Anonanimal

Five Guys I’ve Never Met who Made Me Believe in Life Again, Part 5: Sufjan Stevens

2010-10-24T23:49:00.008-04:00

5.
Name: Sufjan Stevens.
Age: 35.
Occupation: Composer, singer-songwriter, and regional biographer.
Alma mater: Hope College.
Influences: Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and Flannery O’Connor.

Sufjan Stevens never wanted to be a folk singer. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from NYC’S The New School, went broke, and then embarked on his musical career. In 2003, he declared his intention to record albums for all 50 states, but after the release of Illinois andMichigan, declared the thing a joke. A recent project, a multimedia homage to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, featured a 36-piece orchestra and 16-mm film footage of hula-hoopers.

I’ve been trying to write this essay for a year. You would not believe the copious notes I’ve accumulated in that span of time—fifteen or twenty pages, at least. I’ve read four dozen interviews and twenty-five articles on the man. I’ve written eight drafts. I did all my homework, and yet, every word I tried to write about him sounded awkward and hollow.

I was convinced I was never going to finish writing about Sufjan until last weekend, when Significant Other and I journeyed to Chicago to see him in the flesh. As we sat in the ornate auditorium, every inch of it carpeted or gilded, my anticipation soared. It didn't feel like I was about to encounter a celebrity so much as a mythological figure from my childhood, like Santa, or the Easter Bunny, or the imaginary friends I had from Star Trek. (Come, now. You know you had those too.)

I first discovered Sufjan in 2005, just after the release of Come on, Feel the Illinoise!, the album that got him played in Little Miss Sunshine and earned him indie accolades galore. I only started listening to him because I stumbled across his name in a magazine and was puzzled by it. “Sufjan?” I thought. This was a moniker easily mangled, just like mine. I felt a kinship with him from then on.

Over time, I thought of him as my personal minstrel. His was the voice I chose to sing me through my first heartaches, my first true disappointments, my glimmering mornings and shadowy afternoons. Why him, you ask? Why this eclectic stranger? It was simple: he felt familiar. We had a lot in common. Both of us grew up in large families. Both of us grew up inMichigan. Both of us grew up in—and later left—charismatic and boisterous divisions of the Christian church. Both of us attended small, private liberal-arts schools and studied creative writing. Both of us sat in our cinderblock dorm rooms, clutching our guitars, playing songs we wrote for no one. Fortunately for me, I heard his.

Ballads like these and others sustained me through college. I learned dozens of his songs, emblazoned them on my memory: "To Be Alone With You," "Concerning the UFO Sighting..." But there was one song—an intricate and lengthy epic—that stood out above all others. It was called “Seven Swans.”

Fly with me, if you will, to the February of my junior year, an unforgiving year, a gray year brimming with loneliness and existential crises. A drab and fruitless winter encrusted with gray snow. Picture me, if you will: heart hardened, mind burdened, possessing a cynical soul. I am driving a blue Buick Regal Gran Sport, circa 1995. I am listening to “Seven Swans.” And I am running away from God.

Let me provide you with context. I am not one of those people who can do something half-heartedly. I’m not a toe-dipper in the slightest; I either dive into each endeavor or I leave it alone. This particularly applies to religion. Even as a kid, I was religiously ardent, that irritating waif in Sunday School who peppered each morning with questions. Nor was my ardor limited to inquiry; there were actions too. I prayed perpetually. I studied my Bible, highlighting entire pages in fuchsia and electric green and cautionary yellow. I wanted to be a missionary. And an astronaut. A missionary astronaut. I would lead all them aliens to Jesus—because, you know, them aliens had souls too.

Fast-forward, now, to the roadworn Buick. In my old age, belief in God has become too complicated. It’s not working out. It’s too risky. I, the rational and recently-enlightened undergrad, cannot hinge my livelihood on the existence of something I cannot see or feel or touch, and who academia analyzed out of existence anyway. Confused, I turn to the same old answers everyone does: the cold hard facts of the Real World, the wars and sorrow and friends’ deaths from cancer. Compared to these things, my childhood fervor looks trite. I lean toward giving it up.

These feelings are not pleasant. When your livelihood depends on the truth of one being’s existence, and that being disappears, reality itself seems to crumble.

With positively stunning self-confidence (read: arrogance), I decide that God’s existing depends on my believing in him. Kind of like Tinkerbell. Belief that had gotten me into this mess, this agony of soul, so ceasing that belief will get me out. I decide to walk away from my faith. I make this decision while driving my Buick, imagining fuzzily that God was located behind me, living somewhere on the east side of the city. If drive away from him, God will leave me alone.

On my car stereo, Sufjan mumbles blithely and strums along on his banjo. Then he sings the following:

He will take you.
If you run, he will chase you,
‘cause he is the Lord.

And, just in case I had missed it the first time, he sings it again:

He will take you.
If you run, he will chase you,
‘cause he is the Lord.

And then, simply,

He is the Lord.

Sufjan sang, and suddenly I believed him.

I’m not going to pretend that this one song changed everything. I didn’t instantly revert back to heartfelt monotheism; it took another concert to pull that one off. But it did make me realize that, even if I turned my back on God, even if I rejected him flat, he would still find me someday. Maybe in a couple months. Maybe in fifty-four years, on my deathbed. No matter how long it took God, he would always keep trying to find me, whether I liked it or not. In those days, those heartsore transitional days, nothing in my life was certain, and so I found these thoughts comforting. I still wasn't sure what I believed or why, but I kept at it. In the meantime, Sufjan embodied a faith I found both stimulating and beautiful.

These days, I feel far more ideologically settled. It could be that college is done and behind me. It could be the new apartment, the steady job. It could be the ever-constant presence of Significant Other. It could be that I've found a church that makes me feel at home. But panic can accompany this stasis; without the perpetual struggle of my faith being endangered, I now fear becoming complacent. Maybe I 'll forget about God. Or maybe he’ll forget about me. These were the thoughts floating through my head as we sat in the Chicago Theater, waiting for Sufjan to appear.

We almost hadn’t come that day, Significant Other and I. Sufjan had released a new album that week, The Age of Adz, and it was freaking weird. Gone was the comforting banjo I’d known, lush folk now replaced with thundering electronica. Sufjan didn't sing of widows or faith; instead, the new record was a concept album inspired by an artist-schizophrenic. Who was this new Sufjan? We recognized him, but only a little bit. It was like seeing Santa flying a spaceship.

The night before the show, we listened to the new album and sat there bewildered. Significant Other wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know if I actually like this, or just feel like I’m supposed to,” he said. Concert reviews informed us he wouldn’t be singing the old songs, anyway. So much for my “Seven Swans.” So much for the comfort I'd known.

In the end, we decided to go to the show anyway. We had third-row seats, after all. This would be miserable if the show was an art-rock disaster. Tour reviews warned us that Sufjan's setlist was comprised of wholly new material; we likely wouldn't recognize a song. But we went anyway.

Sufjan and his twelve-person band sauntered onto the stage. He wore a Korean Frosted Flakes T-shirt. He didn’t say anything. He picked up his banjo, and then he sang,

He will take you.
If you run, he will chase you.
‘cause he is the Lord.

He is the Lord.
He is the Lord.
He is the Lord.

photo credit: www.flickr.com/iamcreativ

The Nine Books that Live on my Nightstand

2010-10-09T10:05:00.008-04:00

My title is too kind. Really, this post should be called "The Nine Books that Occupy my Floor, my Desk, and Anyplace Else I Happened to Leave Them." A recent move seemed to demote my level of personal neatness from a seven to about a three. This is bad.

