Author Archive for David Driedger

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A Questionable Call?

Published on March 4, 2010 by David Driedger. Closed

This is our game. This game is for world hockey supremacy. We’ve heard the slo­gans. Col­lec­tively we’ve dis­played the pride, enjoyed the swag­ger in vic­tory and felt the blows in defeat. Per­haps in the quiet moments of a bath­room stall dur­ing inter­mis­sion or after this year’s world junior’s tour­na­ment we’ve even ques­tioned whether there is some­thing out of bal­ance, some over­com­pen­sa­tion hap­pen­ing but soon enough the puck drops, the beer is hoisted and we are again trans­ported into the dream of world dom­i­na­tion. I have not fol­lowed hockey for over ten years but the world juniors and the Olympics have drawn me deep into the cor­ners of the hockey world. I fol­lowed with dread the tri­als of team Canada as they teetered and then sta­bi­lized and then charged and then almost col­lapsed as they headed into over­time in the gold medal match. And we all know the out­come. But in my own world I con­tin­ued to travel deep into the oppo­si­tion zone of the hockey world. A place I was once at home in but it now felt strange and sud­denly I heard the whis­tle blow. Did I re-enter the hockey world off-side? The call comes from an unlikely Dan­ish offi­cial, but this inter­na­tional play after all. Embossed on the back of his black and white stripes is SK. But I am not off­side. It is a penalty called against team Canada. SK makes a strange hand ges­ture. I do not rec­og­nize the penalty call. He glides towards the penalty box and says Fort­vivlelse. I wait for the announcer to get a trans­la­tion and make the announce­ment. Then a voice comes over the speak­ers Team Canada has been called on … No, sorry cor­rec­tion Canada, the nation of Canada, has been called for Despair. They are asked to take a time-out to reflect on their rela­tion­ship with hockey.

Despair? A lit­tle harsh don’t you think? Tough call. Up in the media both they dig up some more infor­ma­tion on this offi­cial and they find that SK has a his­tory of hand­ing despair penal­ties. In fact they dig up one par­tic­u­larly con­tro­ver­sial account in which SK was asked to defend his call. The doc­u­ment cer­tainly dates the offi­cial which could raise even more eye­brows. The doc­u­ment was dated back to 1849. There was another nation who was given a time-out for despair. The media jumped on this doc­u­ment and fever­ishly cor­ralled ath­letes from the Dan­ish team to trans­late the doc­u­ment. In order to help Canada under­stand the call they replaced the name of the orig­i­nal coun­try with the word Canada. Through a for­tu­nate con­nec­tion I have obtained a por­tion of this document.

Canada says, ‘We will be Hockey or we will be noth­ing.’ What hap­pens if Canada does not become Hockey? Then they will be in despair. But they will not be in despair over the fact that they did not become Hockey rather they will be in despair because they could not rid them­selves of their iden­tity of not being Hockey. They hoped to become Hockey because they found them­selves, their iden­tity, intol­er­a­ble. And so, they are in despair. But per­haps they will stand atop the podium and Canada will be declared Hockey to the whole world. Surely then they will not be despair. They will have rid them­selves of them­selves and become who they thought they should be. But what then have they done? They’ve suc­ceeded. They’ve now rid them­selves of their iden­tity and become Hockey. And so they are lost, they are not them­selves. They are in despair. And so I stand by my call. And the penalty is hardly a harsh one, though it could be the most harsh. I sim­ply ask that Canada stand alone with­out hockey, at least for a time and see who they are. They are then free to play, to not play, to play well, to play poorly.

It seems that the IOC has found out that SK was never meant to offi­ci­ate this game. He found his way into the tour­na­ment under a pseu­do­nym. Some­thing he has tried on numer­ous other occa­sions. And so secu­rity has come onto the ice to remove him. He makes no objec­tions and gives no resis­tance. He seems con­tent. He has made his call. Canada is called on despair. They either lose them­selves or can­not stand them­selves. A ques­tion­able call from a ques­tion­able offi­cial? Well, either way the time-out is almost over and Canada is free to get back in the game if they so choose.

Boiled Down

Published on February 25, 2010 by David Driedger. 1 Comment Tags: , .

