Hypotyposis on a Good Day

Time apart

This morning, I dropped Laura off at the airport on her way to a five-day trip to Honolulu. I'm already missing her but know that Sunday night will roll around exceedingly quickly. In the meantime, Laura and her mom will have a splendid time in Hawaii while I get some time to indulge into some programming projects that I've not been able to immerse myself in as a married man.

Bach and Ozu: the books

Writing Silences on Sunday prompted me to look more deeply again at Bach and Ozu. From my bookshelf, I took down My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach, Bach , and Ozu.

shrink wrap car

It was only a matter of time that we would get shrink wrap cars.

Silences

Yesterday morning, as I meandered from one thought to another, the words "Be still, and know that I am God" registered on my consciousness. As I quieted myself, I found a clarity of mind and focus of action that I am wont to attribute to divine action. Silence on my part is often a prerequisite for communing with God. What happens though when God is not be found -- or to be heard -- when we actively search for God, whether in quiet or in silence? The theme for yesterday's sermon at First Pres Berkeley (based on Job 23) was precisely such silence of God. Mark Labberton's sermon induced the scribbling of a lot of quotes, questions, phrases, pregnant phrases on my notepad. Let me share a few:

• Job 23 as a counterpoint to the proverbial wisdom tradition in which you will have a good life if you do right.

• Job's friends marshalled all the arguments of proverbial wisdom in an attempt to set Job right.

• How did Job know that he was righteous? Aren't we all less than righteous? Is that type of righteousness what Job was thinking about?

• I don't think that I've ever been plunged in the "dark night of the soul", that Jobian darkness.

• The silences in Yosujiro Ozu's films came to my mind. The previous day, Laura and I had just seen silences in Ozu, who came to my mind because of our seeing Café Lumière, Hsiao-hsien Hou's tribute to Ozu. I found a lot of Hou's silences unbearable, while Ozu's silences were illuminating. Why is that? Are some of God's silences unbearable while others are illuminating?

• The choir had just sung Ich harre des Herrn, meine Seele harret, und ich boffe auf sein Wort from Bach's Cantata 131 (BWV 131) (Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir.) (Out of the depths I cry to thee, o Lord. Lord, hear my voice!). What suitable accompaniment to the day's sermon.

• All this reflection makes me once again deeply aware of my own acute vulnerability. God does not explain or even justify His silences. He provides no satsifying answers other than the ultimate, eventual assurance that things will be set right....eventually.

• In the face of such vulnerability, we need to live in the here and now and live in hope.

• Jesus provide his own share of odd silences. Eg., with Lazarus, Mary and Martha.

• In Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Jesus is ostensibly one of the star singers. Yet he doesn't sing very much. At the beginning, he sings beautifully, reassuringly. Then he falls silent very soon into the Passion.

• In the face of global suffering on mind-staggering scale, how can I not expect to suffer too?

• In silence, we "face the reality of our own mortality" (ML)

• Milosz expresses the transience of the moment with poignancy. See, for example, Czeslaw Milosz - Poetry: Encounter

Back to blogging

There have been many things on my mind lately, and I've not had the discipline in place to make them flow together coherently. The "bookmarks" I have saved on my del.icio.us account gives some indication of what I've been pondering, but by no means, a complete picture. One thing is for sure: all this distraction has pushed my blogging to the side. Today, I will get back on my blogging podiums to write about both the personal side and the work side of what I've been up to.

On the personal side:

As I jumped in wondering what I should actually write about, I felt instantly pulled in too many directions. Fortunately, I was reminded of the central lessons of the last weeks: that I should start in a place of great stillness, which also happens to be a place of great depth. As I hold myself still, I am able to accept that I am a little human being living in a world with outsized needs, including my own. I remember the pledge I had made to pray for Darfur, and I pause to do so. We put up a display to raise awareness about Darfur at First Pres Berkeley and will host a postcard writing event for A Million Voices for Darfur in early April. I am relieved that spring break is coming up, primarily because it gives my students and me some breathing room for the course.

The absence of activity on my electronic presences belies the churn of words on my computer. Having just read about super-prolific Stephen Downe's recently announced hiatus from blogging to take time to stop and reflect made me wonder whether I'm going in the wrong direction by trying to get back into blogging.

The situations are certainly not parallel. First, I've never been the regular and prolific blogger that Stephen was. I have had lots of time to reflect, though I can stand for more in this time of change, challenge, and opportunity. Most importantly, I believe that regular weblogging would be an excellent discipline for me since it would force me to work in smaller chunks, to begin and to complete manageable pieces of work on a regular basis. Without forcing myself to write coherent sentences and paragraphs, I will generate monstrous lists of suggestive phrases. Writers understand the seductiveness of such lists, which seem to contain more content than they actually do.

On the work side:

There is a huge amount of change afoot in my workplace and in my own professional career. Although it would be inappropriate for me to write about some of these matters, I can certainly write openly about my personal vision for information technology at UC Berkeley and beyond. This is an opportune moment to rethink every aspect of my professional work as I look at the field at large and the challenges, opportunities, and risks before me specifically. The product of my (over?) cogitation has been long EccoPro outlines with phrases such as remix, interoperability, gather/create/share, grids, bibliographic metadata, knowledge repository, seamlessness. My job now is to write these outlines in little essays that make sense to others. time to step back to ponder what we do to best serve the academic and research needs of the campus.

dramatic blue in the night sky

The other night, I tried to capture the drama of the night sky. This fuzzy picture might give you some tiny sense of the awe I felt. I didn't have a tripod on which to steady my camera....oh well.

California Hornblower

Because of Shifra's generous present, Laura and I were out on a Bay cruise on Sunday evening. Though it was cold out, the view was spectacular. Laura and I had a wonderful time!

"Do something great for your country. Leave."

Well, I did exactly that -- I moved from Canada to the USA. Is that what the poster meant?

What I need vs what I want

I'm having a hard time accepting that I need long stretches of quiet contemplation to become truly centered and grounded. I just wish it weren't true. I wish I could instantly jump from one situation to another with effortless "context switching" and be fully immersed in each task from the start. Isn't that the dream of a society hooked on "continuous partial attention"? I've been attracted to the "Getting Things Done" system for that reason. As the Wikipedia explains:

GTD rests on the principle that you have to get things out of your head and recorded into a system you can trust. That way, your mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that you need to do, and can concentrate fully on actually doing those things.

GTD has certainly helped me get better organized, but it hasn't been a panacea. I don't blame GTD for my problem since it never promised to let me squeeze five elephants into a clay jar. Instead of aspiring to grow large enough to envelope elephants, I need to accept that I am just an ordinary clay jar.