The good news is that I've started reading again. Finally, after four long months of recovery from school, giving my beleaguered brain a chance to rekindle itself, I am returning to my books. (And to writing. Obviously.)

1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers.
This book is the reason I'm writing again. It's probably also the reason that everything I've written thus far is sprinkled generously with dependent clauses and appositives (that right there is fancy grammar speak for "being long-winded"). I first encountered Dave around the tender age of twenty. At this point, I'd begun to have sneaking suspicions that the world wasn't as spotless as I'd hoped—though I was far too terrified to admit it. Dave gave voice to my anxieties, and I felt emboldened by his brutal honesty.

2. Anne of the Island, L.M. Montgomery.
Most days, I turn up my nose at Anne of Green Gables; it's a schmaltzy and occasionally embarrassing relic from my homeschoolery past. But on some days, days when I'm overwhelmed with Life and the Dizzyingly Rapid Passage of Time and Good Lord We're All Growing Up and Getting Older, Aren't We?, Anne hits the spot. This one's my favorite because it's the one where she moves off to college and—spoileralertspoileralert—finally gets together with Gilbert. Because we all knew THAT was coming. Durr.

3. Somewhere More Holy, Tony Woodlief.

I came across Tony Woodlief by happenstance. A couple years ago, this Wall Street Journal article lay open upon my parents' coffee table, and I ate it up. Tony writes about about the same things that fill my own head: doubt, education, and the trouble with being an evangelical.

4. American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell.
Bonnie Jo was my professor once. (Would it be tacky to admit she's the only one who ever gave me an A+?) We got to see snippets of this short story collection in our Intro to Creative Writing class long before it was published, long before it almost won the National Book Award, long before she got all famous and was on NPR and stuff. The funny thing was that she didn't expect it to sell.

5. "The Events of October," Gail Griffin.

This one was also written by a professor of mine. I can't tell you how awe-inspiring it is to come across a book in Barnes and Noble, feel its weight in your hands, and realize that you know personally the woman responsible for every freaking word between the two covers. In it, Gail examines the story of a murder-suicide that happened at our school in 1999—in the same dorm that I lived in, actually. There was some speculation that "the event" had occurred in my room. I have recently been informed that it didn't.

6. Je-Parlez Francais?, Berlitz Publishing.

My mother studied French in college. Consequently, my middle name is French. Also consequently, I learned the French word for “brother” (“frère”) right about the same time I learned what a brother was. This book introduced this and other such concepts to me, all via a small brown bear named Teddy. On the page when Teddy visits the playground, I scrawled my name in vibrant pink pen.

7. The Orthodox Church, Timothy Ware.

Orthodoxy is a very old and widespread branch of Christianity that's surprisingly little-known in evangelical circles. Don't be embarrassed that you've never heard of it. I hadn't either, until about a year ago. I think that, sometimes, we'd like to think our religion was invented in 1950. In the Midwest. By Americans. But the truth of the matter is that Christianity is an ancient faith, and it didn't begin on this continent. Timothy Ware explains the origins of Orthodoxy and how it still survives to this day.

8. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky.

I first heard about this one in the New Yorker. (Just for the record: I don't usually read New Yorker. I browse it occasionally so I can begin sentences with "I was reading the New Yorker the other day..." It impresses people.) Clay Shirky's arguing that, post-WWII, Americans found themselves with more free time than ever, thanks to sparkly new inventions like dishwashers and ironing boards. Back then, we filled our free time with television. Now, we fill it with the internet. The real question is whether we're using this tool for good or for ill.

9. Sam and the Firefly, Dr. Seuss.
(See, the only reason I can get away with admitting I read New Yorker to impress people is that I confess to reading Dr. Seuss immediately after. It's called being brutally honest. Thank you, Dave Eggers.) This was my favorite book when I was very, very small...small enough that, when I discovered it again, I didn't remember any of the words—just the pictures. And the pictures are beautiful. The setting—a dark and endless night—bears more than a little resemblance to that of Howard and the Purple Crayon, which has also haunted me for years. I think we kids want to know that if we ever choose to go wandering about in the night, we can always come home safely.

A love letter to my senior project

2010-04-17T22:45:00.006-04:00

Dear SIP,

It hasn’t even been two days yet, and I miss you.

We both knew this would happen.

I listened to some of our old songs today—a hodgepodge collection of the best Andrew Bird—and I got kind of choked up. Just a little. This surprised me, because when we were together, I treated you like a burden. I complained about you. I groaned over you. I told everyone I’d be better off when you’d gone. I exploited you for my own convenience, used you as an excuse when I was feeling antisocial—“Oh, I can’t go out tonight, guys. I have to work on my SIP.” (Most of the time it was true.)

Lord, was I harsh toward you. I was an expert at finding your flaws and inconsistencies. Until the end, I flipped through your pages and thought, “Dear God. I should have said ‘bibliophilic mass’ instead of ‘bibliophilic pile.’ Who wrote this drivel?” But these were trivial things. I was probably only critical of you because I'm critical of myself.

The truth is, I loved you. I loved you not because of your pomp or your greatness—imagined or otherwise—but because you were mine. I loved you because I could hold you in the hollow of my hands and say,
I made this.

Oh, the nights that we spent together, the long nights that slipped into mornings, the nights when I forgot myself and all my trivialities. On those tender evenings, our selves fused, and parting us became impossible. I got lost in you, became swallowed up in something more beautiful and truthful than myself. On our last night together, you slept by my bedside.

Then the day came—that startling day when I had to turn you in. Hours before, I printed you, and I sat in the library and held you, and I felt your warmth against me. I realized then that I loved you. How frightened I was—frightened for myself, and for both of us—because I knew that handing you in would mean a severance. Losing you would be like losing a limb, like closing a door inside myself, never to be opened again. Losing you would mean the end of something treasured.

Still, I knew the inevitable, and you did too. I had to hand you over.

My affection does not depend on what becomes of you. Maybe you’ll become something someday. Maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll sit on the shelf in Humphrey House with all the other English SIPs and fraternize. Maybe another lost soul will open you in forty years, and discover something of himself inside you.

Whatever happens, you will always be mine.

I love you.

-E.

The Twelve Books that Live on my Nightstand

2010-04-07T02:05:00.010-04:00

In no particular order:

1. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger.
I prefer having this one near me at all times.

2. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Don Miller.
Says Don: "The stories we tell ourselves are very different from the stories we tell the world." His stories are the most brutally honest I know. I read them and I say, "Ouch. Yes. I've done that too."

3. Stuff Christians Like, Jonathan Acuff.
For instance: side hugs, occasionally swearing, and ranking honeymoon sex slightly higher than the second coming of Christ. Brilliant.

4. Hunger, Lan Samantha Chang.
For the two hours that it took me to read this book, I forgot I existed.

5. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Timothy Keller.
This book saved my faith. Along with Andrew Bird, Spike Jonze, and about a billion other things, of course.

6. The Wild Things, Dave Eggers.
Oh, Dave.

7. The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story, Richard Preston.
This is about germs and diseases and stuff. It's been on my nightstand since Christmas. I can't bring myself to read it.

8. Hamlet.

9. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, John H. Walton.
I haven't read this one either.

10. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger.
Read "To Esme with Love and Squalor." Reread. Repeat.

11. A Year with C.S. Lewis.
This man is my literary father.

12. The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis.
"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering, which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself."

So that's it. That's my nightstand. At present, the Where the Wild Things Are and Fantastic Mr. Fox DVDs live there too.

My literary brain is still eaten up by the senior project. But it'll be done soon. And hopefully, my creative f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s will remain intact.

I only read the New Yorker for the cartoons.

2010-03-10T12:05:00.011-05:00

(No, I'm not procrastinating or avoiding my senior project. Why would you ask that?)