It is encour­ag­ing at cer­tain points to expe­ri­ence life, at least at that moment, as hav­ing been boiled down, clar­i­fied, dis­tilled. I am not sure there is much more to Chris­t­ian life, which is to say life, than prayer and wor­ship. Per­haps there is only wor­ship or only prayer or some third unknown descrip­tion. But for now I still find it help­ful to speak of the two.

Pray with­out ceasing

Let every­thing that has breathe praise the LORD

All things may be prayer and wor­ship. My breath­ing, my eat­ing, my com­ing and my going. My buy­ing and sell­ing, giv­ing and tak­ing. My sit­ting and lying. My speech and my act.

I went for a run today and I did not care (much) for the ben­e­fits I used to hope from this expres­sion (bet­ter fit­ness and self-image) I did not incor­po­rate tech­niques to make my run more effi­cient or effec­tive . I ran and breathed and looked and thought. I ran to the ceme­tery at the edge of town and sat on a bench. It was one of the first sunny almost warm days and on the bench the sun shown directly on my face and the tree behind me blocked the wind. And every­thing was just glo­ri­ous, utterly glo­ri­ous in that moment.

I real­ized then that had I not done this, had I not run in that way at that time I would have been guilty of blas­phemy a fully uncon­scious expres­sion of sin and heresy. This led me then to the much more hum­bling real­iza­tion that much of my life is blasphemy.

A Gold Medal for Protesting?

Published on February 17, 2010 by David Driedger. Closed

To con­tinue with the Olympics …

I have come across var­i­ous anec­do­tal con­cerns and crit­i­cisms of the Olympic games. The crit­i­cisms have revolved around aspects of waste, excess and greed. It is my under­stand­ing that many of the venues in China and Greece are largely unused and dete­ri­o­rat­ing mak­ing them another image of our fast-food cul­ture. I was hop­ing to be quite attuned to these con­cerns as the 2010 Win­ter Olympics approached. I have found that as they began I became enthralled with them.  Never had short-track speed skat­ing and the biathlon seemed so exhil­er­at­ing (not to men­tion snow­board cross). I found it dif­fi­cult to turn away from this real-time drama. Then a nudg­ing of con­science came to me and I needed to ask myself if I could hon­estly sup­port these games. So I per­formed some (very brief) research into the crit­i­cisms of the games. See here for an overview. As I read the crit­i­cisms I had to admit that I largely agreed with them. Yes I agree that the Olympics rep­re­sent tremen­dous waste and excess with their envi­ron­men­tal tolls. Yes I imag­ine that there is an over influ­ence of cor­po­rate spon­sor­ship. Yes I agree that the eco­nomic ben­e­fit of host­ing the games is ques­tion­able at best. How­ever, what came to mind was that these are not crit­i­cisms of the Olympics but crit­i­cisms of our cul­ture as they are reflected in the Olympics. And if this indeed in the case then is it pos­si­ble that the Olympics is at least one of the bet­ter (not deny­ing the many faults still inher­ent in the games) expres­sions of our cul­ture? Should it not be the case that the inten­sity of our protest and resis­tance be ramped up dur­ing the rest of the year and allow our­selves to enjoy and appre­ci­ate what is good in the games?

Per­haps the games are actu­ally more decep­tive, more insid­i­ous with the use of hard­work­ing under­paid ath­letes.  Per­haps the games are actu­ally pure con­sumerism with the drama of the games sim­ply being medium to sell tourism, adver­tis­ing, con­ser­v­a­tive dis­ci­plined cit­i­zens, illu­sions (Believe … in what?) etc.

Please cor­rect me if I am wrong.

Do you know what I know?

Published on February 3, 2010 by David Driedger. Closed

For bet­ter or worse I find myself con­tin­u­ally inter­ested in know­ing, not so much knowl­edge, or per­haps more specif­i­cally I guess I am inter­ested in knowl­edge about know­ing (epis­te­mol­ogy to drop the 10 dol­lar term). Just how is it that we know some­thing to be true, or come to any sort of knowl­edge for that mat­ter. Lis­ten­ing to a church Christ­mas con­cert this year two lines sud­denly entered my mind as though encoun­ter­ing them for the first time,

Said the shep­herd boy to the mighty king,

Do you know what I know?

