an act of interpretation. These things emerge from that which precedes it, from its source, thus it cannot be understood without that necessary foundation to interpret its meaning, its value and force. And it is that foundation that art seeks to discover and to reveal.

Art, therefore, doesn’t just imitate life, it imitates the transcendent. It makes the invisible visible. Hence one of the great lies of the modern age being this- that any amount of scientific disciplines and discoveries can erase the necessary need for art. Science is but one way of knowing. The ancientss understood this. We have come to see ourselves as better and smarter and wiser and more knowledgeable than those primitive folk way back then. Art can remind us that we are, in fact, not. If anything, we’ve simply taught ourselves to see and think more narrowly about knowledge and truth.

What is Rosebud

A few years ago I began a New Years Resolution Plan called Rosebud. I heard about it on one of the travel podcasts that I follow. The process essentially looks like this:
Step 1: List Three Roses-
This is the stuff that I would consider the greatest strengths, successes or accomplishments of the past year, the stuff that has managed to blossom into a Rose.
Step 2: List One Thorn
This would reflect my greatest personal struggle of the past year.
Step 3: List Three Buds
Based on my “thorn”, this is a list of what I would like to “bud” into potential Roses in the coming year.
Step 4: Come up with a word for the year
This should be a single word that can help reflect the direction I want to head in the coming year, a single word that can give my year a theme or a recognizable focus and narrative.

Why Rosebud

I have been asked in the past, why three Roses but only one Thorn? Most of us don’t realize it, but it is often much more diffciult to come up with roses than it is thorns. Also difficult is learning how to speak about thorns in a way that imagines forward movement, seeing it in light of one’s potential for growth. It’s kind of like that old piece of advice that says when you are in an interview for a new job and they ask you about your weaknesses, always give a weakness that you can do something about.

The great part of the Rosebud system is that it allows one to document their struggles and their growth year by year as a kind of working and interactive diary. You can build on the previous year and form an ongoing narrative out of the successes, struggles and hopes. This is not about resolutions persay, at least not in the traditional sense, it is about making space for introspection and observation and forming that into perspective and potential. And it allows one to not just make goals, but to examine what those goals are actual about, the why of our goals.
With that in mind…

Looking Back at Rosebud 2024

My three buds:

• Figure out my hard conversations and make some hard choices
• Celebrate our 20th anniversary
• Invest in my local community

Reflection:

I made some of those hard choices and had some of those hard conversations. Those choices shaped the year going forward. It meant embracing changes in finances, trading that security for a job situation with less hours but a healthier atmosphere.

More choices await. Heading into 2024, I am navigating my first full season at this new place of employment and its financial realities. I continue to look for opportunities that can help make this present situation more sustainable in the long run.

The change in financial situation probably played a role plans for our 20th anniversary. Technically it falls in 2025 (January 8th), but the plan had been to utilize either summer or Christmas break in the hopes of going back to NYC (where it all started). This never happened. Our ability to make it happen has been crippled.

As far as the investment- equally a struggle. The changes in job plus entering a phase of anxiety and depression in the second half of the year left me unable to get forward movement and explore possibilities. Small steps don’t get anywhere fast, because I am finding that the “community” is an exclusive inner circle that is difficult to break into and unfortunately reflective of some much of society- built for accomplished type A’s. This is true even for the local arts industry, which is where I would most natural fit.

Looking Ahead: Rosebud 2025

Three Roses

1. Making changes in my work situation
2. Continuing to push myself to embrace solo travel
3. Making concerted efforts to readjust life to care for and respond to challenges our pups are having

One Thorn:

1. The inability to keep things from spiraling out of control when it comes to my anxiety. The second half of this year has been a steady progression of losing all sense of agency, ability and hope. I made some movement on the big things, but my neglect of the small things have created a fresh set of big things, all of which now feel expressly out of my control. And I don’t do well in these seasons.

