Souls

At the moment I'm reading Discipline and Punish by Micheal Foucault. He died of AIDS in the 80's. He was French, bald, gay, and really freaking smart. I'm reading this book because I was informed that it was his most ground-breaking book. Foucault uses history to bring forth social philosophy. This book got a lot of acclaim for his unearthing the concept of power. I still don't think I fully understand his stance on the issue, provided he ever actually took one, which is debatable.

I talked to a friend of mine a while back about what a soul is. A soul, in my estimation, is the synergy of all the aspects of human existence. Body, spirit, mind, emotions, history, environment, and social context all come together in this unique reality of person that can be understood as a "soul". I don't think this is Foucault's particular understanding of soul, but I'll get back to that.

In Western society we've been gorged on individual autonomy so much that we've sufficiently become blind to the way that "society" is one particular part of our soul. Indeed part of what makes us truly unique is the interaction we have had with other people. I think this accounts, to a large degree, for the postmodern craving for community. We've continually realized the shortcomings in individualism. We've realized there is more to ourselves than our self. I think this amounts to more than some genetic programming for community. In fact I think there is an aspect of the human soul that is incapable of understanding self apart from the interpretation of others like us. Surely we can all seek self-understanding in solitude, but I truly believe this is only a fragmentary and meaningless grasp on one's own soul. Yet, there is a danger in this inter-connectedness. There is a tension between the isolation and meaninglessness of autonomy and the repression and slavery of 'herd-thinking'. Certainly modernity arrived at its hyper-individualism in reaction to the oppression of medieval traditionalism, which prescribed violence to any who thought outside the traditions of society-at-large. Now, we find ourselves on the opposite end, surrounded by empty selfishness and the terrifying thought that in our quest for total freedom of our soul we have surgically removed the social organs of soul. Our souls, missing this integral aspect, are dying slowly.

Discipline and Punish is about the evolution of penal systems from medieval times to now. The more subtle discussion underlying this concerns the use of power in social context. To oversimplify, his point is that in the last few centuries we have witnessed a shift in judicial actions which have slowly excluded the direction of punishment toward the body. Whereas in medieval times punishment was directed at the body: torture and physical punishment being the norm, we now see the practical exclusion of physical punishment from our judicial systems. Perhaps this is reflective of certain ethical shifts in our penal system, but in Foucault's view there is more. What we are seeing now is a judicial system which aims its practices at the soul of man. Now, as I said before, Foucault does not share my concept of soul. Instead he refers to soul as a construct whereby power is exerted over people. To Foucault, the soul is a political tool. It is a mental program which allows the animal nature in people to be controlled by a self-imposition. People in our atomized Western democracies are granted with a terrible freedom which poses the greatest danger to human society. Therefore political control is maintained not through fear of maltreatment towards the body as in medieval times, but rather through the influence of micro-politics over the soul. In our times, justice has ceased to focus on making criminals "pay" for their crimes, but rather to impose on them a heavy burden of soul by which they can be downloaded with a certain self-imposed social conformity.

Truthfully, it could easily be seen that this is a phenomena which is certainly not limited to our prison system. In fact elements of it can be seen in our educational system from kindergarten to Ph.D. candidacy, in media, in corporate structures. Because of this, Foucault points out that what we see more and more of is the terrifying reality of human beings attempting not to shake merely the perversion of social influence, but in fact attempting to shake the very soul that they come to see as the construct of inhuman coercion!

Consider the events at Virginia Tech recently, or Columnbine, postal workers, disgruntled workers with AK-47's, indeed terrorism on any level. Foucault points out that in many prison revolts of the 19th and 20th centuries this is an obvious drive: the prisoners were not seeking better conditions in their prisons, they were seeking to free their bodies from the political coercion which relied on them adopting a certain understanding and attitude toward their "soul". Not much has changed. Why are prison sentences so ambiguous? Why can one sentenced to 20 years get out in 5 "with good behavior"? Doesn't this signify that we are less concerned with just punishment, and far more with the criminal becoming a certain kind of person. The question remains, who is truly fit to pass such judgment on a person? What many are beginning to fear is that anonymous forces, corporations, politicians are in control, and their power is growing. The question many are now wondering is how can the human soul be entrusted to anonymous powers?

