Doing Stuff

Doing Stuff

For Travis, for L-slice, and for the Kid

I have been repeating myself of late, the same aphorism, and I have possibly repeated it to everyone I know, and always in response to excuses. Because, unlike many of my so-called friends and acquaintances, I am always in favor of doing stuff – especially when the alternative is something as dreary and predictable as not doing stuff. And my objection is inherently ambiguous: there are few verbs less specific than “to do” and fewer nouns less specific than “stuff.” Yet, when it comes to doing anything – and when I say anything, I mean anything – most people I have met would rather not. For some reason, the miasm of predictability appeals irresistibly to Americans between the ages of eight and eighty, a dimming but undiminished contentedness with the foreseen and foreknown.

(A friend of mine, Phoenix-born and Phoenix-dwelling, has never seen the ocean, though it is only a relatively enjoyable eight hour drive away. And this, this alone, is shocking to me. I remain, weeks after he first revealed this to me, continually astonished. More troubling, however, is his complete lack of concern with the situation. He is, amazingly, content to remain in the desert, measuring out his life in coffee spoons of sun and sand.)

To be clear: “doing stuff” can mean literally any activity. Literally. Hiking, for example, is a stuff to do, as is attending a theme park, searching for buried treasure, or impulse driving to the beach. Trying out a new restaurant is a stuff you can do; so is wandering around an unexplored grid of streets or trying to hit a distant tree in the park with tiny, tiny rocks. Grocery shopping is doing stuff – especially if you take every opportunity to play grocery store bingo. Going to a coffee shop can be “doing stuff”, even if the trip consists only of sitting around and doing the same stuff you would have done if you had chosen to stay somewhere familiar and not “do stuff.”

Because “doing stuff” is, or should be, the single most successfully undertaken endeavor available to humanity as it exists across time and space. Anyone with a pulse and a soul is capable of the activity. And anyone with a pulse and a soul and a will has probably had the experience of successfully becoming, if only for a short time, a doer of stuff. The requirements to become a stuff-doer are unbelievably, undeniably, incontrovertibly lax. The desire to do stuff is almost commensurate to the activity itself.

Which leaves me in a conundrum of weighty philosophical and anthropological proportions: why (ohwhyohwhy) do so many friends, families, and variously undefined acquaintances choose so very often to avoid the doing of stuff? What appeals to them so strongly about not doing stuff instead?

                Quite frankly, I am starting to take the default response here quite personally. I have begun to wonder if I am locked within some twisted version of the Cartesian dilemma, playing a game in which there is no divine conspirator and society has individually and unanimously determined that I shall have to pursue the art of doing stuff all on my very own. I have begun to wonder if everyone else is out there doing stuff with each other while I sit at home inventing stuff to do while relentlessly and fruitlessly searching for someone to do it with. I have taken to smelling myself every time a friend tells me they are “too busy” to do such a simple stuff as walk to the part. I sprint to a mirror to check whether I have gained some monstrous physical deformity. Do I still have a nose? I check to see if my fly is unzipped. I grab a newspaper, searching for the recent outbreak of catatonic apathy.

                As might be expected, my failure to persuade those I love that they should, in fact, do stuff has increasingly formed in me a kind of apocalypticism. Of course the world is coming to an end. How could it not, when the color is being drained from it breath by repetitive-coma-inducing breath? when the world is caught up in its separate selves, fractured, contained, and dissipating? when the notion of committing to any activity sends thousands into paroxysms of existential uncertainty? My internet history is chock-full of search results for lapsometers, mass hypnotisms, spontaneous electron loss, and giant malevolent immobilized brains. I keep waiting for the kids to jump-rope and bounce identical rubber balls on a schedule. I wait for some to go outside with an object of their choice and do any stuff at all.