Three Buds:

1. Find a way to reoconfigure my current work situation into something with long term sustainability
2. Take a first step in regaining agency and control, beginning with reclaiming this blogspace as an important part of my ability to process.
3. Reclaim time and routine, beginning with getting rid of certain social media presences which have allowed me to escape the weight of my anxieties

Word of the year: Reclaim

Summary:

The difficulty with my present work situation is that the financial struggles pair with the present demands of our current phase of life. What I do (school bus driver) affords me the necessary schedule to be able to be at home during the day and care for our dogs whom have specific needs and demand certain responsibilities. Finding ways or other opportunities to pursue a better financial siutauom compromises those responsibilities. That’s the present dilemma being presented.

Making sacrifices to fit our present financial situation compounds other things, both in terms of future plans and for present demands. Any unexpected detour (car problems, house problems, health demands and vet bills) carries that much more weight, and the ability to dig out of the holes these things consistently create becomes that much more challenged. To put things in perspective, I have had to adjust to living on more than $1000 less a month than I used to get. Thus why my options above create such a dilemma.

That and the things being sacrificed along the way become the things that help afford me some mental and psychological stability (the ability to escape to the movies, to keep up with the latest theology books that typically are not accessible through the library, the ability to dream about potential travel plans, even if they are small). It’s all interconnected.

Things thus far have been managing. What hasn’t been managing is the slow accumulation of the small things which spiral into big things. Big things that cripple my ability to do anything about anything. Thus, when everything feels out of control, it feels to me the way forward is to focus on one thing. To find one thing that I can control and to reclaim that space. Hence my three buds and word of the year.

Travel

My reading year started in a place of aspiration and hope. A chance to jump start some travel plans by diving in to a holiday purchase, Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel. Part philosophical and spiritual exercise, Airplane Mode is an unfiltered look at why we travel and the complicated  history of how travel came to be. I said as much in my review, but it’s rare to cross paths with a really good travel book. This is one of those that immediately found a place on my forever shelf.

Throughout 2024 I read a few more titles related to travel, including the classic Steinbeck memoir Travels With Charley which was as quaint and lovely as I expected with its broad view lens of America from the road, and the quirky, fun A Travel Guide To The Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes. I even managed to catch up with a holdover from the previous years travels to Wisconsin and Milwaukee (Brewtown Tales: Stories From Milwaukee and Beyond) and a couple tbr titles that had been eluding me for a while (Conor Knightons Leave Only Footprints and Frank Delaney’s narrative take on the history of Ireland). There were, however, three specific titles that topped my list in this genre, all for different reasons:

Off The Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel by Pamela Mulloy

This Storied River: Legend and Lore of the Upper Mississippi by Dennis McCann

Imagined Places: Journies Into Literary America

Mulloy utilizes the pandemic as an opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of train travel, effectively rendering this a love letter to a nostalgic but still relevant approach to everyday commutes and exploration. McCann writes a travel itinerary using a writer to navigate the spaces that anchored their stories. A particular insight has stuck with me all year- we all have two basic conceptions of place, the place in which we live and the place(s) we are drawn to. And lastly, McCann provided me with a welcome new addition for my growing library of books on my favorite river- the Mississippi. What makes this stand out is not just the insights he brings to his area of focus (the upper river), it’s the fact that he melds this into an easy and helpful travel itinerary. Leaves me with a desire to return, especially given I purchase this following my completion of the upper portion of the Great River Road this past summer. That leaves the final stretch from Memphis to New Orleans on my bucket list

Non-Fiction

Perhaps fitting within the travel genre, this memoir of one reporters unexpected opportunity to document the otherwise secretive and enigmatic life of Harper Lee (The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee) is another holdover from my trip to Alabama and Georgia the previous summer, having visited the place this book documents. On that level this uneven, not well written and mired in controversy work gained a sort of grassroots level charm that made its weaknesses easy go forgive. If nothing else it opened uo the writers relationship to this place she called home.