Staring at faceless corporations, bureaucratized governments, corporations with endless chains of computerized voicemail systems, we are infected by a perverted concept of social interaction. Our souls become sick, suffering the loss of what makes us human. People spend their lives at a job, for a corporation that cares nothing for them as a human. They are taught they are replacable. People begin to treat each other as such. Co-workers further the dehumanization. And then one snaps, and in a moment of hatred and insanity shakes the soul which has begun to amount to nothing more than an accomplice to such anti-human forces.

And has religion on the whole amounted to anything different? Has Christianity provided an alternative? Rather haven't our churches merely served to such means to the subjugation of souls to anonymous or semi-anonymous forces. Our mega-churches serve the same model, teaching an individualistic conformity relying on approval-based control of the human soul.

Again I am reminded of Martin Buber's concept of "you" vs. "it". It seems that what is needed is people who have found the spiritual capacity to breath life into others. People who in action can restore life into other souls by restoring the social aspect of soul; one not based on political coercion, but respect, understanding, and perhaps love. We need a shift back to 'face-to-face' society that reminds the other that they are a person and not a thing. Frankly it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if this is in the name of Christ or not; it matters that it happens. Our whole world suffers from the terror of forgetting how much more it is. We have all been infected and beaten down with the lie that we, or the world we live in, can be summarized. Community of any kind, and most of all Christian community, must remind us all of how much more we amount to than the summaries we have been lead to believe. In doing so people can be freed to realize that "soul" is much more than a tool for anonymous control, but is the uniqueness, indeed the irreplacable quality of their existence.

Austin on a Friday

So, I'm sitting at a coffee shop in Austin. Out the window to my right I can see the state Capitol rise above the buildings. It's spring and Austin is lush with the varied shades of green; each hue boasting a uniqueness of the tree it represents. Austin is filled with young people, which is different coming from a country town comprised mostly of geriatrics. It's refreshing and annoying all at once. I am reminded of the hubris of college kids who have found nothing to live for but the pursuit of sex and trendier clothing.

Austin is best described as eclectic. The average kid on the UT campus is adorned in a blend of styles spanning the last four and a half decades. Hippie chic, with entrapments of the 80s pop culture and facial expressions of kids who grew up in the hopeless confusion of the 90s. There's the occasional polyester shirt and 'urban cowboy' apparel to give the disco era honorable mention. Around campus this town is liberal and pluralistic. All nationalities, sexualities, and attitudes are represented and boasted. It's four in the afternoon and people are already drinking. Yet if I drive a short ways I am immersed in the bland conservatism of proud, Republican Texas. Austin has suburbs like everywhere else, and they mannage to look just like any suburb anywhere else.

I wonder if all the kids here, my age and younger, will really live out any of the open-minded idealism they wear on their sleeves (often literally). I wonder if, when they hit their mid-30's, they will continue to strive for a humanistic tolerance. Or, will they just decide they need to make some money so they can buy remixes of albums that were cool when they were in college?

Austin has a reputation for its strangeness, but I wonder how many of these people are choosing whatever is "weird" because that gets them in with this progressive postmodern culture that buzzes about the university.

I came down here to see my friend play guitar tomorrow night. I probably should have come the day of, since, after an unforseen change in plans, I don't know where I'll be sleeping tonight. That's ok I guess. I think I also came to see if this is the type of place I really want to move to in the coming years. I guess I'm just wondering if any geographic locale is really all that different from any other. Aside from topography and climate and vegetation, is it true that there's any place where people are genuinely more open-minded/hearted than what I've been exposed to? Austin gives off such an appearance, I guess I'm just wondering if it's mere pretense or does its essence match the decor which I openly admit I find appealing.

responsibility

I am the only child of two oldest children. My parents had me at the age of 32 after a full decade of marriage. . . . all this to point out I have grown up in the environment of responsibility. This is fine and good. I'm glad that I've been taught the importance of planning for the future, family responsibility, etc. Still, here's where it's been breaking down for me lately. Every night when I clock in I take care of patients who have worked their whole lives in order to carefully plan out the comfortability of their own deaths. I don't know how death feels, but I feel quite certain that the process leading up to it sucks no matter how well planned out it may be.