This last one isn't New Yorker, but it's my favorite cartoon of all time.

To the Boy who Played Me Chopin: Or, Why I'm Glad as Heck My Life is Not a Sandra Bullock Movie

2010-02-25T12:00:00.034-05:00

Recently, I’ve had two odd experiences involving total strangers and a piano.

The first happened at work, in a crusty practice room littered with stale Reese’s wrappers. My job is wholly cerebral, and so on my break I run to the practice rooms and I play, trying to shut off my throbbing brain for a minute. The pianos are tuned only once at the beginning of each school year, and by the time February rolls around they sound pretty awful. My piano today sounded remarkably honky-tonk.

As a musician, I’ve always had this secret fantasy that one day, I’ll be sitting there, playing and minding my own business, and someone will enter the room and he’ll say (yes, it’s always a he), “My God! What were you playing? That’s beautiful!”

“Oh,” I’ll say with a flip of my hand, “it was just something I wrote.”

How casual I shall be! How nonchalant! I'll gaze at him steadily and finger my platinum-blonde hair. (In my fantasy world, I resemble Gwyneth Paltrow. Early '00s Gwyneth Paltrow. Think Margot Tenenbaum.)

Then—oh, joy!—he’ll turn out to be a musician too, and then we’ll be fast friends, and we’ll ride off into the sunset. Or the cafeteria. Or something.

Well, the other day I was sitting there, minding my own business, and I finished playing something my friend Cusack and I have been working on for months—an epic, eight-minute blend of Muse, Chopin, and Debussy. And then this person I had never seen before entered the room and closed the door behind him. He looked like a young, shabby Jason Schwartzman, of all people. “What was that piece you were playing?” he asked.

I reddened. “It was something I wrote,” I said. “I mean, that my band wrote.”

“How did you do that?” he said.

I showed him. Naturally, now that I had an audience, I sucked.

Not-Jason didn’t seem to mind. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “I love it.” He smiled, and then he bent over and unzipped his backpack, pulling out sheet music, Chopin and Debussy. He asked me if I’d ever heard of Muse.

I told him I plagiarized Muse on a regular basis. Not-Jason didn’t seem to mind this either. He was a pretty easy-going guy. He started going on and on about all these songs by Muse. I hadn’t heard any of them, but I wanted to look like I knew what I was talking about, so I nodded and said, “Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, that’s a good one.” Not-Jason sat down and started playing Chopin. He wasn’t bad.

After that, we stood around and looked at each other for a minute, and then we talked about nothing, and then I told him I had to get back to work. And that was it.

If this had been a movie, things would have ended differently. If my life was a crappy rom-com directed by Garry Marshall that will make $50 million on its opening weekend just because of Sandra Bullock and her not-quirk, it might have ended like this:

Not-Jason finishes his Chopin. Elyse giggles uncontrollably. She snorts.

ELYSE [covering her nose]: Oh my God! I’m so sorry!

NOT-JASON: Did you just snort?

E. [still giggling]: No! [She snorts again.] Yes! Oh my God!

[She starts to run out of the room, but trips and falls. He catches her.]

N.-J.: I think it’s cute.

[They stare at each other. Cue “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol.]

Dear God.

Truth be told, I like the real ending better, in which I ran off and phoned my friend Cusack—the one who wrote the song with me—and told him our music was so good that it moved total strangers to interrupt private practice sessions and declare their adoration. Thing is, I was so excited that my phone skills (which are pretty shoddy to begin with—I hate talking on the phone) deteriorated and I found myself shouting, “Boy! Piano! Muse! Plagiarism!” Needless to say, Cusack was thoroughly confused.

The second Weird Thing happened in the chapel at school. (As a side note, I’m surprised we’re still allowed to call it “the chapel.” Chapel services themselves, which have been secular for decades, were recently redubbed “Community Reflections.” This reached a new level of absurdity last quarter when we held a Community Reflection about Intimate Partner Violence. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon we have Community Reflections in the Center for Spiritual, Humanistic and Tree-Huggery Thought. Anyway. )

Nomenclature aside, the chapel is an ethereal place to play. It’s one of those places I run to when I’m either glowingly happy or blackly depressed, like last winter, when I got turned down from study abroad. I ran up the hill to the chapel and played for two solid hours. I played until my arms hurt, and then I kept playing anyway. Outside, the snow fell slowly.

A year later, on the afternoon of this Strange Occurrence, the sun was out. I took my shoes off. (I always take my shoes off when I play in the chapel. That way I can actually feel the smooth metal of the pedals.) Then I stepped on the stage and sat down at the Baldwin grand, which is ancient and immaculately tuned.

Half an hour later, I had to go to class, and so I descended from realms ethereal and started getting ready to go. Then I heard a voice from the balcony.

“You took me to the woods,” it said.

I looked up, startled. “I what?” I said.

“You took me to the woods,” the lady said. She was a cleaning lady, and she was staring down at me. She had long gray hair and had probably been a hippie in a past life.

These are not the sorts of conversations one usually has with strangers. “What did you see in the woods?” I asked. (The nice thing about conversations with strangers, though, is that if something becomes awkward, you never have to see them again. Thus, it's appropriate to take a little more risk than usual.)

“I saw a lot of things,” she said, arms slung over the railing. “I saw a lot of things, and you took me there.” She paused contemplatively, and then she said, “How does it feel to be enormously talented? Does it feel good?”

I shouldered my backpack of Important Books to Read and pondered how to answer this question. These aren’t the sorts of things one usually asks of strangers unless they’re irritated--i.e., "How ya feelin', punk? Ya feelin' good?" But the cleaning lady didn’t sound malicious. She wasn’t making fun of me. It occurred to me suddenly that this maintenance person was in possession of sensibilities just like mine. She could feel things too, even though I carried a bag full of Important Books and she scrubbed walls dirtied by the soles of selfish liberal arts kids.

It’s a very strange thing when something you do moves somebody enough for them to tell you about it. It's strange because making art is an often solitary and sometimes very lonely affair. I wrote one of the songs I played for the cleaning lady after the death of a friend a couple years back. I never thought I would share it with anybody: it was just my attempt at reckoning with something that didn't make sense. But apparently it made sense to her.

I was watching an interview with Chris Martin of Coldplay the other day, and he said that most of his songs, now consumed by millions, were written in moments of extreme loneliness, dark hours when no one can hear you and all the world’s asleep. And yet here were these songs, songs borne out of sorrow, being sung by stadiums full of people. Turns out Chris wasn’t the only one who was “lost and hurt and lonely too.”

I stood in the chapel, stood beneath the balcony with the cleaning lady. She thought I was enormously talented. Did it feel good? She wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said. “But only if I get to take people to the woods.”

Five Guys I've Never Met who Made Me Believe in Life Again, Part Four: Spike Jonze

2010-02-18T12:06:00.025-05:00

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

-Where The Wild Things Are

4.
Birth name: Adam Spiegel.
Age: 40.
Occupation: Film director and sometimes screenwriter.
First job: Working at a BMX shop.
Dislikes: Olives and mushrooms. (He says they’re evil.)

Spike Jonze is not heir to the Spiegel family fortune. He grew up in Rockville, Maryland and spent most of his childhood skateboarding. Jonze is known for his films Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, as well as a slew of inventive commercials and music videos.

The photo above is the whole reason I saw Where The Wild Things Are. Hitherto, I’d had no interest in the book or the film; all the connection I had with them was a fuzzy memory of being six and freaked out by little stuffed Wild Things in Barnes and Noble. I didn’t understand why anyone would cuddle something with fangs. But then I saw this photo of Spike Jonze and Max Records, and I knew I had to see this movie, though I wasn't sure why. It reminded me of something.