Another book worth a mention is Charlie Peakocks Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much: The Way of Love in a World of Hurt, a book he tandem wrote with his wife Andi Ashworth. It’s a sort of autobiography that uses their storied journey through the complicated nature of the American Christian music scene of the 80s and 90s into a new found appreciation and perspective for where they are now, coming to find God in the ordinary and the everyday, and recognizing that we are all occupying space in the same circle moving in one of two directions- away from Jesus or towards Jesus.

Three particular standouts for me in this genre:

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough

The Half Bird: One Woman’s voyage of self-discovery from Land’s End to the shores of Greece by Susan Smillie

Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood by Gary Paulsen

The story behind this memoir from and about Lisa Marie is as captivating as the story itself. Following Lisa Marie’s death, her daughter completed this project by forming it into a conversation between her and her mother across the great divide. It’s  powerful, along with being an unfiltered, and uncensored fusion of perspectives shedding light on generational bonds. Occupying a different space is The Half Bird, the story of one woman’s unexpected journey on to the sea and around the shores following  life upended by circumstances and struggle. I adore the waterfront, I’m not as fascinated by journeys on the water, so I didn’t expect much from this book. Whatever compelled me towards it was following a right intuition, as it turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of the year. A book about finding light in the dark, beauty in the storm., all wrapped around this touching relationship she forms with her boat (Isean).

Lastly, the post humous release of Paulsens memoir, Gone to the Woods, was perhaps the most affecting reading experience of 2024, Paulsen being a formative figure from my own childhood and a personal hero. What made this more special is I had no idea it was being related until I accidentally stumbled across it.

History

Sadly, I didn’t read a ton of history books this year, but three that stood out for me:

Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski/The Middle Kimgdoms: A New History of Cemtral Europe by Martyn Rady

The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stafanos Geroulanos

Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling by Nijay Gupta

The first mentions were tandem or supporting reads helping to unpack the unique history and positioning of central Europe, an area I’ve had an interest in ever since visiting Ukraine. There’s a lot of overlap, with Goodby being a bit more interested in the philosophical and cultural underpinnings and Middle Kingdoms being the more accessible, straight forward history of a place that has consistently struggled with matters of langauge and identity in spaces with ever changing borders, caught between powers east and west.

The Invention of Prehistory is probably my most recommended book of 2024, bringing to light important insights about how it is we perceive progress and the enlightened West at the hands of invented caricatures of a non-existent ancient past we use to prop up our us versus them paradigms. Gupta, a fitting compliment to the Invention of Prehistory in some way, helps to explore how the first Christians found themselves   confronting and challenging these us versus them paradigms in their own context of an invented paradigm of Empire and its false promises of unity and progress. It’s just as weird to the world to confront this invented prehistory and its problems today,  given it comes at the hands of Empire and its same promises in the modern world.

Theology

Unlike history, I had a big year when it comes to transformative and paradigm shifting theology reads in 2024. The highlights:

Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus Death by Andrew Remington Rillera (required reading for anyone interested in exploring fundamental misunderstandings of the sacrificial system and better more faithful readings that can challenge problematic allegiances to things that penal substitution)

Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ by Ann Jervis (might sound a bit geeky, but it is much more relevant than the might think, delving into the complicated notion of the already-not yet, new/old age, fulfillment of the Law language that permeates Paul’s writings as a faithful Jew)

Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites by Jason Staples (a book that’s been shaking up the scene in 2024, making a case for how much of our theology in the West has been built on wrong conceptions of the terms Israel, Jew, Judean and Gentile. Understanding how each of these terms have their own meaning and are not interchangeable, as they often become in common readings, opens up important observations about the narrative we find in Paul’s writings, particularly as it sits in relationship to the Gospels)

Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist by James McGrath (a simple but well researched, concise and interesting work that seeks to bring the character of John the Baptizer out of the inevitable shadows cast by the one who would come after. For anyone interested in learning, more about the narrative and historical connections between John’s ministry and Jesus’ ministry, including gaining insight into what baptism was and how it applies to Jesus)