                Such failure to do anything, such preference to stare at screens and sit on couches, such inclination to kill time rather than treasure it – at some point in history, such a mindset infected humanity, and the condition has spread, and the symptoms are showing. The students I teach would rather play Temple Run on their touch-screen gadgets than actually run in the park, would rather watch Phineas and Ferb than create and solve their own mysteries, would rather talk to each other on the internet about the stuff they would prefer not to do than find new and improved stuff to do instead. They are eleven years old and made up of boundless potential, and they have watched day in and day out as those past such potential choose to ignore their very existence.

                I am not saying that the Nobel Peace Prize has become a joke because everyone chose to stay home and watch TV the day their opportunity presented itself. Or maybe I am saying that. But more importantly, I am contending that practice becomes perfect, and practice at becoming sedentary makes for a perfectly sedentary human being. I am saying that the de facto response to doing stuff is rejection, and that this status quo is perhaps the single most frightening tendency of our age – if it was not already in ages past.

                So, with the same impassioned impulse that Antione De St. Exupery warned children “watch out for baobabs!”, I have unleashed my phrase upon the world. It is not a tautology, though it appears one at first, because living is a habit and zombies frightening; it is an acknowledgment of the supremacy of habit, and a warning against the tendency that might undermine our world and split it into tiny jots of merely filled space. It is an encouragement and a pronunciation of the human potential, an apocalyptic yawp of desperation sounded from the rooftops of apathy into the void of indecision. It is praise and it is folly, and it is where I will leave you.

Once I tell you the secret, you must use it. Walk outside, memorize a poem, visit a landmark, or fly paper airplanes from the most obtruding object in sight. Use the secret to do more stuff. If you are not sure what stuff to do, follow these simple steps:

1.       Choose an active verb. Almost any will suffice.

2.       Choose a noun. Again, almost any will suffice. Some adverbs too.

3.       Place the verb (“verb”-ing) in front of the noun.

4.       Execute.

Oh, and my irritating aphorism:

The secret to doing more stuff is . . . doing more stuff.

Love,

TCS

Three More Verses

I did the math, and at my current rate, I think I will finish my translation of 1 Peter just in time to buy Teddy (the younger brother) his 21st birthday present. His birthday is in May. He is also 19. Ouch.

This section was hard, and I felt obliged to read/translate a bit ahead just to make sure I wouldn't contradict myself later -- or too much anyway. I'm sure there are more things to talk about here, but I picked the ones that jumped out at me most after a few revisions. The exceeding generality and particularity of time in the passage still eludes me, I think.

ΠΕΤΡΟΥ Α

First Peter

3-5 Blessed is God and the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one, according to his great compassion, raising us into living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from those dead -- into an inheritance undecaying, undefiled, and unfading, (an inheritance) being guarded in heaven for you, the ones being preserved by God’s power through faith for a certain salvation to be revealed in the final moment.

***The Greek provides no finite verb for this sentence, a translational difficulty that is usually (and most naturally) remedied by inserting some form of “to be” in the initial clause. Since I can think of no better solution, and since I have no desire to turn any of the given participles into main verbs in my translation, I followed suit. That said, I was tempted (and still am) to forego English grammar altogether. Implying ἔιμι is not an irregular practice, leaving only the difficulty of deciding where and how to put it. By my estimation, “is” sounds far more natural than the third person imperative (functioning descriptively, of course) “be.”

However translated, the whole construction reads like a cause-and-effect stream of consciousness, describing an event that is ongoing and immediate yet still directed at a single and critical final moment. If the writer intended to suggest that God the Father has already raised us into living hope, or that the inheritance of our salvation would come to pass at some indefinite future moment, he could easily have used finite or infinitive aorist, perfect, or future forms. Instead, he speaks of a continuous action always being performed and always intended to have been performed -- an action reserved and protected for that very purpose. The hope is living, we being raised and protected, our salvation-inheritance being preserved. Nothing here is complete in the sense of having been finished nor is it incomplete in the sense of lacking a particular quality or virtue. It actively and fully is. Notably, in this respect, the aorist is only used in the infinitive passive at the end of the passage, in reference to an event that has not yet been revealed. Even the use of “to be revealed” indicates a level of distinction and interconnectedness between what is happening and what has been done and what will be done. Whatever that is and however it might later appear, it is happening and we will see why at some unspecified time.