When the trailer for Wild Things first came out in March, I watched it over and over again. Seldom had I anticipated a movie so much. I watched countless behind-the-scenes videos, read dozens of interviews, and indulged in other such reckless nerdhood. Finally, it came out in October. I loved it. I saw it three times. It was an honest and devastating look at childhood. But still, I was kind of disappointed. The movie was beautiful, but the third time I saw it, I felt like it was missing something.

Eventually what I figured out was that, though I loved Wild Things, what I really loved was the story behind it. The story of Spike and Max Records.

This video really gets me for some reason. The part that gets me the most is when Max gets licked by one of the Wild Things, and he gets grossed out because his face is all goopy. Spike yells “CUT!” and then he walks up to Max.

“Sorry,” says Max. He sounds like he’s afraid of getting in trouble.

“It’s okay. I know it’s hard,” Spike says, and he wipes the goo off of Max’s face himself. He doesn’t ask a crew guy to do the dirty work for him. He doesn’t cry out for the makeup team. Spike walks up to Max and he wipes the goo off his face himself.

There was another scene in Wild Things that required Max to be covered in goo, and Max hated it so much that, after a couple takes, he would only let them film the scene again unless Spike let Max cover him in goo. And he did.

And I started thinking…this kind of reminds me of God.

“But Elyse,” you say, “this is a seriously flawed metaphor. God doesn’t hire us. God doesn’t pay us money to act out stuff. God doesn’t control everything that happens to us like some master puppeteer.” And you’re right on all accounts. Really, any metaphor that attempts to describe God is flawed on some level, because God is indescribable. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Here’s my attempt: God is like Spike Jonze, who gets covered in goo.

Let me explain. I’ve been wondering for some time if God is really empathetic. At the beginning of one of my writing classes last year, my professor asked us to write down what question we would ask if we could ask anything in the world. I wrote, “What does God really think of us?”

For all I’ve been taught, a large part of me still pictures God as being indifferent to our circumstances. He doesn’t want to help us, I think, and if he does help, he does so begrudgingly. “Elyse needs me again?” says the God In My Head. “Geeeeez. Can’t this girl take care of herself by now?”

I thought this, and then I met my friend Dante.

Dante is a brilliant writer. He's so brilliant that, after his professors read his essays, they gallavant around the room like the teacher in A Christmas Story. (I know this is true. They’ve told me so.) I've tried telling Dante this, but I don't think he believes me. I think someday I will tell people that I used to get coffee with Dante, and they won’t believe me either.

Dante is also an atheist. The funny thing about this is that I’ve learned a lot about God from Dante. I’ve learned more about God from Dante than just about anyone else I know.

One night, I was up really really late writing. It was three or four o’clock in the morning, and I was trying to distract myself through the Internet, like I usually do. Through said Internet I found out that Dante was in trouble. Big trouble. The kind of trouble that you can’t get out of all by yourself.

Now understand that I am not an especially empathetic person. Maybe it’s because I was raised Republican, but I used to look at suffering people and say, “That’s nice. Now pull yourself up by your bootstraps, please.” I think this might be why I expected God to be indifferent too. (In retrospect, this was anthropomorphism at its worst.)

But when I found out about Dante, I didn’t feel that way at all. I wanted to help him. I didn’t have his phone number, and there was nothing I could do, so I just stayed up all night and prayed for him. Had I known where Dante lived, I would have jumped in my car and sped to his house, even though it was three o’clock in the morning and there was black ice on the roads. I would have broken down the door. I would have done anything to save him.

Later, when I found out that he was okay, and that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding, I went to my car and cried for half an hour—which was weird, because I only cry maybe three or four times a year. My best friend has never seen me cry.

I told my friend Lindsey this whole story, and about my wondering how God feels about us, and she said, “Well, that’s it right there.”

“What’s it?” I said. (I’m kind of slow sometimes.)

“‘I would have done anything to save him,’” she said. “If you’re trying to understand how God feels—which is pretty unfathomable—God pretty much said, ‘I’ll do anything to save him,’ and then he ran off and did just that.”

When Lindsey said this, I had to sit down for a minute. I was stunned. If I, a person, and a pretty selfish one at that, had been so worried about another person, one that I didn't know very well, how did God feel about us?

I told Dante about all of this, about all of the things he had taught me about God. (I made sure he knew I wasn't hitting on him, because, you know, girls say weird things to get guys sometimes.) I rambled on for a good ten or fifteen minutes. When I got to the part about my wanting to help him, I thought I was going to cry again.

It didn’t matter if he believed what I believed. I wasn't trying to make a convert out of him. I just wanted him to know that I cared about him. Dante sat there silently and gave me this look I will never forget. Dante gets very sad sometimes, and when he does, his eyes look like dark holes inside of his head--they're closed off, like they don’t want to take in anything else of the world. But that night, his eyes weren’t like that. They searched me. They were looking at me like they wanted to bore right through me. They were looking for a catch.

This shouldn’t have surprised me, because I do the same thing to God all the time. Okay, God, I say, that stuff about you loving me unconditionally is nice and all, but where’s the cold, hard truth? Where’s the heart of the matter?

The heart of the matter is that there is no catch.

Back to Spike and Max. Back to the goo. When my friend said that “God ran off and did just that”—did the anything to save us—she was referring to the Incarnation. This was God's ultimate act of empathy: becoming a man, dealing with the common cold and the same crap (pun intended) that you and I deal with on a daily basis. God let himself get covered in goo. Some of this stuff we don’t really like to talk about in church—like I told Dante, Jesus had a penis. (If you’re curious about Jesus and his manhood, there’s a book called The Gospel of Biff that I highly recommend.)

Why does this help? Because it means that God understands what it is to feel pain.

I, like everyone else on the planet, often wrestled with the “Why Do Bad Things Happen?” question. I came to the conclusion that bad things happen because people make bad choices. I was okay with that, because of free will and everything. But what I wanted to know, what I needed to know in order to trust God, was that he was moved by these things. I wouldn’t want to follow a God who sat indifferent and unmoved by all our sufferings. I needed a God who felt things, and felt them more deeply than I did. After talking to Dante, I understood that he did.

Contrary to logic, though, a caring God is far less comforting than you might think. It’s easier to deal with the thought of a God who’s indifferent—because if he’s indifferent toward me, it’s okay for me to be indifferent toward him. But a God who can feel, can be hurt, and I hurt him all the time.

Some days I wish God didn’t give a damn about me (again, pun intended—sorry), because that would mean I could do whatever I want. Some days I’d prefer a Big-Man-In–the-Sky God who waves his fingers and says, “Go off and do what you want, my children! Fornicate away!” But if parents did that, we wouldn’t think they were good parents. We’d think they were crazy. Parents tell us not to run out in the street because they love us. By the same token, it’s God’s giving a damn what happens—his giving a damn about me—that makes this whole thing worth it.

So really, this has nothing to do with Spike Jonze at all, which is why writing this essay took me four months. But look at this picture of Spike and Max Records anyway. It reminds me of me and God.

A Retraction (or, in the very least, a repentant postscript)

2010-02-13T14:01:00.009-05:00

Return with me, if you will, to the winter of 2003. To a dark movie theater. To that December afternoon when you finally saw Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. You with me? Okay. Fast-forward for a good while, past Minas Tirith and Pelennor Fields, to the last fifteen minutes of the movie. Remember all the fake endings? Remember how the film faded over the bleak image of Frodo and Sam huddled near the underside of a collapsing volcano, clutching each other, awaiting their, erm, doom? If you were like me, you saw this, and you wiped your misty fifteen-year-old eyes, gathered your things together and got ready to go. But wait—wait! There’s more! Here come the eagles! And wait—wait! Here’s Frodo awakening in Rivendell! And wait—wait! The Shire! Et cetera, et cetera.