The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross by Brian Zahnd (a beautiful take on the cross, using what he calls a theopoetic lens to bring some of its baggage to the forefront of some long standing theological positions so that we might be able to reimgine it afresh)

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck (It is a book for those who have struggled with this present age, who have been left feeling disenchanted by it all, who have been left with more questions than answers, and whom have a desire to find some direction in the language and experience of faith. In knowing how to recover an enchanted faith. there are differences between skepticism and enchantment. It is the difference between a “scientific description of the world” versus “beholding the sacred meaning of the world.” The question is not whether the observations and data are true- we all observe the same world. It’s about what has the power to define the meaning of reality and how we get there. The invitation is to rengage the hunt, to learn how to perceive reality anew the way faith intends to see it. Enables us to see it. It is about learning how to submit our skepticism to the imaginative power that faith affords us. Not in abandoning our questions and our sense of reason, but allowing it to be captured by that which can expose the limits of our knowledge and awareness.)

Passions of the Soul by Rowan Williams (This is the kind of book one highlights and cites and quotes and returns to. It’s small, it’s brief, but it’s powerful, even if you have no connection to the Eastern Orthodox Tradition. It is universal, and it will connect you not just to the Gospel, but to the fundamental heart and nature of the Gospel as a way of knowing, a way of telling the story about our lives and this world in such a way that reveals its truthfulness more deeply and more intuitively.)

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson (it’s not just Robinsons grace filled spirit and approach that makes this book shine, it’s her willingness to embrace it all- the challenges of both faithful criticisms and academic rigor and the challenges of faithful conviction. She exhibits how to do this in real time, walking through the text, asking good questions, and exploring the potentials. The result is an invitation to fall in love with the process, and more importantly to trust it).

The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is by NT Wright (There is nothing necessarily new in the details, language and approach for anyone who has read Wright, but as is typical, the richness is in a narrowed focus, a fresh lens, and a particular application of his ideas in a text he hasn’t quite dived before, at least not in this way. A nice mix of academic and pastoral interests)

Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield/Everybody Come Alive: A Memoir in Essays by Marcie Walker (two books about what it means to be alive in spirit, faith and circumstance, albeit from two very different perspectives sharing equal degrees of skepticism, enchantment and hope)

A Life of Jesus by Shusaku Endo (picked this up after it was announced that Scorsese would be adapting it, it’s a classic text with his familiar approach to faith and the Christian story, seeing it through the lens of culture and history and contextualization)

Science/Philosophy

The Sovereignty of the Good by Iris Murdoch (What Murdoch argues for is an essential differentiating between beauty and goodness. Beauty is that which we can observe and experience as a shadow, while goodness is the higher virtue that can only be seen dimly. To say that goodness can never truly be grasped or seen or reached or defined might seem antithetical to the modern approach, but it is in fact the very thing that allows us to locate it within the empirical process. What we observe then in beauty (and its counter, the ugly) is freed from having to bear the weight of explaining it’s own existence, and it is this act of seeing that binds us necessarily to knowledge as an intrinsically external reality)

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath/Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson (two different explorations of memory using the field of science, one exploring the biological function, the other exploring the philosophical and historucal component. Both solid reads and good additions for anyone interested in the topic, Why We Remember being the more accessible and practical of the two).

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong/Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions by Cass Sunstein (Both books left their mark on me in their own way, the first one exploring how seeing and interacting through the sensee is a universal reality with unique expressions, not better or worse, simply framing that perspective in ways that create different  vantage points with different strengths across the field of what we would call life, enabling one to see what the other cannot. Animal rights is a practical and political and moral/ethical discussion looking at the disparity that exists in how we treat one life form differently than another. It challenges how we might conceive of something like the basic right to life as a universal value and some of the logical arguments that both challenge and support it)

The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves by Alexandra Hudson/On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg (I’m not sure either of these reads ultimately establishes the necessary foundation for its ideas, but the ideas of civility and reconciliation have a strength all their own, making these two books important and relevant)