The words rushed through me leav­ing in their wake wave after wave of emo­tion. Or maybe they dropped on me like stone, like a liv­ing stone on my stag­nant sense of knowl­edge and drove the waves out­ward, out to the ends, to sur­face of my body that I trust to sense and know the world around me. When waves first peaked they were numb­ing leav­ing room for no other thoughts or think­ing and as the waves ebbed my returned feel­ings kept telling me, “But the king has access to knowl­edge.” What can be known the king is able to know. Now I may not be an explicit fan of the king but if there is some­thing to be known the king can extend the reach of his hand to grasp and acquire it. And what of the rhetor­i­cal flaunt that the shep­herd boy adds,

In your palace walls mighty king,

Do you know what I know?

No I try not to fly the ban­ner of the king but the truth is that I am on the side of the king. Per­haps I posi­tion myself as the king or pros­trate myself before kings. This is true because of how these lines offended me deeply, uncon­sciously. I have been build­ing palace walls in my days even in my sleep.  God for­give me.

There is more than one know­ing. There are thrones of knowl­edge. But there is also know­ing that is no knowledge.

And the shep­herd boy did not cre­ate his own know­ing. His know­ing was born of see­ing and hearing.

Do you see what I see?

Do you hear what I hear?

In this already estab­lished new year may we be granted eyes to see and ears to hear a knowl­edge drift­ing some­times rush­ing low to the ground steal­ing past palace walls fill­ing the hearts and minds of those with­out king or coun­try. For the Gospel is a refugee knowl­edge or maybe a refugee of knowl­edge tented under the stars and in touch with the wind.

Read On

Published on November 27, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed Tags: .

I have begun read­ing Fer­nando Pessoa’s The Book of Dis­quiet. From the first pages of this journal-like ‘fact­less auto­bi­og­ra­phy’ some­thing was stirred in me. Sud­denly the sim­ple and hereti­cal phrase emerged from within me claim­ing, “This book will be my sal­va­tion.” I have never had that sen­sa­tion before in read­ing. I began to feel like the text itself, with or with­out my per­mis­sion, was begin­ning to search me. It was begin­ning to read me aloud back to me. The text was keep­ing in step with me. As I thought it too was think­ing. As I thought it was already think­ing ahead of me. At every pos­si­ble turn it opened paths that I did not know existed. And then it became clearer. I can­not antic­i­pate its goal, its des­ti­na­tion, and so I must humbly fol­low it. So I must decide if its is a sav­iour or a false mes­siah. I can­not know this ahead of time because I can­not assume to know where I will end up if I con­tinue to fol­low. As of now I am read­ing in faith. But then I ask myself what this means for the church, for my faith in God. Have I not already deter­mined the end of my faith, its goal and des­ti­na­tion? Is not the church just a well-rehearsed con­struct that offers no real sur­prise or alter­na­tive? Could this text actu­ally demand more faith than my church? For­give my heresy for the moment. And as though my tex­tual com­pan­ion was already antic­i­pat­ing all this I read the sim­ple and rev­e­la­tory phrase, “I read and am lib­er­ated.” I have already found myself in the text. The text can allow me to be more of myself than I am. I read on … for who I can still become? The author makes no claims as a mes­siah in fact I found out that this man­u­script was found in a trunk after his death. The text is mak­ing no claims to power or con­trol. And still I read on and so I read the cry, “Do my words ring in any­one else’s soul? Does any­one hear them besides me?” For­give my heresy but tonight … I will read on.

Wandering the Ethical Wilderness with Alasdair MacIntyre

Published on October 10, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed Tags: .

I came across the name Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre as I am sure many oth­ers have in the work of Stan­ley Hauer­was.  And as you read more Hauer­was you encounter again and again Mac­In­tyre.  I am cur­rently tak­ing a course in pro­fes­sional ethics in coun­selling and was given the oppor­tu­nity to choose a text to read and review.  I imme­di­ately took the oppor­tu­nity to finally crack open MacIntyre’s After Virtue.  I am, so far, quite intrigued and hope to share a bit of my jour­ney into the text with you.