My translation of “certain salvation” (σωτηρίαν ἑτοίμην) is a devastatingly insufficient conveyance of this. The sense of the adjective implies preparation and immediacy, willingness and zealousness, even a kind of heightened reality and ownership, all with respect to both the past and the future and used in this present progressive context. I can think of no appropriate English word: I shy away from “prepared” if only because it connotes a sense of inevitability, the idea that this salvation was actively set and only has not taken place because the moment has not yet come (when, in fact, it is taking place and the moment could be any time); I equally dislike “ready” or “ready at hand”, both of which give a sense of hesitance, as if salvation is waiting on something and has not already happening-ed; “immediate” is out of bounds for the same reason, and “present” confuses the whole notion of time and actionthat the rest of the passage has already laid out. “Certain”, however insufficient, can at least refer to a present emotion or perception as well as a future occurrence dependent upon a past or contemporary action. Perhaps we should coin a new word: “pre-immediated” or somesuch.

Of final interest is the use of etymological negatives to define a presumably ontologically sufficient thing (salvation): the inheritance being guarded is not “pure, noble, and eternal”, but instead “undecaying, undefiled, and unfading.” Quite pointedly, the writer does not try to say what salvation is while asserting that it is not what it is not. Of course, this renders an apophatic reading impossible to miss. Linguistically, also, the word choice does not try to reveal anything that will be revealed, maintaining its tenuous chronology. Or eschatology. Or And both.

One last note: two things are preserved or protected here, in parallel construction with one another: salvation and the saved. At the risk of unwittingly saying something heretical, I end my observation there.

Translation and Notes. A Cop-Out

It's been almost a month since I posted "A Promise", which either makes me very patient or a liar. Since I in no way desire to be known as the latter, I will for the time being claim the attributes of the former -- despite the fact that everyone who knows me knows it also is not true. Here's hoping for an in-between place I can wait (stagnate?) for just a bit longer. I am trying to put together a few poems, since none of my stories are working. Because that's easier or something . . .

In any case, to keep myself from becoming as intellectually dry and depressing as this desert and the giant square city it holds, I thought I might start a translation/commentary project. And to keep myself from becoming an existential wreck, it seemed appropriate to do the New Testament. Also, much easier than Plato, my other option. So here begins my translation of 1 Peter. The Greek is available at the Perseus Project. The commentary raises more questions than it answers and, even within the first two verses, is reminding me that I should consider becoming familiar with the Pentateuch. Robert Alter reading parties, anyone?

I'll be going by paragraph or sentence or whatever I feel like doing. So here are the first two verses, since my explanation of the next three keeps getting longer. Exciting, no?

ΠΕΤΡΟΥ Α

First Peter

1-2 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those set apart in exile in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia: according to the foreknowledge of God the Father in the sanctification of the spirit into obedience and according to the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ, may grace and peace be multiplied unto you.

***It appears most translations accept ῥαντισμον as an object of εἰς (parallel to ὑπακοὴν), rather than an object of κατὰ (parallel to πρόγωσιν). The difference I see is subtle, I admit, and perhaps only a product of my own mental quibbling: is the sprinkling of blood, like sanctification of the spirit, a consequence of the foreknowledge of God which in turn effects grace and peace? Or is the sprinkling of blood itself, along with the foreknowledge of God, a primary and necessary element in the bringing of grace and peace, just as sanctification of the spirit is a primary and necessary element in the bringing of obedience -- which itself relies upon God’s foreknowledge and, consequently, the textual parallel, Christ’s own blood?