Supercommunicators: How To Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg/Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Chamge Your Life through the Power of Storyelling by Matthew Dicks (in case one wasn’t convinced, these are two books that show how the science behind our interactions in this world are all about necessary manipulation. However one feels about this realization, both books give practical insight for how to communicate with intentiom towards a given and wanted end)

The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language is, and What One Has To Do With the Other by Walker Percy (one of my books of the year, for sure. The way he helps distinguish between sign and symbol, both relating to the role of language in shaping knowledge of his world, is profund, illuminating and compelling)

Fiction

As I sit here writing this, i just finished a first chapter in Kawaguchi’s Before We Say Goodbye. It has become something of a rite of passage for entering into the new year, as every year it seems I kick things off with the next in the series. In 2024 it was Before Your Memory Fades, which once again follows the familiar emotional and sentimental pattern that it has become famous for. It’s like an old friend.

A second note about 2024: I read a lot of books about books. The Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, The Book of Doors, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, Bookshops and Bonedust, The Book of Stolen Dreams, The Ogress and the Orphans (that last one doesn’t have books in the title, but a library sits at its center).

A third observation: I read a lot of books set in my hometown and about my hometown. Largely because it was Winnipegs 150th anniversary this year. When the Pavement Turns to Sand, The Shadow over Portage and Main, The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters With Winnipegs Ghost Photographs, More Than Books: The History of Wimmipeg Public Library

Mostly though, what stands out to me in 2024 is not just the diversity of my fiction reads, moving between classical and modern and revisionist takes on classics, it’s that many of these reads that make up my top 10 felt important and monumental, if in different ways.

Here is my top 10 reads in 2024 (in no particular order):

Small Mercies

This might be the least significant pick in terms of relevance and importance, however it’s worth pointing out that it every new release by this author comes with great anticipation because Mystic River, still his best work, is on my all timers shelf. If this doesn’t live up to its brilliance, it nevertheless remains incredibly satisfying to be able to rust an author to engage me with a genre that I don’t typically go for. Propulsive, strong, and thematically interesting. Lots of praise for this one. 

Wild Robot

Picked this one up to prepare for the big screen adaptation. I immediately wished it had been around when I was younger. It asked a lot of the big existential questions I was asking at the time, and explores some complex ideas, using the image of technological progess to explore the connection between humanity and the natural world. Not a problem to call this an instant classic since it already is.

Once a Future Queen

This one took me back. It’s reminiscent of Lewis and Mcdonald, and in fact opened me up to an author who is immersed in that literary world. I love new discoveries, and i also loved this book. Magical realism at its best.

James

Everyone’s talking about it as a 2024 release that is topping lists everywhere, and for good reason. It’s one of a handful of new releases I read this year, and it is the real deal. Fun, inventive, biting. It takes some big swings. As a revisionist take on a familiar classic, ut functions both as inviting nostalgia and challenging commentary, giving it the sort of layers that help the risk pay off. Rather than isolating fans of the classic, it celebrates it while also inviting readers to acknowledge our contemporary lens. 

Winesburg Ohio

“In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.” Beautiful even where it finds things like depression, loneliness, boredom, death, addiction, and unrealized longings. This is a book that doesn’t feel the need to mask over the truth of these realities, instead embracing them as part of what binds us together.

Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde

I love this kind of thing. The simplicity of a fairy tale melded with the profundity of these philosophical questions. And I found many of these stories to be both entertaining and incredibly meaningful, sometimes cynical, sometimes hopeful, always honest. So glad i picked this up from the discount bin

Northwind

The final book Paulsen wrote. It’s a bit messy, but there is a poetic undertone to the prose, bringing together his real life experiences with the pacific northwest coast and Nordic mythologies. It doesn’t always makes sense being blended together, but there is a beauty to the madness. Paulsen’s affection for the natural world and its creatures is an expected and important facet of the story, which is part survival, part adventure, part internal process as our main protagonist makes his way across a rugged landscape. From this flows his philopshical ruminations, weavimg in and out of subtle theological touchpoints.