My parents in their wisdom have long stressed to me the importance of having insurance and a retirement plan. This is wise since one unforseen event could financially wipe out an individual and their family if they are not insured. Since my parents are quite wealthy and have lots of possessions they don't want to lose, this is an ominous fear. Retirement is also needed, since the day will come when one cannot work, and it is guarenteed that medical bills will begin to increase as one's days come to a close.

I now work for a corporation who provides me with insurance and a retirement plan. This makes my parents with their 'oldest-children' complexes happy. I am now covered against unforseen events, and the forseen consequences of aging. Here is the problem: the cost.

My company ultimately doesn't really care much for me. I am a pawn that funnels money through the corporate rooks, knights, bishops, and queens, so that the anonymous king can have a bank account capable of ending hunger for the entire nation of Haiti. Sure, this company has an ethics committee which helps present the corporate machine with a 'human face'. Ultimately though this corporation like all corporations cares only that I provide the labor which allows them to survive the Darwinian world of corporate growth and competition. In front of my face lies a bundle of carrots: a steady check, insurance (safety), a family (the duty of all humankind), and a retirement. True they are ethical enough to allow me to eat these carrots, at least enough to keep me fueled up, so I can proceed to pull this burden behind me.

Should I choose to reject this corporate patronage, I must then face the scary world on my own. I would lose my insurance and therefore my sense of safety. I would lose my paycheck, reminding me how good a carrot tastes now and then to overworked corporate ass. I would cease to be able to provide for a family, and thus cease to be of any appeal to the average American female. Threaten a man's access to sex and he typically will do whatever the corporate figureheads expect of him. Listening to my coworkers daily is a good case study in this. Last, but not least, I lose my retirement plan, and thus am doomed to face death with no morphine to numb the pain, and no nurse to wipe my ass and change my sheets.

So, the responsible thing to do is remain a volutary slave to the corporate world so I can be assured of food, sex, safety and a numb but drawn out death.

I see it every night, patients who were responsible enough to plan out their death. They lie in bed disoriented and slightly helpless. In so far as they are capable of helping themselves they amount to a liability. The process of numbing one to impending death typically involves making them too unstable to walk to the bathroom, and broken hips tend to be the beginning of the end for most people. These are people who have worked a 9 to 5 for decades. Mindlessly they attended a job. They performed the role of a cog which found a place in the structure of a company that was more alive than they. We sell our souls to a system so our needs can be provided for.

I don't plan to quit my job in the immediate future, and I still like the idea of having a retirement accout and insurance. Still, I don't think I am willing to value these forms of safety above living from my heart or living for the sake of dreams. There is more to life than trying to die comfortably. There is more to life than raising a family to prepetuate the social system as it now stands. I don't think the system is all bad, only it much too easily becomes a way to live without taking into consideration how one truly wishes to live. I don't wish to live in such a way as to remain a slave to a corporation for fear that I won't eat, have what I need, enjoy sex and family, or die well. It is a fallacy that corporations and their meticulous plans have successfully bought up all the good things in the world. All their promises of safety and provision are illusions. I daily take care of people who prove that no insurance plan, nor retirement can give meaning to life. No family can suffice to answer all the deep questions of soul. The truth remains that living is dangerous. Insurance is good, but the safety it provides only robs life of its needed poetic character. We all die, but when we die is there anything poetic or meaningful we are living towards? Is our life set on a trajectory toward something beautiful, or is it merely cowering in the face of the unknown which surrounds us?

God is no Stoic. There is something about him that is wild and free. We delude ourselves thinking that his greatest wish is for our safety, as though any story worth reading has ever been about people living in safety. God transcends the peaceful stillness of a lake at dawn and the torrent of a raging waterfall. He is both and more. I look at all our attempts to dam up the rivers and make them peaceful. God is no respecter of safety, and insofar as I live my life solely to maintain safety and peace, I am denying God.