Though Theo would take this opportunity to remind me that the many official translators of this book probably know something I don’t, and though I accept this charge, the latter option appears far more likely, both within the context of 1 Peter and within the context of the Christian salvation narrative. Grace and peace are made abundant equally according to God’s wisdom and Christ’s sacrifice, the two becoming at some point necessarily indistinguishable: I am hesitant to suggest that the sprinkling of Christ’s blood is a direct product of God’s foreknowledge and a potential substitute for simple “obedience”, that the action is several steps removed from any abundance of grace and peace.

The “sprinkling of blood” refers to Hebrew practice laid out in Numbers (and one of Deuteronomy or Leviticus, I think), mentioned also in the New Testament in Hebrews, the obvious and unsoundable parallel establishing Christ as the final and ultimate sacrificial lamb Whose blood alone brings sanctification.

Two minor notes: I haven’t the heart to translate ἐκλεκτοῖς as “elect” despite their aural similarities; I apologise reluctantly for the use of “unto”, an archaic and altogether appropriate preposition in this situation.

Relativist Musings. A Promise.

That all things are related does not imply absolute relativity between: the inability to separate the one fact from such proximate folly may constitute the predominate misunderstanding of our age.

For now, the only word that makes sense to me is "tether": all things are tethered and wound, inseparable and unique. The cords that tether are twisted and clear (silver?), not so much a spiderweb as an infinite cluster of monofilament stars. Also one star. Pearls unraveling among pearls and there is no space.

~       ~       ~

That's my whole post for the night. When I figure out a story that makes enough sense to get the idea across, I promise it will make an appearance here. The Dream was an initial shot -- which apparently has made no sense to anyone but me. And has the irritating quality of beginning each paragraph with the same phrase.

All these sentences might be better as a poem.

The Dream

"I love the tiny, sticky spring leaves, the blue sky, so there it is! There's no sense in it, no logic . . ."

You are running. You are running and you cannot run any faster, and the sky engulfed in green flickers with a striping, blending, obstinate brown scar of life and not life -- fear and unfear. You see every leaf on every tree, the colors of every flower, and somehow the smeared reality of it all is continuous and separate, transience and permanence alike. Every ant has made his journey across your path a thousand times and he is at once in all the places he has been and will ever be. Every flower blooms and unblooms, falling under the weight of its own opening, rising backwards to bud and stem, pausing gently mid-flight in one last entrancing display. There is nothing unknown here, you have seen it all and are seeing it all and again it rushes past in articulate unchanging motion.

You are running, but you don't know why. Everything around you is clear, nothing hidden, and you can see nothing that should make your soul sprint with your heart, your lungs, your mind. The green blur engulfs the sky and the sky is not obscured: sunlight trickles into every corner through cracks in the treetops that cannot possibly be there, and you note every crack from height to depth as the light seeps into the ground and out into the vastness on the other side -- green and blue and black and light. Ants and bears and undergrowth form a chimera altogether unlike itself, and each is altogether not the other though their motions meld and their actions are unsettlingly same. Only you are separate, a fleeing observer, an unwilling guest and an unwilling host. The scene would almost peaceful, if you weren't there to see it. Serene if not for the running.

You are running and you cannot stop. You cannot stop and you cannot continue and the infinitude of your stride is only dwarfed by the infinitude that remains ahead. Seeing around every trunk and every stream of light and under every sticky leaf, there are only more trunks, more cracks, more budding falling furling flowers. There is no distance though space is distinct, and the particularity of all things only heightens their separation and proximity to one another. You are running through a blur of definitions, a seamless mismatched pattern, stretched and ripped and unaffected in itself.

You are running through infinity, and infinity comes to an end. Still in the blur you are also at a great height, and below the pinnacle -- in and through and beyond and before the trees and leaves and light -- a shimmer. It is wide and unrelenting and straight. It is blinding, and yet you watch it. It is straight and thin and all consuming. It is the water below and the water above, but you are not the water in-between. You draw closer with every infinitely motionless infinite pounding step. You know you have reached the end of the heights without climbing, that the water below is closer without ever having moved. You are still running.