At its heart, the book seems to be about the movement from life to death to life, with the uncertain nature of this journey with its all its questions and doubts and unknowns being caught in the crosses that nature itself exhibits. The struggle begins, and perhaps ends, with the basic observation that beauty clashes with the honest brutality of the nature we observe. It becomes difficult to imagine, then, what is illusion and what is not, especially when it comes to speaking about good and evil. Even more difficult to imagine life and death having meaning that isn’t constructed over and against this confusion of realities. The presence of Nordic myth gives this an added dimension as well, transporting these same qualities to our ruminations about the gods. If we cannot say the gods are good or evil, then god becomes a distant entity that is both the author and result of this confusion. Equally so with life operating distanced from the gods. Which leaves death as the great leveler. In such a world the brutality is the only true measurable reality. Driven by instinct and evolution and survival. It becomes the only true certainty.

And yet, as Paulsen confronted his own experience of brutality, he became equally compelled by something else- an untamed beauty, as irrational as it was. He found this in the most unlikely of places; in nature where one would expect the brutal reality of this existence to loom largest. This contrasted the humanity where he found beauty to be most hidden. One of the most striking things about his life, something I gleaned from his autobiography, is how it is his encounter in nature and survival that helped clear his confusion about humanity. It gave him a fresh lens to see existence through. And in some real sense that’s the undercurrent running through his final book. If the one true measurable reality is in fact death, then reality must become immeasurable for life to make sense. For me, this is an idea that endeared me as a child and continues to captivate me as a now aging man.

The One and Only series

Finished the final books in the series this year, ending with the fitting and poetic finish in Family. I’m sad to say goodbye, but I’m so glad I took the journey

Brooklyn/Long Island

An all time favorite film paired with the release of a long awaited sequel led me to finally check Brookyln (and its sequel) off the list. It was worth the weight. I’m still mulling over how I feel about the sequel, but Brookkyn brought back the feeling of seeing the film for the first time. Very much familiar to its adaptation with its mix of philosophy, love, immigration, displacement, change, progress and home.

Earth and High Heaven

Particularly absorbing were the characters, filled as they were with nuance and complexity while never betraying that sense of raw, unfiltered dialouge running underneath. It subtly keeps adding natural layers as it goes, giving it the sense of getting to know these strangers on a level befitting friendship. There’s the Canadian context. There is the context of the war. There is the socio-political dynamics of the three central povs- jew, gentile, and french. The way the author brings these dynamics to the surface as a unique exploration of a specific place and time is impressive, and the insight it gives to all three of these dynamics carrying their own sense of isolation in contemporary Montreal was fascinating.

Most important- its a good story. Its entertaining and engaging and meaningful, the perfect balance of crowd pleaser and substance where you can have fun cheering for particular outcomes while growing in the process.

Thornhedge

A fascinating, and very brief at just over 100 pages long, reimagining of the aged fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty. Characters are swapped and reshaped in ways that turn the story upside down and and sideways and backwards, so much so that it makes the unfolding tale nearly impossible to predict. And in so doing, it allows its voice to challenge our conceptions and assumptions at the same time, exploring themes of good and evil, and how such notions frame our tendency to judge the exterior rather than to allow ourselves and hear and see those internal realities that lie hidden beneath the surface, or beyond the thornhedge. As the book suggests, this is just as true of ourselves as it is of the world we live in, both in a material and a spiritual sense.

In this sense, T. Kingfisher has written more of a myth than a fairytale, one that challenges some of our modern trappings and resistance to a reality framed by more than simply one side of the Thornhedge. Myths are important, and necessary, because they challenge our tightly guarded conceptions of reality and epistimology. The minute we decide that this is what reality must be, is the very moment reality, should we be willing to see and hear, bears itself out as something not content to  simply exist within our manufactured restraints. Thus why one of the central characters in this story is a seeker, and the other a protector. It is when these worlds collide that the hedges can be cleared away and greater realities to break in, which brings with it danger and struggle, especially when it comes to our grasp on reality, but also beauty and great reward.