Mac­In­tyre begins his work by ask­ing the reader to imag­ine.  Imag­ine that there were a dis­as­ter in the field of nat­ural sci­ence.  “Wide­spread riots occur, lab­o­ra­to­ries are burnt down, physi­cists are lynched, books and instru­ments are destroyed.”  And finally a polit­i­cal power comes into place and bans sci­ence from being taught or prac­ticed.  In time though there is a move­ment to revive this ancient prac­tice and a new gen­er­a­tion learns piece­meal from the scraps that remain.  A new expres­sion of sci­ence emerges but it remains arbi­trary based on par­tial and ran­dom bits of knowl­edge that have sur­vived.  No one real­izes the inac­cu­racy of what they are doing because they have no mem­ory or recorded his­tory of sci­ence as it was in its total­ity.  Mac­In­tyre sug­gests that this imag­ined state of affairs for the nat­ural sci­ences is anal­o­gous to the cur­rent state ethics.  Their remains scraps and frag­ments of eth­i­cal lan­guage and rea­son­ing but they no longer fit into the coher­ent whole from which these con­cepts and prac­tices emerged.

This was an unex­pected but help­ful frame­work by Mac­In­tyre to intro­duce his explo­ration and retrieval of par­tic­u­lar moral tra­di­tions.  I think the image by and large holds.  We con­tinue to pre­serve a par­tic­u­lar vocab­u­lary around ethics.  We speak of jus­tice, hon­esty, com­mit­ment, integrity, inten­tion, respect, val­ues, etc. and yet these terms tend to be stretched and shifted with an elas­tic­ity that makes us won­der where and how they can gain pos­i­tive and eth­i­cal trac­tion in our age.  Mac­In­tyre seems to sug­gest that there is indeed a way for­ward in ethics that is, well, eth­i­cal.  Let’s see where it goes.

Get Real — Part I

Published on September 6, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed Tags: , , , , .
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Now I sus­pect these few sec­onds of video elicited at least a few adjec­tives, inter­rog­a­tives and maybe even some exple­tives.  I hope some of you asked the sim­ple ques­tion ‘Why?’.  I also imag­ine that many of you actu­ally, at least implic­itly, already know why.  Why is it that you can sub­mit some basic searches on YouTube and find scores of peo­ple doing things that strike us as almost unbear­ably stupid?

Heck for your view­ing plea­sure here is another pole walk­ing attempt.

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You may also notice that this phe­nom­e­non is prac­ti­cally the exclu­sive domain of young men.  Coin­ci­dence … I think not.  Com­ing across this video reminded me of two things.  The first is a short story I am work­ing on that reflects on my expe­ri­ence of rais­ing beef cat­tle in south­ern Man­i­toba.  What stood out to me as this piece pro­gressed was the role of cas­trat­ing and de-horning the young bulls strip­ping them, per­haps, of some pri­mal layer of wild and reck­less mas­culin­ity.  I will leave that thought to develop another time.

Sec­ond, this video reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Under­ground (bear with me).  The Under­ground Man says, “So this is it – this is it at last – a head-on clash with real life!”  And so we have what comes to close to how I would char­ac­ter­ize Dostoevsky’s work.  In each work it seems that D is will­ing to walk out from pole to pole know­ing the cross­ing or crash­ing will, hope­fully, bring an encounter with ‘real life’.

Dos­to­evsky will take any step and make any turn nec­es­sary so that there will be a pos­si­bil­ity for the real.  The Under­ground Man both despises and feels despised by his anony­mous audi­ence.  He attempts to recount his life with bru­tal hon­esty which means being hon­estly decep­tive at times.  He throws any notion of con­sis­tency out into the street for it is being tossed on your head into the street that one might actu­ally learn some­thing about one’s self.  The Under­ground Man con­cludes spite­fully that he was sorry for ever start­ing this account of his life rec­og­niz­ing that is was a pur­suit in van­ity and has moved away from lit­er­a­ture.  For, “[a] novel must have a hero, and here I seemed to have delib­er­ately gath­ered together all the char­ac­ter­is­tics of an anti-hero, and, above all, all this is cer­tain to pro­duce a most unpleas­ant impres­sion because we have all lost touch with life, we are all crip­ples, every one of us – more or less.”  We all began on pole and fallen so we may as well try and walk them again.  He goes on to tell us that because of our dis­abil­ity with are left with a dis­gust for any encounter, any taste with ‘real life.’ In response to any rejec­tions his audi­ence might raise for this view the writer con­tin­ues by say­ing that, “for my part, I have merely car­ried to extremes in my life what you have not dared to carry even half-way, and, in addi­tion, you have mis­taken your cow­ardice for com­mon sense and have found com­fort in that, deceiv­ing your­selves.”  You have seen the poles, thought of ven­tur­ing out onto them but said to your­self it would not be pru­dent and thought your­self the wiser.  And even after this the Under­ground Man is not finished.

