Very often I email myself quotes with no attribution or explanation so that I can feel a sense of rediscovery two months later when I take the time to track down their sources. Of course then sometimes the sources are lost.

“What more can we ask of a writer than that he draw us into the charmed circle of his obsessions?”

“The whole of social life rests on theological imagination, on acts of explicit or implicit worship of what stands beyond ourselves, of what we depend on. The connections we imagine ourselves into with other people and things weave around us with divine thread.”

“I found fun dip in one pocket and your NYPL card in the other.”

I would like to say a word in praise of lapse. I would like to give thanks for moments when I cannot or will not feel grateful, when I find myself afield and gratitude feels unreasonable, far—flung away like folly or worse, like a feeling irredeemable, alien, and wrong. There is something to a thankfulness recovered from gloom. A gut-punch of gratitude at cooking and eating everyday food; at sorting, stapling, tidying, cutting sharp lines with new scissors; at walking alone for a long time on an unremarkable afternoon. Last weekend my love baked me a pie and the smell of its buttermilk custard rising was a lesson in life’s dearness. Walking home from the market through unseasonable sun that had brought with it a heavy smell of mildew from the previous day’s rain, I felt my heart warm to sun and damp: to a moment in the presence of gratitude but also to my many moments of exile from it. I felt myself open to words that I will hate tomorrow (note: these words). Open and suddenly kind to that part of myself that I often want to forget or destroy or to put away in its place with a sneer. Oh, how to turn the other cheek to one’s own impulses? How to remain grateful for the self that denies gratitude its forgiving grace? How to stay with this softness that tends so close to fear? I will start by giving thanks.

Some words I have been loving lately, definitions omitted.

semaphore
tenanted
ebenezer
amanuensis

Ramble on.

The Rothko Chapel, Houston 2007 - Thomas Struth

This afternoon, a post by a friend of a friend referencing Thomas Struth took me on an epic online ramble so personally resonant that I wanted to set it down here in narrative form. First I stopped at several NYT articles that have been illustrated by Struth’s photographs, including this fascinating piece from a few years ago on political theology and this feature on houses of worship that also function as art installations. One of the spaces featured in that second article is the Live Oak Friends Meeting House, a Quaker Meeting House designed by James Turrell that I’ve heard rapturously described by one of my closest friends, who lives in Houston and has, I think, a particular interest in sacred architecture (hi, Evan!). Turrell connects the function of the Meeting House to a piece of his at PS.1, Meeting, a piece that I first saw on a trip to that museum with Evan and his boyfriend Ryan (hi, Ryan!). We were there on a clear, colorless winter day at the end of December and opening the door into the room (what Turrell calls a “skyspace”) was a literal shock to the senses. PS.1 has a kind of mad-abandoned-hospital feel to it at all times—it inspires a delicious, excitable wandering—and opening onto the frigid outdoor evening air and the crowd of museum-goers, many of them lying on their backs on the floor, was a near perfect experience of surprise gratification. It was just as lovely and sudden a moment to come upon today, in the midst of a very different kind of wandering.

Considering what was already an overwhelming wealth of circuitous association, it was almost overkill to find Struth’s photo of the Rothko Chapel, another sacred/artistic Houston landmark that always makes me think of Evan. On a visit to him shortly after relocating to Brooklyn, my girlfriend and I loitered outside the chapel in the dusk, talking about the huge mistake we thought we’d made in moving an extra thousand miles away from such good friends and loved ones. Later I walked back in the deeper darkness to retrieve a scarf that I’d left behind, forgotten in haste or, more probably, in emotion.

I generally believe in a universe without consciousness or intentionality. I know I’ve now written two posts that smack of God or religion in a look-how-it’s-all-connected kind of way. (Also, admittedly, in a literal content kind of way.) Undoubtedly, undeniably I am tracing such lines because I’ve been spending time with others who are interested in doing the same—not just David Dark but Rebecca Solnit and Annie Dillard and Krista Tippett. I’m kind of embarrassed, not to be keeping such company, but to be nursing thoughts that would sound ridiculous to that sad girl carrying her recovered scarf and wondering, really, where she was going. The difference between her and me, there and here, is that I’m finding so much more pleasure in wondering lately, and in wandering. I’m having more moments of opening onto skyspace, of unanticipated pleasure in connection. It’s maybe even enough to make embarrassment feel irrelevant.

Having a moment here. Saving it for later.

“Without a costly commitment to candor among family and potential friends, the possibility of truthful conversation (a prerequisite for the formation of more perfect unions) begins to tragically diminish, and responsible speech that communicates what we’re actually thinking and believing becomes a lost art.” - David Dark, The Gospel According to America.

So David Dark is one of my newest favorite writers. His mind-bending insistence on a biblically-based world view oriented by a commitment to bewilderment has, well, bent my mind. It seems appropriate to the content of his writing that my context for reading it has often been a squirmy, unavoidable sense of self-questioning generated by the act of standing up on the train with a book subtitled “Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea.” (Standing as, I guess I should note, a visibly queer, atheistic, “East Coast liberal” style NYC transplant. In other words not someone you would necessarily expect to be hip to Jesus.) And yet I can’t stop reading his book even long enough for one day’s commute—it lays out one of the most challenging and exhilarating conceptions of American identity that I’ve run into in a long time.

Here’s the article where I initially saw Dark’s name, found courtesy of author Jessica Hopper, who wrote it and The Girls Guide to Rocking, which Dark reviews on his blog… here. I like the circularity, the overlap, the messy internet humanity of the little transaction that brought me to his book. Having spent some time recently with Dark’s view of America, I think he might like it too.