Alone, but connected

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Most avid readers don’t need much by way of motivation for what they do. Still, In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics (University of Alberta Press, 2009), a thoughtful meditation on reading by Daniel Coleman, professor of English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., provides good reasons to keep reading.

Coleman considers what’s going on in the practice of reading, and posits it as both countercultural and spiritually beneficial.

He doesn’t present a romanticized view of reading, however. People can be damaged by it (even by the “Good Book”). And, he says, “readers can be insufferable.” But what’s both countercultural and spiritual about reading is its slowness, its emphasis on critical alertness, and its way of humility. “The desire to read emphasizes a basic generosity toward the Other that is the condition of all language.”

One of the strongest arguments Coleman makes is that reading, although private and solitary, actually brings us outward toward others.

…reading does a painful and positive thing at once. It creates the isolated individual who extracts herself from the group, but that isolation is not as alienated as it looks, for reading is also a connection to others, an imaginative connection to the writers and to other readers by means of the tracks the writer has left on the page.

Coleman discusses the “right posture” of reading (charity, as per Augustine), how we encounter the “absent Other” in reading, and reading’s “wide-ranging social and political effects.” The latter are especially emphasized by stories from Ethiopia and the context of slavery in which people gain literacy for the first time.

In summary of this aspect of reading, he says,

[R]eading is a process that simultaneously individualizes us by placing the words on the page between us and the world and connects us by drawing us out of ourselves through imaginative projection toward the thoughts and experiences of others. At one and the same time, reading is a technology of alienation and a maker of new community…. For reading can give us a role to play, a direction for our energies, a way to channel our spiritual hunger that takes us into the social and political worlds in which we live.

I believe he’s right.

Mourning the oil spill

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I’ve changed the header image of this blog as a way to reference — and to remember — the Gulf oil spill. It’s a another postcard “slice” from my grandfather’s album, this time of Baku, currently capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, indeed of all the Caucasus, a port city on the Caspian Sea, which he travelled in and out of while serving as medic on the Russian troops trains during World War I. There are 11 scenes of Baku in the more than 80 postcards in his collection.

This one is of “Black City,” the industrial oil belt established in Baku. “The Black City was a cluttered landscape of oil rigs, metal storage tanks, refineries, heavy industrial manufacturing buildings and housing for workers,” says one source. The name came from “the heavy, black pall that hung above it and the smell of oil so thick that its taste lingered in your mouth.” Incidentally, the oil company that first came to prominence in Baku was founded by the Nobel brothers (one of them being Alfred, of Peace Prize fame). The Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company started extracting oil there in 1874 and dominated the European market until the Russian Revolution. Worldwide it was second largest after Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.

Black City, near Baku. Postcard about 1914.

I don’t know how much my grandfather, Heinrich Harder, actually got to see of the city. In an August 31, 1914 letter written from Baku he says,

Today we spent most of our day unloading, brought wounded men from Sharekamesh to this place and tomorrow at 8 in the morning, we begin to load again and take off to Derbent and Petrowsk Harbour. Thus it has been now for the last month — load, unload, disinfect, then load again…

On March 3, 1916, in another letter from Baku, he writes,

Today I watched three maneuvering birds, soon up in the air, then swimming on the sea — a beautiful picture! Too bad that inventions like that are used to destroy life and culture.

It was a coded message, it seems, about war planes.

These are just bits of trivia, but they bring me round to the Gulf oil spill, which for many of us seems far away. But we keep being reminded of it, and realize again it’s not a movie, and then it grieves, worries, angers us anew. This morning on CBC Radio I heard two photographers being interviewed about what they were seeing. They couldn’t help describing some of the scenes as beautiful. But it’s the beauty of destruction, like the “birds” on the Caspian Sea, and the reality, much like Baku’s Black City, beyond grim. (Baku, in fact, is still, according to 2008 data, the world’s “dirtiest” city in terms of pollution.)

Of Baku back in its Nobel oil-empire glory days, Fuad Akhundov writes,

At that time, the view of chimneys and pipes was a symbol of progress and mankind’s achievements. No one was concerned about environment and ecology.

It’s sometimes said we have a love affair with oil. Yes, and it’s a sordid one. And now, again, though hardly able to shake our oil dependency (I speak for myself), we mourn the failure, the terrible damage. I go about my daily tasks, and then I’ll remember the gallons of oil shooting from the ocean floor, and the suffering of humans and creatures in the Gulf states. Will today’s attempt, apparently risky, finally plug the spill? It finally occurred to me that I might keep this more deliberately in my prayers. Oh God, may it work!

How the wind…

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Yesterday afternoon my daughter and I went to St. Benedict’s Monastery to walk/pray the labyrinth. The labyrinth there is definitely unassuming, its beginning marked by a small arch trellis such as you might find in any garden centre, and its circling path cut by a narrow lawnmower into a low-grass field. There’s no signage, and even a short distance away the place seems only a stretch of green bracketed by trees, set beside a bricked patio-like spot designed for contemplation, complete with chairs and a small statue of Mary, lying between the monastery and the Red River.

The day was pleasantly warm without being hot, but it was windy. All day the wind had been loosening elm seeds upon us like rain, swirling them into piles in front of the door and on our deck and any other place they could find to gather. Once, while I stood on the front porch, the wind also brought me the sweet fragrance of lilacs from somewhere down the street. 

But walking the labyrinth, I didn’t notice the wind. Not at first, at least. In that relatively sheltered spot, all seemed calm. And then I heard it, strong and unmistakable in the tops of the trees. Ah, yes, of course, the wind. A reminder of the vigorous, comforting sound that marked the coming of the Spirit and the birth of the church, which we celebrated yesterday, on the Day of Pentecost. A reminder of the words spoken to Nicodemus: “The wind blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. That is how it is with all who are born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Those words further resonating with Jesus’ parting words, pre-Pentecost, “It is not for you to know times or dates that the Father has decided…”

The title of our pastor’s sermon in the morning was “Other people’s languages.” It focussed on how the transformation of the Spirit opens us to hearing and understanding others, especially in contexts in which we talk “past” one another. Pentecost reverses Babel, our pastor said, not by reducing us to fewer languages, or to one, but by enlarging us to more in our ability to speak and understand.

Recently, in a blog post titled “A Hermeneutic of Generosity,” Debra Dean Murphy spoke of the need for more than politeness to bridge the conversational polarities we find ourselves in as persons, churches, and cultures. Needed, she suggests, is “curiosity” and “compassion” (both of which, it occurs to me, characterize the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus), as well as truth-telling (which surely characterizes Peter’s sermon at Pentecost). A hermeneutic of generosity, she says, interprets what others say or intend “in a favorable light.” Perhaps it even interprets so that, as in the Acts 2 account, we hear declared “the wonders of God.”

I’ve been mulling on this, thinking of the many “languages” I speak or understand poorly, or not at all, and of the unfavorable interpretations I’m so quick to place on the words of someone with whom I disagree. Thinking of how the images given us for Spirit involve both unknowing (mystery) and knowing (sound), remembering how the wind played above the grass and its turns of prayer, and how it scatters and stacks up seeds. How it carries the scent of lilacs.