My open­ing quo­ta­tion from this short story came about half-way through the nar­ra­tive and imme­di­ately guided me the rest of the way.  It has crys­tal­lized for me what is clear to all of us.  As humans we act out and artic­u­late the desire for some­thing ‘real’.  Though I don’t think we do this for all of our life.  Real­ness in child­hood is know­ing that the world is more than it is.  Real­ness is cre­ative and unsta­ble.  Real­ness becomes in young adult­hood more con­crete as we begin to pur­sue tan­gi­ble goals in love and voca­tion.  Because the real was always more and big­ger than our­selves it was never cap­tured or tamed and so in time most of us began to sim­ply give up on the real and sought the com­fort­able and sta­ble.  And so from below the ordered streets and time-conscious pedes­tri­ans the Under­ground Man emerges not with a chal­lenge but with an asser­tion and a con­dem­na­tion.  I have fol­lowed through and looked around the cor­ners of the dark cor­ri­dors of the real.  I have said yes to all of life.  The pitch of the Under­ground Man rises in its crescendo.  In deceiv­ing your­selves “as a mat­ter fact, I seem to be much more alive than you.  Come, look into it more closely!  Why, we do not even know where we are to find real life, or what it is, or what it is called.… We even find it hard to be men, men of real flesh and blood, our own flesh and blood.  We are ashamed of it.  We think it a dis­grace.”  The Under­ground Man includes him­self in this con­dem­na­tion.  I think gen­der in this lan­guage should remain spe­cific.  I hope to develop this more in Part II.

The Passion of David Bazan

Published on July 31, 2009 by David Driedger. 1 Comment Tags: .

I came across this great arti­cle on the life and faith(?) of David Bazan.  Here is a post I wrote for my old blog on my own expe­ri­ence with this great per­former in rela­tion to my own min­istry expe­ri­ence.  The post was orig­i­nally titled ‘Min­is­ters of Death’

I sus­pect you can guess who I am (with my star struck eyes) and who Bazan is (appar­ently chew­ing tobacco or something).

I have been lis­ten­ing to Bazan’s music for some ten years now. His music has always rep­re­sented a brave and engaged crit­i­cism of Chris­t­ian reli­gion. What sets his approach apart from more reac­tionary crit­i­cism is how hon­est he remains in his own sense of hope­ful­ness to the spirit of faith. After the show I talked with him and asked if he kept any per­sonal ties to the church. He said that his wife and daugh­ter attend church but that he had ‘made his exit’ (adding a com­ment of it being a hope­ful exit; I think is how he put it). Hav­ing grown up as a pastor’s kid he has tried to dis­tance him­self from the insti­tu­tion with an attempt to sus­pend his received assump­tions. What remains is still a sense of God’s exis­tence, which in his words has cre­ated a strong dis­so­nance to where he thought he was going (athe­ism). He admits that this could sim­ply be the result of such an entrenched world view that he received grow­ing up. I would have liked to talk longer.
David Bazan remains for me a of min­is­ter of death. A min­is­ter in the truest sense (though prophet may be a more appro­pri­ate term) in that his engage­ment with the social impli­ca­tions of faith and reli­gion remain sig­nif­i­cant in his work. The role of death func­tions promi­nently in much of his lyrics whether it is phys­i­cal death, the death of a rela­tion­ship or the death cer­tain beliefs. To those in the church who will lis­ten this min­istry of death injects needed per­spec­tive and the pos­si­bil­ity of change and move­ment.  I believe it was Flan­nery O’Connor (or some­one speak­ing about her work) who said that the rea­son an artist focuses on death is because death is ‘gett­gin some­where’.  In tran­si­tion to the sec­ond sig­nif­i­cant event of the week (when this post was writ­ten) here are his lyrics to “Priest and Para­medics” (see below for video).