You are still running and there is no fear and there is no cause for fear and the beyond moves closer and stays precisely where it is and the trees grow from tiny pellets dropping flowers and growing again and receding into nascence with every heightened inch. You are still running and there is no more time. There is infinity in every moment, but the moment grows closer that you know is coming and for some reason has not come.

You are running and you know you must jump or fall or dive. You are running and you must enter the beyond and there is only one question:

When do you wake up?

why my kitten knows more than you do (and maybe my crazy parents do too)

         Well, there it is, a mewling shadow with oddly bright and dark eyes, clinging and scrambling up the split live oak in the backyard. Two years have gone by since the Craigslist Kitten Catastrophe (see "Drivers, Kittens, and Thieves: Our Modern Life"), and my parents finally decided to get another kitten. Or, as they tell it, they accidentally happened upon one. I think their mutual developing craziness helps them to forget bad things ever happened. It makes their aging quite endearing, if a bit frightening sometimes.

         Example: the parents have never been big on finishing projects. They're "project-starters," they would tell you, not "project finishers." Sometimes things come up and money or time or family keep us from finishing, says the dad. We have a lot of maintenance, from the mom. And it's true -- two acres in NorCal is no national park, but it's no walk in the park either. Still, I'm pretty sure maintenance means starting fewer projects as much as it means finishing fewer projects. And with at least 100 people showing up to my dad's birthday party in less than two weeks, I've made a mental list of things they intend to finish "sometime" or "soon":

         At least one room in the house is recently remodeled and unfurnished; one shed in the pasture still needs doors and windows (these have been missing so long the plywood covering the holes has warped fully inward, providing a splendid view of the garden through the north-facing wall); another shed in the backyard is still only half-completed and could run up to three tokens at lower-class county fairs, a maze of broken and uninstalled cabinets, bookcases, table-saws, and sawed up tables stacked up inside; a third shed on the other side of the creek is almost fully concealed by blackberry brambles that might serve equally well as bullwhips of spiky death.

         There is a retaining wall of concrete blocks next to the house, upon which sits a broken tractor and all its broken parts, decorated Deliverance-chic with cracked five-gallon buckets, sheet metal, picnic tables, and enough Rubbermaid trash cans to service Fenway Park. (A carport is supposed to grace the foundations of the wall at some point. The tractor was purchased some 4 years ago since which time it has never moved). The first layer of another wall takes up most of the parking space in front of the house -- which makes the parking of six cars an effort in creativity. Six cars, you know, for the two drivers that live here year round -- not including the two they just recently got rid of (sadly, in one case I was the buyer . . .).

         All of this strikes my parents as normal. They are wonderful people for it, really. And the fact that they accidentally have more cars than Usher (or, for the older folks, Liberace), more unfinished business than Edmond Dantes (or, for the younger folks, Bruce Wayne), and (for the second time in three years) a kitten -- this is probably as much a sign of their kindness as their craziness.

         But I digress, and as I'm thinking all this, little black kitten has clambered over 7 feet into the oak tree, choosing to stare down at me from a particularly claw-attracting patch of moss. He has fallen partway down the trunk on several occasions now, head- and tail-first, and once I was sure I would have to explain to my mother that her new kitten was no longer . . . again. I'm sure I could find someone into kitten taxidermy on Craigslist. Fortunately for my mother's psyche, the kitten's developing claws are sharp and his balance good -- and it appears he is determined to show this particular tree exactly how intimidating it is to him.

         Strangely, I know the kitten is going to come down before he looks around and checks the area, before he stops licking his back and stands back up, even before he reaches the green kitten-velcro mossy patch at all. I know he could make his way up the whole tree without trouble, though it is easily 40 feet tall. I know he is physically capable of scrambling down as well, despite his size and youth: I know how the subtle twisting branches and gnarled bark of the oak are so suitable for climbing. I know he probably wants to sit atop the very highest branch and survey his land; he is, after all, going to be king. I know the attraction of the height as a place to see and a place to be seen. He could be the kitten that did it, and all the people of the world would climb their ladders in order to wonder at his unparalleled cuteness, point out his bravery, and offer to help him down. I know and he knows, though surely in different ways.