This is my wait!—wait!

I think that, in my eagerness to publish again and possible short-sightedness, I only gave you half the picture. I told you we were all intrinsically unlovable. By this I meant that humanity, in all its strivings and weaknesses, could not give back to God anything he didn’t have already. He couldn’t love us an account of anything we did. That’s true. But there’s another side to this coin. We are also intrinsically valuable.

Don’t go thinking I flip-flopped. I stand by the things I said earlier. But after reading a bunch of stuff and talking to a bunch of people, I realized something else. We are valuable. And remember that this isn’t because of anything we did. We are valuable because we are, and because God made us. By this I’m not necessarily arguing that “GOD DESIGNED MY EVERY PART IN UTERO AND DECIDED WHICH FRECKLES SHOULD GO ON MY NOSE.” I’m not even going to pretend I can figure out if that’s true or not.

But if we step back a bit—okay, a lot—and look at the origins of the universe, if there was some kind of cosmic being who designed and composed the fragments of our reality, then he has left his mark on us. Even if he only created the particles to set the chain reaction of the universe’s inception into motion, we are made of those particles. As a friend of mine put it, “Every cell in our bodies is marked with the image of God.”

(He said this while we were driving down the road and when we got to the restaurant I tried to write it down but my stupid pen wasn’t working and so I had to wait until the waitress came with the check and then I grabbed the pen that she brought and I scribbled. A drunken passerby saw me and asked if I was taking notes on my food. I wasn’t. But I digress.)

Now you could say, “Alright, Elyse. That’s fine. I accept that the Supreme Being had some hand in designing my particles. But following your logic, those same particles make up everything else. I may be marked with the image of God, but so is a cabbage.”

Now hold on a second. That’s not quite what I mean. Don’t mistake me—it’s good to acknowledge the interchangeability of matter. We all need to play Hamlet at some point and realize that every piece of matter in us was something else before it was us, and will be something else when we’re gone. But I think we’re more than matter. I think we all have spirits too, because God is a spirit, and he made us to resemble himself. This is what I mean when I say we are made in the image of God. This is why we are all glorious. This is why we are infinitely valuable.

“There are no ordinary people,” C.S. Lewis tells us. “You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life to ours is as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors…Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”

This is both humbling and terrifying. Humbling because it removes the possibility of pretension, of my thinking that I am any better than anybody else. It means the smelly guy I see at work who has never used a computer and spells his last name with dollar symbols is just as valuable to God as I am. It’s not because of anything he did. It’s because he’s God’s. This idea is also terrifying because I’m supposed to treat him accordingly.

This is the crux of my faith. That same eloquent friend I quoted earlier lives by the tenet that we love God by loving people, which is also terrifying. It means that when I interact with people, I am supposed to love them like God does. This is the scariest thing in the universe. I’m really really bad at it. I can think of maybe two times I did it well. But it’s the reason I’m alive.

I think Thrice says it better than I do. “We’re more than carbon and chemicals,” they say. “We are the image of the invisible.” No matter how far I run from God—and trust me, I run hard and often—he comes after me. I cannot escape him. His mark is on every cell in my body. His name is in my very essence, and every day he cries out to me, You are mine. You are mine. You are mine--even (and especially) when I don't want to hear it.

On that note, I’d like to dispel a myth. I don’t think God is mad at us. The other day, I asked a friend to consider his parents in order to understand this. “Remember how your parents always told you not to run out in the road?” I said. “If you did anyway and you got hit by a car, they wouldn’t stand there and say, ‘Geez—why did you do that? We’re so mad at you.’ No. They’d run screaming and say ‘Oh my God! You got hit by a car!’ and then they would come and rescue you.”

Well. So does God.

Thrice, take it away.

Five Guys I've Never Met who Made Me Believe in Life Again, Part 3: Holden Caulfield

2010-02-11T11:39:00.012-05:00

3.
Name: Holden Caulfield.
Age: Roughly seventeen.
Occupation: High school dropout.
Influences: ?

I don’t know why, but for the longest time, I thought Catcher in the Rye was about kids making out in a rye field. It’s not. It’s about Holden Caulfield.

I realize that, at this point, I’ve lost almost all of you. A third of you are staring at the title above and are saying, “Who the heck is Holden Caulfield?” Another third of you are saying, “Holden Caulfield? Really? How unforgivably trendy and hipster of you.” (For the record, I started writing this long before Mr. Salinger kicked the bucket, God rest his soul.)

The last third of you saw this picture and were thoroughly confused. “Elyse,” you say, “that’s not Holden Caulfield. That’s Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore. You are poorly educated and misinformed.”

Bear with me. There’s a point here. And that point is, when I read Catcher in the Rye, I kept picturing Holden as young Jason Schwartzman. For me, young Jason Schwartzman is Holden Caulfield. So there you go.

The real Holden Caulfield is the hero of Catcher in the Rye, and he’s very depressed. He lives in a world full of phonies, and he knows it. Take his observation in a movie theater:

“The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.”

Holden sees phonies everywhere he looks. His friends are phonies. His classmates are phonies. This is the terrifying realization that, at some point in our lives, all of us must face: our friends and relatives and everyone we know is trying just as hard as we are to keep up appearances. On some level, all of us are phonies.

Sometimes I’m a phony too. I admit it. Let me give you an example.

Several years ago, before I found a home at [insert name of liberal arts college here], I visited a liberal arts college on the other end of the political spectrum. Said school dedicated itself to the preservation of “traditional values,” and hence the dorm lobby bookshelves overflowed with titles such as The Case for Marriage, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, and The Da Vinci Hoax. I’m not kidding.

I knew all this going in. I had been groomed heavily by friends and mentors who told me exactly what the admission officers were looking for. They told me what magic words would ensure my swift entrance to the college and a hefty scholarship. So during my interview, when I was asked to expound upon a cause that was important to me, I said, “The preservation of the Constitution.”

Let me be clear. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Constitution. I didn’t then, even though I identified far more with conservatism then than I do now. I understood it was vital to the founding of our beloved country and all, but in all honesty, I had not given it two seconds’ worth of thought before that moment. But the admissions officer was oblivious to all this and scribbled glowing remarks about me in her notebook: Loves! The! Constitution! OMG! (She was very young.)

The magic words had worked. I felt nauseous, however, because I knew I was as artificial as they come. I fled from that school. I didn’t even end up applying.

I’d like to pretend that when I came to [insert name of liberal arts college here], everything changed; I was transformed. But that’s not true either. Just take a look at my admission essay:

I am applying to [insert name of liberal arts college here] because its qualities reflect much of what I hold dear: academic excellence, diversity, and a commitment to excellence. I hope to graduate from [insert name of liberal arts college here] with more than an English degree. Rather, it is my goal to emerge as a better writer and a more well-rounded person.

Diversity? “A more well-rounded person”? Who says these things? I was being phony again, using buzzwords and catchphrases just as I had before, only now on the opposite side of the spectrum. I was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear, and it worked. I got one whopper of a scholarship.

I could pretend that my college years have made me wiser, that I’ve given up my high school inhibitions and become free and easy and cemented in myself. This also is false. If you want proof, look at Facebook. Everything I say on there is carefully filtered. Through witty one-liners, references to obscure filmmakers and quasi-hipster music videos that I know full well are visible to friends and relatives, I am trying pretty hard to convince everyone that I Am an Awesome Person. I am smart. I am spiritual. I have good taste in just about everything. I am an attractive Potential Significant Other. (Come on, you know you do it too.)