It’s always fun looking through my Letterboxd Pro account around the end of the year. Some relevant data:

My first watch of 2024: Humanist Vampire Seekjng Consenting Suicidal Person (Ariane Loius-Seize), a unique and inventive horror that explores a coming of age story surrounding an existential and moral crisis, unafraid to dig into the difficult subject matter of depression, anxiety and suicide.

My last watch of 2024: The Return (Uberto Pasolini), a slow but methodical examination of the final sections of The Odyssey (perhaps preparing us for the next Nolan feature)

Total Diary Entries: 409

Favorite Stat: Daisy Ridley topped my most watched performances for the year. Why I like this stat- they are all from films released in 2024. I was a considerate fan of the Marsh Kings Daughter, which released back in January, but each subsequent release (Sometimes I Think About  Dying, Young Woman and the Sea, and Magpie) are all operating on a whole other level. Love seeing her find more and more success with leading roles.

What’s also interesting to note is, aside from The Beekeeper (Jason Stathoms over the top thriller) and Argyle (the unfairly maligned action thriller by Matthew Vauhgn, it took almost to March for theaters to finally start screening some new features. January is often a dumping ground, along with catching up to limited release Oscar fare, but this year was actually barren.

One last note: Five of my top ten films of 2024 were seen in the first quarter. Which speaks to the lasting power of those selections.

The Outliers

If I was making a top 20, these would be the titles vying for the back half, starting with Ridley’s Sometimes I Think About Dying. Few films hit such personal notes this year, and for the few technical shortcomimgs that it does have, the journey of the main character felt incredibly validating in all its rawness and honesty. It gave me the freedom, not to be ashamed of my own thoughts.

I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out Alex Garlands uniquely positioned blockbuster, Civil War, still one of the more visually arresting experiences of 2024. Or the intimate and impressive work of Hopkins in One Life, an emotionally arresting holocaust narrative that might feature some of the best work of his career.

There’s a handful of fever driven, energized efforts that really stood out and were all pushing for contention- the thrill ride that is Kneecap, an indie biopic of an international hip hop sensation, the immensely engaging and spirited take on Saturday Night’s historic emergence, and The Apprentice, an inspired examination of the rise of Trump that leaves the facts clear but the interpretation open.

Two films were in my top lists back at the half point- the touching YA adaptation Turtles All The Way Down and the captivating and wonder bearing Riddle of Fire, an old school take on a grown up childhood fantasy story anchored in realism. I’m especially sad to see Riddle of Fire bumped off, as I failed to get around to a rewatch. I think seeing it again could have bumped it up.

And lastly, The Taste of Things remains the other film just outside of my top ten, battling it out with Riddle of Fire and Sometimes I Think of Dying. Such a visceral and poetic visual experience, while Freuds Last Session, capturing a historic and legendary conversation between him and Lewis, remains my pick for underrated and underseen gem along with the biting humor and deep emotionality of Didi.

My Top 10 Films of 2024:

10. Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)

A haunting and deeply sad exploration of the connections between the moving image (film) and the passage of time. It wonders about life and all its unanswered questions, and even more about death either as a hopeful venture or unfulfilled promise. As a reflective piece of visual poetry its undeniably arresting.

9. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

The story of this film is the astonishing reveal of its casting choices, but beyond this is a film that occupies what is perhaps the opposite terrain from Close Your Eyes- yes, still rooted in the struggle of life, but far more committed to using the relationship between art and life to draw us specifically towards hopefulness and renewal. A tonic for the spirit

8. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)

Looking at life once again, this time through the lens of our relationship to technological change, one of the more resonating parts of this film comes in its reflection about how the why of life often matters more than the how. Lest we get to where we are going and forgot and discarded the necessary questions. Can our efforts to make meaning ever be satisfied? Who makes the expectations. Powerful thoughts and thematic interests to consider for anyone looking at the relevance of their personal journies in this world.