The responsible thing to do is to live peacefully in the midst of chaos, and live untamed amidst the comfortability of all-too-domesticated world.

nothing glorious, yet

"Sooner or later your figure out life is constructed specifically and brilliantly to squeeze a man into association with the Owner of heaven. It is a struggle, with labor pains and thorny landscape, bloody hands and a sweaty brow, head in hands, moments of severe loneliness and questioning, moments of ache and desire. All this leads to God, I think. . . . Matter and thought are a canvas on which God paints, a painting with tragedy and delivery, with sin and redemption."
- Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

Illumination is a metaphor, and one which I got to live in this last weekend. A friend of mine's myspace describes her as someone who "believes in the power of words." I was illuminated this last weekend at the extent to which I have long lost my faith in words. This is a very defeating loss of faith for myself. I write. Songs. Blogs. Brief paragraphs I hope might one day become books. My mind more often than not is exerted in an exhausting attempt to open up words. To free them from incomplete definitions that have robbed them of the truth they refer to. Yet, for a while, I know, I have lost faith in them. I have been aggitated by the hopeless relative character of language in general. Words have been lacking life for a while to me. Language has all felt as a game, and games are insignificant.

Nonetheless, my faith has this intrinisic attatchment to words. I am so tired of the imperfection of words, but I can see no way to truth without them. All concepts and grammar it seems play a role in struggles for power and coercion, social-political struggles that I tire of quite often. I could continue on with my frustrations for pages, but I'll save you all that.

This last weekend I spoke with friends. I had words spoken over me. I started reading Through Painted Deserts. Something came alive in me this weekend, and I think it was that I found a renewed hope that words somehow matter. I think I realized in the quote above that language finds power as it connects to the beauty and imagination of the fluid narrative of life. God has no interest in dictation. The revelation of his will has never amounted to God speaking something word for word so that reality would once and for all time remain a concise legal document. God is free. Think of it, we would not know freedom were it not for the fact that God himself exists in it. There is no predetermination of God. In short God is not defined; he never has been nor will be encapsulated, nor even be found structurally within a definition. Strange then that for millenia we have wrestled with the eerie sense in which God "speaks". The absurdity I have long perceived, but not fully understood is that his "words" carry with them the same freedom whih his essence exists in. Beyond all the ridiculous assertions of predestination and the scientific mythology of the nature of the Trinity, we can find the simple fact that the words of Scripture, the inaudible words of existence, all refer to a story that is not yet determined. I know this somehow because the one we claim as the only god deserving a capital 'G' is free, and as I have learned that I am somehow similar to him, I too am free. My story is not determined, and all the Calvinists can kiss my ass since they serve a god who is a slave to their lofty ideas of his nature.

It is because of God that I find the freedom to believe or not believe in the factuality of the gospel. It is because he is free that he created me how he wanted me to be. I never need look longingly at another person for "admirable" characteristics of their personality feeling inadequate. For all the negativity I have felt surrounding the past few years of my life, I need not be ashamed, because I know that I was seeking an honesty with which God is pleased. Meanwhile God was seeking me, watching me grow frustrated with the inadequacy of words in approaching him. And though my frustration was connected to a truth about words, I was missing out on the freedom of it all.

The imperfection of words prevents me from ever touching God through language. It is one of the many asymptotes we experience: approaching God infinitely, yet never connecting to him. I don't regret seeking God in theology or philosophy. The closeness I have found to him as such is amazing and irreplaceable. And, at a distance, I can appreciate those who have found God through acts of daily devotion and prayer, but I deny that they are at an advantage. They too only know how to approach God. They grow closer but never connect. That is, unless God chooses to bridge the infinitesimally small gap that stands between him and us all. God determines whom he will touch, no prayer or act of devotion can undercut his freedom in this.

It is this freedom that I feel called into lately, and maybe called to bring my words and thoughts with me. I don't get the impression that it will be anything glorious at first. Probably I will proceed through my daily routines much the same, yet change begins from the core. Perhaps the power of words is found in the freedom of choice to let them be more than phonetic sounds waiting for an ear and a mind to engulf them in an ocean of predetermined meaning. Perhaps words are waiting to become living breath, spirit, from the mouths of us who have received the same breath into our own lungs. It just might be that I'm discerning how it is such a spirit of one's story instead of the mere procession of words revealing a predetermined plot that reveal the value of all life; that reveal that no story is inferior to another, and that all stories somehow belong to one another.

I have a shelf in my library for books I intend to read next. Yesterday I made room for some fictional stories at the front. This is the first time I can remember feeling convinced that it was a good idea. . .