Para­medics brave and strong
Up before the break of dawn
Putting poker faces on
Bro­ken bod­ies all day long
The neigh­bors heard a fight
Some­one had a knife
It must have have been the wife
Husband’s lost a lot of blood
He wakes up scream­ing, “Oh my God
Am I going to die?
Am I going to die?“
As they strapped his arms down to his sides
At times like these they’d been taught to lie
“Buddy, just calm down, you’ll be all right”

Sev­eral friends came to his grave
His chil­dren were so well-behaved
As the priest got up to speak
The assem­bly craved relief
But he him­self had given up
So instead he offered them this bit­ter cup
“You’re going to die
We’re all going to die
Could be twenty years, could be tonight
Lately I have been won­der­ing why
We go to so much trou­ble
To post­pone the unavoid­able
And pro­long the pain of being alive”

I per­formed my sec­ond funeral yes­ter­day and the first on my own. I had never met the man who passed away. He was 48 and died of a heart attack in his sleep with no warn­ing (a hus­band and father of two). As a min­is­ter of death who works firmly within the insti­tu­tional church my work stands in some con­trast to David Bazan’s. I hope to make death a lit­tle more palat­able so that its hem­or­rhag­ing force move through the sys­tem with less resis­tance. In rela­tion to death I often recall the words at the close of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness. Mar­low is try­ing to recount the words of judg­ment at Kurtz’s death to Kurtz’s wife. He fails in trans­mit­ting this mes­sage of death, instead he says that Kurtz uttered her name at his death. Mar­low says this in response to his action,

It seemed to me that the house would col­lapse before I could escape, that the heav­ens would fall on my head. But noth­ing hap­pened. The heav­ens do not fall for such a tri­fle. Would they have fallen I won­der, if I had ren­dered Kurtz that jus­tice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he only wanted jus­tice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark — too dark altogether …

David Bazan appears lib­er­ated to speak some of those dark words, but what is his com­mu­nity that needs to hear the dark words of faith if he remains largely unheard out­side the church walls? My speech is mod­i­fied within these walls and not all for bad. Some things are too crush­ing and need medi­at­ing, but the right medi­a­tor is cru­cial. I wres­tle between the min­istries of death. I hope to con­tinue in both, in some way.

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Letters to a Young Poet — Letter 10

Published on July 21, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

This is the final para­graph in the last let­ter that Rilke wrote to Franz Kappus,

Art too is only a way of liv­ing, and, how­ever one lives, one can, unwit­tingly, pre­pare one­self for it; in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neigh­bored than in the unreal half-artistic pro­fes­sions, which, while they pre­tend prox­im­ity to some art, in prac­tice belie and assail the exis­tence of all art, as for instance the whole of jour­nal­ism does and almost all crit­i­cism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called lit­er­a­ture. I am glad, in a word, that you have sur­mounted the dan­ger of falling into this sort of thing and are some­where in a rough real­ity being soli­tary and coura­geous. May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that.

I sus­pect that most of us with some appre­ci­a­tion towards the arts feel a lit­tle sting in Rilke’s part­ing words. I also sus­pect that Rilke is not inter­ested in crit­i­ciz­ing pro­fes­sions as such but in crit­i­ciz­ing those who “pre­tend prox­im­ity”. Nature, real­ity and truth will not be fooled. Rilke believes that they can be trusted, but this in turn means that they must be trusted. We can­not fool or manip­u­late art and beauty. Prox­im­ity and pres­ence is key both to the for­ma­tion of iden­tity and to the healthy rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. Rilke’s call inward demands that we begin ana­lyz­ing or most pri­mal walls, those inte­rior walls that divide our pas­sions, goals and com­pul­sions. What have we ghet­toized in our self? What is it in us that remains her­met­i­cally sealed? This move­ment is nec­es­sary first because it in turn affects our exter­nal sen­sual real­ity. In greater self-understanding we develop courage and sta­bil­ity to allow our­selves to “pres­ence” real­ity and not pre­tend prox­im­ity. There is no peer review here that can val­i­date our inte­rior and the move­ment is not nat­ural. Much of Rilke’s admon­ish­ing focuses around receiv­ing the dif­fi­cult. This can of course be reduced to pathol­ogy and veiled masochism, but this is not truly dif­fi­cult. The rela­tion­ship between pres­ence and dif­fi­culty is key here. To expe­ri­ence pres­ence we need iden­tify par­tic­u­lar divid­ing walls and either dis­man­tle or at least gate them. Walls, how­ever, are the very essence of our grasp for con­trol and power. To take down a wall is con­trary to the nature indi­vid­ual self-preservation, or at the very least it is an act of trust beyond one’s self. The move­ment of dif­fi­culty is the move­ment of de-centralizing a per­sonal posi­tion of power. This how­ever, is also the move­ment and pos­si­bil­ity of pres­ence, even communion.