7. About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Another existential crisis, this one leaning deep into its philosophical exercise. Can we claim meaning in this world when even acts of altruism aren’t really true or existent as we see them. Like A Different Man, it wonders about whether we are products of the world or actual agents. Where doe the illusion get drawn within the boundaries of reality, or can we even know such things at all. A heavy film, but its the sort of stuff I eat up.

6. A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)

Immersive performances paired with an inventive biopic structure. I loved its use of music as a dramatic, storytelling device, but even more I loved the simple ideas it was pulling from the iconic characters. A complete film with impressive craft that immerses from start to finish

5. The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel)

A memorable and biting revenge drama that just might be a career best for Mads Mikkelson. Essential viewing.

4. Conclave (Edward Berger)

Riveting, a powerful look behind the curtain of institutional religion, at once a robust critique and celebration of its relevance, in case you thought a voting process couldn’t be dramatic, this film is here to prove you wrong.

3. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

A deeply astute and powerful reflective on nature and humanities place in it. Not so much about our responsibility towards it, but more about what we find in it- good and evil and the philosophical/theological crisis this represents. It’s a meditation, designed to push back on our perceptions of this world and our need to interpret it

2. Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An)

One of the greatest opening sequences of the year, followed up by a lengthy, contemplative exercise in slow cinema. It frames itself around a seeming joke- a devout believer, a skeptic, and an agnostic walk into a film. As such its deeply felt seriousness becomes all the more pronounced, forcing us to wrestle with the tensions and ambiguities of our longings and desires in a world caught between questions and belief.

1. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

How to know a person is the question. Observation rather than speech is the proposed answer, drawing us through the subtleties of the details using camera placement and movement. It’s storytelling where we see rather than listen, or listen though seeing into the silence and isolation of unspoken dynamics that make up an identity. To understand the journey of this film you have to look deeper, deep enough for this story to become his and not ours. If we can learn this, it can become a powerful meana of seeing the world as well.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted in this space.

I can’t point to any tragic reason or immediate reason that can explain why. Simply to say, it’s been a season, and if such matters (personal struggle) will always remain contextually relevant in comparison (there is always suffering that will categorize as greater), it is nevertheless real and true to my experience of it.

Life can be difficult. Sometimes near impossible

I created this space in such a season (experiencing severe anxiety and depression when I turned 40) to help me navigate that terrain. As 50 now continues its relentless onset with ever increasing speed (a year and a half away come the new year), I feel the surrealnes settling in. I do not have langauge for this. And yet it sits there shadowing the wealth of anxieties riddling what has been a tough 2024.

I have this new year’s resolution exercise called Rosebud. One of its practices is locating a single word that I want to define the year ahead. My word for 2024 was intent. The broader vision- be intentional about things big and small.

I’ll be honest. I made some movement on the big things, but my neglect of the small things have created a fresh set of big things, all of which now feel expressly out of my control. And I don’t do well in these seasons.

So, what’s ahead? I suppose I want to begin with reclaiming this space. Just with a little necessary reinvention for myself. After all, holding public visibility remains more a mode of accountability than expectation. The space exists so that I can get things in my head onto a page where hopefully it can gain some level of objectivity, with the emphasis being on the stories, be it events, persons, film, books, anything that has informed my world. To this end, I feel the need to let go of the unspoken expectation for this to exist as an extention of my reading and watching logs. Less posts, more intentionally when it comes to ongoing reflection. I’m hoping this can help me reclaim some of what this past year has stolen.

I also want to continue to pressure myself to keep going at writing my own story, the story of my life. I recently purchased a couple guide books to help ignite that flame once again.

We will see how this goes. As the wonderful animated film, Memoirs of a Snail, so wonderfully reminded us, life must be understood backwards, but it can only be lived forwards. A familiar refrain that never loses its power.