Why is it so much easier to slouch behind ready-made personalities than to discover who we really are? After a couple decades of wrestling with this, I think I’ve realized why. Our genuine selves are pretty scary things.

Here’s how I arrived at this conclusion. For years and years and years I wrestled with the whole “Jesus-came-down-to-earth-to-save-us-from-our-sins-HOORAY!” thing. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed too good to be true. I wasn’t sure why I felt this way, because all my other beliefs were fairly orthodox. I believed God was capable of everything. I believed he was infinite.

Now that I reflect on it, I realize that I questioned not God’s ability to love, but my own lovability. And the simple answer to this is that I am not lovable.

I’m not. Not from a divine point of view, anyway. Oh, sure, I may be lovable by human standards. I'm a pretty nice person by those standards. But the truth is, I’m selfish to the core. And in many ways, some of which I’ve just demonstrated, I’m more of a phony than Holden Caulfield.

There is not a reason on earth why a God who made the universe, an infinite God, an all-knowing God who can see into the decrepit corners of my soul that I hide so well from others, should love me. But he does anyway. I’m not saying this out of a false humility or some sick kind of self-loathing. I’m saying it because it’s true. On some level, we all know it's true. We all know we aren't what we ought to be, that all of our best efforts are not enough. And so we hide our true, dark selves from ourselves and from others.

Back to Jesus. Were I as wonderful as my Facebook profile would lead you to believe, God’s death for me would have been meaningless. Were I as selfless and smart and funny as I project, anybody would have died for me. But I'm not. I'm a broken person. And it’s my human brokenness that makes the cross so astounding. It’s what makes it beautiful.

This is liberating, because it means the one thing I can rely on for genuine identity—the way God loves me—does not rely on me at all. Gone, then, is the constant need to check up on self, to stroke self’s ego, to examine the words and Facebook comments of others and discover how self is perceived. This love does not rely on the upkeep of my reputation. This love does not rely on me at all. It exists solely because God does, and because he is love.

/rant.

PS: I still keep checking my Facebook anyway.

Confessions of a Chick Drummer

2010-02-05T03:09:00.012-05:00

Hi, I’m Elyse. I’m a girl, and I play the drums.

Hi, Elyse.

I have a confession to make. I have abused the power of my instrument.

I started playing drums when I was roughly twelve. This was junior high, mind you, when we’re all nondescript clumps of hormones clinging to whatever semblances of identity fly our way. One day, while I was playing at a youth retreat, somebody saw me and yelled, “HEY! IT’S THE CHICK DRUMMER!” The name stuck. And so did the persona. It became my email address.

I milked it, to be honest, and for a terrible, predictable reason. The truth is, most guys find chick drummers interesting. Not in a sexual way—aggressive, cymbal-smashing girls shake up traditional gender roles enough to make small-town guys feel queasy. They didn't trip over themselves to talk to me. But they talked to me a heck of a lot more than they would have otherwise. So I always threw my drum-playing out there after being introduced to someone, much like I casually mention Latin during first conversations now. (I’m trying to break the habit, okay?)

As a fifteen-year-old, I took a certain pleasure in being a novelty. I loved ordering drumheads at music stores, stunning the smarmy clerks who couldn’t see past my Curious George T-shirt. I rejoiced in the knowing precision of my language; I walked right up and put my hands on the counter and said, “Alright, guys, I need a 14” coated Remo Emperor head, two clear Pinstripes in 12 and 14”…and heck, let’s throw in some nylon-tipped 5As while we’re at it. Zildjians, of course.”

Their jaws hit the floor, and I was satisfied.

I set out to be a novelty, and eventually that was all I became. After a while, I didn’t play the drums because I loved them: I played because everybody loved it when I did. “It’s so much fun to watch you play!” people told me. “It’s so different to see a girl playing the drums! Wow!” Because of my sex, some were surprised I was capable of percussion, as if having ovaries made it incredibly difficult to hit things with sticks.

This jaded me. It probably had something to do with the fact that I was seventeen and freckled and insecure anyway, but I started thinking people liked hearing me play just because I was a girl. And they liked me just because I was a girl who played the drums. And so, I gave it up for a while. I gave up my chick-drummerhood, stowed it away in a distant corner of my memory where it would grow dusty, along with recollections of braces and high school prom. My drums grew dusty too.

But recently, inexplicably, I picked up the sticks again. After ten years of playing, I fell in love with my instrument in a way I never had before. There’s something really exciting about being master of the tempo and texture and feel of a song; the band can’t help but follow you. There’s something thrilling about kicking your bass pedal a couple of times and filling the sanctuary with sound. There’s something majestic about it all.

I joined the worship band at church and, of all things, got yelled at consistently for not being loud enough. (I go to a weird church. Last week, the pastor rode a bicycle around the sanctuary to illustrate a point.) Every week, Fraaza (our worship leader—he’s bald), gives me dirty looks through the Plexiglass drummer-cage. He mouths, “BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!”, rising up on his toes as he does it, indicating spots where he wants me to be noisier. “Your crashes are too polite,” he says. Eventually, he yelled at me enough that I began to play with a reckless abandon that I'd never had. I even got sweaty.

This has all been wonderful. The problem is that I’ve been playing in front of people again. And thus, all those chick-drummerhood things have reared their ugly heads. “Oh, we just love seeing you play!” they tell me. “It’s so much fun to see a girl up there playing the drums!”

Glower all you want, I think. Praise me. Go ahead. I know it’s just because I posses a certain anatomy that most drummers do not. I know you don’t really mean it.

Last week, Fraaza started sounding like everybody else. “I always get positive feedback when you play,” he said before service. “People tell me they like you.”

I rested my chin on my nylon-tipped 5A and felt suddenly bold. “I wonder if they’d say that if I was a guy,” I said. “Probably not.”

Fraaza stopped re-stringing his guitar (he breaks a string at least once every service—the man strums fiercely) and looked at me like I was an alien. “That has nothing to do with it,” he said. “People like you because you’re lively and you’re interesting.”

Wait. It’s not my ovaries?

My gut reaction to Fraaza’s comment—sheer disbelief—made me realize how hard it is for me to accept genuine praise. It’s got to be conditional, I think. Nobody can like me just for who I am or what I’m capable of. There’s got to be some other reason. There’s got to be a catch.

Why is this? Why are we so eager to hide behind fabricated personas, even though we feel miserable and artificial when we do? Why are we so eager to shrug off earnest compliments?

It’s because we’re all phonies, that’s why. And that’s what we’ll return to next week when I investigate the works of the late J.D. Salinger.

Regrets

2010-01-18T01:43:00.002-05:00

Friends,

It is with a heavy heart I announce that this blog is on hiatus until I make serious headway on my senior project. Believe me, I'd far rather pour my lifeblood into this than into that funsucker. Unfortunately, only one of the two stands in my way of graduating. And it's the funsucker.

Regretfully yours,

-Elyse

PS: To hold you over until I return, here's some clues about the three guys left in my "Five Guys" series.

Five Guys I've Never Met who Made Me Believe in Life Again, Part 2: Andrew Bird

2009-12-23T15:25:00.029-05:00

2.
Name: Andrew Bird.
Age: 36.
Occupation: Multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.
High school gig: Playing at weddings, funerals, and renaissance fairs.
Influences: Ravel, Charlie Patton, Johnny Hodges.

A lifelong resident of Chicago, Illinois, Andrew Bird has never had a day job. After getting his start with swing band Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire, Bird went solo and toured by himself for seven years, usually performing to crowds of fifteen or twenty. But recent years have been kinder to him, bringing performances on David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and a sold-out show to 13,000 in Millennium Park. An avid cyclist, Andrew can sometimes be seen pedaling around the streets of his hometown, hanging up his own concert posters.