         But I also know he won't do it, and he doesn't. He skids clumsily groundward from one velcro patch to another, bounding past me in my reverie to chase the brown and crunchy leaf which scuffled past him in the afternoon breeze. The green ones can wait, I suppose, until he's bigger or brighter or less suspicious of the fallen ones. The tall ones will fall eventually too, though he can't possibly know that and he probably does. There are new leaves to chase and new trees to begin climbing. The world is filled with things a kitten knows and doesn't know. Why would he miss out on all that for the sake of a single tree?

         So I guess, in a weird way, the hundreds of incomplete projects around my parents' house may not be inspired by laziness as much as eagerness -- as much as wonder. Maybe their foolishness is actually wisdom, something they've always known even though they don't. Maybe I don't know it either.

         I think I've got too many things to do to figure that out.

         Oh, and this is Tuba. Or, if you're my dad, Tarmac. He's pretty smart, and undeniably cute. He does not like being photographed. He also has fleas.

my u-haul the universe

          It first struck me somewhere in eastern Oklahoma, I think, careening down a hill in my 5-ton, 14ft. U-Haul rental truck. In the past 16 hours, I'd driven through hundreds of towns, each with its own infinite set of possibilities, every sign an invitation and every face a reminder that I could be anywhere. Anywhere at all. And there I was, driving 2100 miles to a giant city in the middle of the desert. And here I am.

          To be fair, I've never lived in the plains states and I never really intend to: Oklahoma, at least, is by no means without it's own personality, and it has its fair share of hills to break up the monotony (how else could I have been careening?). But the westward drive on I-40 left me with a vast sense of dislocation. The swollen greens of Missouri blended through Oklahoma into the patched openness of northern Texas, which subtly and suddenly became New Mexico desert all the same – and there I was in the middle, my ability to see out the window forever impeded only by the sloping curvature of the earth. The space itself was an open invitation to everything and nothing all at once, potential and entropy crashing together where the last green-brown blur met the sky.

          Maybe it was the week at Math Camp, but I couldn't help thinking of Zeno in that moment that he first considered his paradox. Imagine: the man stands at one end of a room staring across the infinite expanse of infinitesimal spaces set before him, unable to register the wall before him so bewildered is he by the inch and half inch and millionth of and inch and a millionth of that millionth right before his toes. He cannot help but quail at the task before him: the infinitude of motion closes in on him, the expanse ever approaching him in these millionths of millionths, some kind of inexorable localized eschaton trumpeting the banality of every possible step. He is paralyzed by the task. Which millionth of a millionth of a millionth might he dare to cross?

          In an instant, the world spins away in that green-brown blur – the walls and floor, his hands, those feet. And Zeno, a man who has never heard of canvas, finds himself twisting through some kind of monster scene, the bastard child of Van Gogh and Dadaism. His mind a swirling, darkening, stationary monument to the rigor of Greek logic, he has beaten Descartes and Sartre to the punch. He cannot know the impossible distances his blood has traveled, the countless electrons shivering with anticipation in his own fading body. How could he eat a peach?

          And in one further cosmologically shattering motion, his right foot comes into perspective, swinging confidently across such infinite space, the room bursts back into existence, and first half, then all of his body crosses this immense mass of space. As step follows step, he does what he cannot, and his mind is restored to an order that his logic could not define. Reaching the opposite side of the room, he begins to write.

          And, strangely, here I still am – me and my new city in the middle of the desert, walls and roads and sand beyond. I have taken Zeno's step inductively and crossed that room, marked the blur and walked into it. I have crossed these 2100 million millionths, and the horizon has become a solid thing – faces here and signs as well.

          There's good news, too: the blur is ever returning and the curvature of possibilities themselves ineluctable. I do believe I will enjoy taking more steps, making these infinite millionths of anywheres into somewheres to behold.