Letters to a Young Poet — Letter 8

Published on July 14, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

With respect to our place in the future Rilke says,

The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kap­pus, but we move in infi­nite space.

In an attempt to get my own head around Rilke’s thought in the fol­low­ing para­graphs I will quote in full with per­haps some brief com­ments clar­i­fy­ing what I am focus­ing on or perceiving.

And to speak of soli­tude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bot­tom not some­thing that one can take or leave. We are soli­tary. We may delude our­selves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much bet­ter it is to real­ize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assum­ing it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accus­tomed to rest are taken from us, there is noth­ing near any more and every­thing far is infi­nitely far. A per­son removed from his own room, almost with­out prepa­ra­tion and tran­si­tion, and set upon the height of a great moun­tain range, would feel some­thing of the sort: an unpar­al­leled inse­cu­rity, an aban­don­ment to some­thing inex­press­ible would almost anni­hi­late him. He would think him­self falling or hurled into space, or exploded into a thou­sand pieces: what a mon­strous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up with and explain the state of his senses!

Why is it that the move­ment towards the soli­tary is so dis­ori­en­tat­ing? I have writ­ten else­where that I can­not con­ceive of a non-relational real­ity, which seems to make this idea of pri­mal soli­tude a prob­lem.  While that may be true I won­der if what Rilke is get­ting at is that our notion of con­nec­tion or rela­tion­ship is more often the con­nec­tion to our­selves which we see in oth­ers. We love in oth­ers what we love in our­selves and there­fore do not love oth­ers at all.  We hate (or cre­ate) in oth­ers what we also hate. We are dis­ori­en­tated in soli­tude because we have lost the self-perceived affir­ma­tion we find in others.

So for him who becomes soli­tary all dis­tances, all mea­sures change; of these changes many take place sud­denly, and then, as with the man on the moun­tain­top, extra­or­di­nary imag­in­ings and sin­gu­lar sen­sa­tions arise that seem to grow out beyond all bear­ing. But is nec­es­sary for us to expe­ri­ence that too. We must assume our exis­tence as broadly as we in any way can; every­thing, even the unheard-of, must be pos­si­ble in it.

This is where my sense of Rilke’s tran­scen­dence emerges. By tran­scen­dence I mean open­ness.

That is at bot­tom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most sin­gu­lar and the most inex­plic­a­ble that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cow­ardly has done life end­less harm; the expe­ri­ences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called “spirit-world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily par­ry­ing been crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atro­phied. [empha­sis mine]

Then he writes this in con­nec­tion to human relationships.

For it is not iner­tia alone that is respon­si­ble for human rela­tion­ships repeat­ing them­selves from case to case, inde­scrib­ably monot­o­nous and unre­newed; it is shy­ness before any sort of new, unfore­see­able expe­ri­ence with which one does not think one­self able to cope. But only some­one who is ready for every­thing, who excludes noth­ing, not even the most enig­mat­i­cal, will live the rela­tion to another as some­thing alive and will him­self draw exhaus­tively from his own expe­ri­ence.  [empha­sis mine]

Rilke goes on to encour­age Mr. Kap­pus to explore the con­tours of his world crit­i­ciz­ing human­ity for becom­ing to accom­mo­dat­ing to their envi­ron­ment. He continues,

We have no rea­son to mis­trust our world, for it is not against us. Has it ter­rors, they are our ter­rors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dan­gers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life accord­ing to that prin­ci­ple which coun­sels us that we must always hold to the dif­fi­cult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faith­ful. How should we be able to for­get those ancient myths that are at the begin­ning of all peo­ples, the myths about drag­ons that at the last moment turn into princesses; per­haps all the drag­ons of our lives are princesses who are only wait­ing to see us beau­ti­ful and brave. Per­haps every­thing ter­ri­ble is in its deep­est being some­thing help­less that wants help from us.

Far from being an attempt to view the world through rose col­ored glasses Rilke here advo­cates a “nar­row path” rec­og­niz­ing that we can­not trust the smooth and the easy. This path is both unsta­ble and promises no fruit. Rather, this per­spec­tive opens wide the embrace of ter­ror and abyss with the knowl­edge that they are not embed­ded or foun­da­tional in the cre­ated order. They too will be dis­solved or as Rilke sees it trans­formed as we approach them in beauty and bravery.