When I was in fifth grade, I pitched a fit in the Museum of Science and Industry. My parents wanted me to see the grisly wonders of the Body Slices exhibit, but I thought seeing dead people cut into half-inch pieces was unnatural and disgusting and a violation of human dignity, so I refused. I shut my eyes tight, and my parents had to lead me around the exhibit by the hand. Young Gregor Mendel I was not.

In recent years, however, I’ve found myself inexplicably drawn to the sciences. I read about neurons all the time. I get geeked about the Hadron Collider. I have photographs of zygotes and red blood cells on my bedroom wall. I even wandered around the Chicago Field Museum by myself for hours on end, and nobody had to drag me by the hand.

Andrew Bird has been my partner on this journey. His song “Anonanimal” is the only reason I can identify a troglobite. (It’s also the namesake of this blog.)

Journalists, after making smug references to his whistling and other avarian clichés, often compare Andrew Bird to a mad scientist. It’s not a hard thing to do. His tousled hair, twirling Specimen horns and constant references to all things natural invite such comparisons. In concert, I heard him refer to songwriting as “performing experiments.”

But other than his multifaceted virtuosic skills, what sets Andrew Bird apart from other artists is his subject matter. Bird writes about everything from cellular mitosis (“Weather Systems”) to the mating habits of midges and moths (“Masterswarm”) to the transmutable nature of matter (“Spare-Ohs”). The latter was inspired when all twenty-six chickens on his farm were slaughtered by racoons and coyotes, but their feathers were left behind.

“For a year after that happened the chicken feathers were still around from the massacre,” Bird says. “There’s just hundreds and hundreds of sparrows around my barn and they were taking the chicken feathers and stuffing my chimney with them to make nests. And then I would have a fire and I would see the smoke coming out and I would see little feathers reminding me of how I let down the chickens.”

Lest you think this sounds morbid, hear the song in context, as Andrew walks the streets of Paris:

Why take this naturalistic approach? Bird says it’s not the science itself that appeals to him—it’s the concept of someone looking for answers. He says he frequently finds himself writing about “a scientist who is a protagonist who is trying to quantify something—searching for some empirical formula…and he fails to do it.” Perhaps the best illustration of this is “Imitosis,” in which he tells the story of a professor seeking an empirical answer for “why kids can be so mean”:

Why do some show no mercy
while others are painfully shy?
Tell me, doctor, can you quantify
the reasons why?

As I read about this, I realized that I had come to science for the same reasons. I was looking for answers—and, like Bird’s scientist-protagonist, I was failing.

I started reading about neurons and black holes after a crisis of faith. I’d been raised as a diehard Christian, but the clichés of college and scientific inquiry had taken their toll. I began to discover some things that did not mesh with my prior understanding of the universe, and this terrified me. Unable to find a resolution, I decided to believe in nothing at all. I became an atheist.

I wasn’t a very good atheist, however. I only lasted for about three days before I snapped out of it. Those three days were hell; the universe was senseless without someone behind it, and thus I returned to theism. Even so, I was left with nagging doubts, and to resolve these, I turned to science. I refused to believe in anything without solid empirical evidence.

It was about at this time that I discovered Andrew Bird.

“There's definitely a theme on [my records] of desperation, I think,” says Bird, “of trying to hold onto any evidence that we're still alive. I think life is a wondrous thing. I'm happy to try pretty hard.”

Even so, Bird admits that he wonders how our chaotic world remains intact. “How does the earth not spin off its axis?” he asks. “That’s what you get when you’re traveling all the time: a sense of impending chaos…How does it all hold together?”

Bird echoes these questions in “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left”:

Over-prescribed and under the mister
We had survived to turn on the History Channel
and ask our esteemed panel: “Why are we alive”?
And here’s how they replied:
"You’re what happens when two substances collide..."

Are these answers enough? Do expert explanations of our functions and origins explain the purpose for our existence? Can our scientists find “the reasons why”? For a long time, I thought so. But gradually I began to realize my search for empirical answers wasn’t enough. “I feel like you’re looking for proof,” a friend told me one night, after I’d been grilling him for hours on all things scientific. “You’re not going to find it.” He was right. The more I learned, the more I felt the tension between what I knew and what I felt. If religion was my thesis, science was the antithesis.

But, following Hegel’s dialectic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the answers were not far behind. Strangely enough, my synthesis came in the form of an emotional experience. I found myself once again in Chicago, once again seeing Andrew Bird, this time in a tiny Presbyterian church near Water Tower Place.

Waiting in line two hours before the show began, other rabid fans described seeing Andrew in concert as a spiritual experience. Anyone who’s had this experience will tell you that the difference between seeing him live and hearing him on record is like the difference between having sex and reading about it. One is felt viscerally, while the other is understood rationally. This evening was no different.

In a black suit and tie, Andrew Bird limped onto the stage of Fourth Presbyterian Church, having injured his foot during a recent show. Without saying a word, he started to play, and filled the church with swirling melodies. As I watched him, I was struck by something remarkable. With his looping pedals and Specimen speakers, Andrew created a sonic world that was mechanical, but beautiful. It seemed chaotic, but the chaos was controlled, because there was a mind behind it—someone laying down the loops, manipulating knobs and controlling speakers.

In strictly material terms, there was nothing earth-shattering about this experience. To put it crudely, I watched a skinny man hobble onto a small stage in a small church and whip a horsehair bow across strands of nylon. And yet, the sounds he made reverberated through the rubber soles of my yellow rainboots, and I was tremendously moved. Perhaps he did just cause certain "happy feeling" neurons in my brain to fire, but he gnawed my heart out anyway. And yes, he was singing about “anthurium lacrimae decay,” but oh, was it beautiful. There was purpose to it. I watched him, and I felt like I’d come home.

This was when I realized that my stubborn reliance on empirical evidence was as silly as wandering through the Museum of Science and Industry with eyes wide shut. Our rational understanding of the world is not enough; our explanations of our biology do not tell us why we exist. Had Andrew walked off the stage of Fourth Presbyterian and left his speakers running, an onlooker might have been able to deduce where the sounds came from and how they were made, but he would not be able to tell why. It took an Andrew to explain that. (And yes, I figured this out in a church. The irony of that was not lost on me.)

I've long thought that when we say something is beautiful, we mean that it reminds us of God. Thus, I leave you with "Section 8 City," a song that spoke to me in the midst of all my struggles. Only now do I understand the reasons why.

Five Guys I’ve Never Met who Made Me Believe in Life Again, Part 1: Wes Anderson

2009-12-10T22:58:00.016-05:00

Over the next few weeks, I'll be publishing a series of essays in which I detail the lives and work of five artists I discovered over the past year. The title for this series came from something that I wrote for myself in March. At the time, I was coming out of my personal Waterloo; I’d survived heartbreak, a three-day bout of atheism, and the move to a college that threw all my long-held beliefs into question. Having escaped with my faith and my identity intact, I felt compelled to write about the artists who had been important to me. The first was Wes Anderson.

Full name: Wesley Mortimer Wales Anderson.
Age: 40.
Height: 6’ 1”.
Occupation: Auteur filmmaker.
Influences: John Ford, Francois Truffaut, J.D. Salinger.

Originally an aspiring novelist, Wes Anderson decided to become a movie director after meeting aspiring actor Owen Wilson in a playwriting class at the University of Texas, Austin. The two of them hit it off, entered a short film in Sundance, got noticed by a producer, and launched their cinematic careers. As an auteur, Anderson writes, directs and produces his own films, often acting as soundtrack supervisor and art director as well. Anderson was nominated for an Oscar for co-authoring the script of 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

Long, long ago, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I sat in a sticky-floored multiplex with a handful of Jujubes and saw this commercial.

Back then the only film directors I knew were Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, grizzly, humorless veterans who wore frumpy T-shirts and rumpled parkas and mumbled during interviews. They didn’t hold much interest for me. But right away, this guy got my attention. He was different. For one thing, he was young. And unlike George and Steven, he seemed friendly, spoke quickly, and wore a safari jacket. In one minute and thirty seconds he illustrated the ins and outs of filmmaking, making demands of prop people and giving orders to underlings, all the while eating half a sandwich. I was impressed.

“My life is about telling stories,” The Mysterious Young Director said as he hopped in his director’s chair and swung up on a big dolly facing the camera. As an aspiring novelist myself, I found that pretty intriguing. I asked myself, “Who is this guy?” I went home and tried to find out who he was, because I was the sort of kid got a kick out of researching things thoroughly. I was a quintessential nerd. By the age of fourteen I’d written a novella, founded a desktop publishing business, and authored my life plan for the next decade. I was obsessed with pirates, astronauts, and extraterrestrials. I spent more time in my artistic and academic pursuits than in the company of peers, and consequently I was a lonely kid, and kind of melancholy too.

But whoever this director guy was, he seemed to get it. He was nerdy and unafraid, and he seemed like the kind of guy who’d get a kick out of research too. Unfortunately, I found out that all of his movies were rated R, and as a fourteen-year-old living in a socially conservative household, I wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies. I thought this meant I would never see any of the Mysterious Director’s films. Cue more melancholy.

I forgot all about this until some years later when I had a friend who, after obsessing over T.S. Eliot and Stephen Sondheim, went through a Wes Anderson phase. He wouldn’t shut up until I had watched The Darjeeling Limited. And boy, am I glad he didn’t. I was hooked from scene one, and to this day, Darjeeling is the only film where I have sat through the entire end credits.

Like most Anderson fans, what arrested me at first was his style. Each of his films boast a look so meticulously assembled that they’re sometimes accused of coming off as phony and contrived. This infamous clip from The Royal Tenenbaums, for instance, is strictly Andersonian:

I loved every facet of Wes’s style, though, from the heavily symbolic Louis Vuitton luggage featured in Darjeeling to each carefully composed frame of The Royal Tenenbaums. His films made sense to me, and I felt at home in them.

The more I watched Wes Anderson’s movies, the more I realized that his characters were like me. They were outsiders. In short, they were weird. They were contradictory eccentrics who sometimes spewed banalities like “I’m going to go sit on that thing over there” and sometimes quoted Latin, just like I did. They were morally ambiguous, virtuous and heroic one day, and the scum of the earth the next. They were strange people with strange problems, and I could relate to all of them. Take, for instance, Max Fischer, the son of a barber who gets into elite Rushmore Academy on artistic merit and becomes a career Renaissance man:

Or take the titular hero of Anderson’s latest film, an egotistical fox who can’t kick his chicken-stealing habit:

“I think I have this thing where I need everybody to think I’m the greatest— the quote unquote Fantastic Mr. Fox—and if they aren’t completely knocked out, dazzled, and kind of intimidated by me, then I don’t feel good about myself.”

Here, Mr. Fox has stumbled upon something important, for with all this outsiderness comes an undeniable, self-induced pressure to be exceptional. I can relate to this too: I’ve written fourteen step-by-step career plans for myself over the last couple of years, and most of them have involved becoming famous. Max Fischer also has delusions of grandeur:

But after this scene, Max wakes up from his dream, and he’s drooling. At the end of the day he’s just another poor kid with too many hobbies. Things are little easier for Mr. Fox, or his son, Ash, a scrawny fox who lacks the athletic or academic prowess of his older cousin, Kristofferson. Like me and my astronaut obsession, these guys just don’t really fit in anywhere.

As I watched Anderson’s films, I asked myself, “Why all these outsiders? Why all this misfit-hood?” I couldn’t figure this out until I saw Wes interviewed on Charlie Rose one day:

After watching this clip, I finally understood why this man and his work appeal to me so much: he’s a misfit too. He admits that when writing Fantastic Mr. Fox, he accidentally based Ash’s character on himself and Kristofferson on his older brother. “My brother was the perfect one, and I was the maladjusted, awkward kid,” he said.

In fact, I’ve discovered that most of the people I talk to on a regular basis feel like outsiders. (Perhaps not coincidentally, I’ve successfully made Anderson fans out of several of them.) It could be that I’m just attracted to outcasts and thus unconsciously surround myself with them. But I think what’s more accurate is that everyone, on some level, feels inadequate. Everyone thinks that everyone else is part of some super secret club, and if we try hard enough and if we’re just plain lucky, one day we’ll be part of it too.

Maybe there is a secret club. I don’t know. And I’m not going to pretend that after thinking about this I’ve suddenly stopped feeling left out and am in harmony with the rest of the world. That’s just not true. Ask my mom. I was pretty darned irritated at the rest of the world a couple weeks ago when Fantastic Mr. Fox only made $9 million on its opening weekend, an injustice I tried my best to remedy by seeing the film three times. (Tomorrow will be four.)

But after becoming an Anderson fan, I’ve learned to embrace my outsiderhood, if for no other reason than knowing that there are others of us out there. And who knows—maybe my obsessive research tendencies and NASA knowledge will come in handy someday. At the end of Fantastic Mr. Fox, our hero and his son are only able to save the day because they are eccentric.

Perhaps it is Mrs. Fox who puts it most succinctly. “We’re all different,” she says to Ash, putting her paw on his scrawny shoulder. “Especially him.” She points at her flamboyant husband, who is wearing yellow- and red-striped pajamas. “But there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?”

Indeed there is, Mrs. Fox. Indeed there is.

2009-08-24T18:46:00.009-04:00

My friend Leah says that, for her, a piece of writing is good if she picks it up and reads it and cries, "Me too!" This is the moment when one finds a shred of resemblance between oneself and inky thoughts on a page. (I can't imagine why she didn't particularly get Dave Eggers. Who hasn't run buck naked on a beach with seventeen friends during a covershoot for Might Magazine?)

I've found that the "Me too!" rule holds up fairly well. Case in point: Mil Millington and his novel Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, which was easily the funniest thing I have ever read. The following excerpt was my Shred of Resemblance; here, protagonist Pel takes his two young sons to the grocery.

"Peter indicated that he'd prefer another foray into the fascinating plentitude of the store, rather than coming to stand with me in the checkout, indicating thusly:

'Nooooooooo! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!'

I caught his eyes flicking towards the freezer section; he was wondering whether he could make it. 'I'm three years old, but Dad has got a basket and Jonathan to slow him down...' I saw the thought flash behind his eyes. Instinctively, I acted--whipping out a hand and grabbing his arm before he could make a break for the wire.

'Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-ah-ah-ahhhh!" (I suspect that Jonathan and Peter are practicing this together when they're alone--'That's quite good, Peter. But you need to convey more of a sense of utter desolation as the vowel sound begins. Let's try it again--and from the diaphragm, remember...')

The end checkout was in sight and I headed towards it. The shopping basket was hooked, painfully, over my left arm with my hand beyond it, clasping Jonathan's. He was ice-skating his feet along the floor, using me to provide half the energy. Peter was dangling from my right arm. He'd just flopped like a protester and I was having to drag him along behind me. In what can only be considered a stroke of improvisational genius, he was tearfully casting his eyes around at the other people in the store and plaintively wailing: 'Help me! Help meeeeee!" (p. 138-139).