I just got home from a trip to Reno, Nevada.

Not my favorite city. Nor is Nevada my favorite State. But we got to see family, and that was good. And we drove along the Sierras for miles and miles, which I attempted to sleep through, which is always nice. Good to see them, even if only in passing.

Ask Captain Ribman!

Check this out!

Watch out for fire breathing salamanders of death.

Hmm...

I haven't abandoned my blog, I've merely had nothing at all to say on it right now!

Peter Pan is a great book. I haven't read it for awhile, but getting back into it is refreshing and exciting. I mean, Neverneverland really IS like its portrayed in the book. I think that would be the perfect imaginary world for a child to live in. Great fun for everyone.

i remember when i came to biola, i met this wonderful beautiful young woman. And I thought, "she's cool," and so I liked her. And then, things happened. Lots of them. But now I finally have had the priveledge of being her boyfriend!

I'm a lucky guy.

This is actually the third (now fourth!) time I've begun to write on this post. Two times so far I've wiped it clear. Nothing is coming out right tonight at all. First I wrote about the moon, and how it is the sad light of our heavens. Then I wrote about ice, using it as a metaphor for depression. Not bad images, but poorly portrayed they were worthless, so I deleted them. They're true, though, and if someone else thinks. Rain's another good image for depression, because it's like tears. And dew dripping from a mossy, overgrown forest of dark firs. That might be a good one. Imagine pressing through a forest where the trees block all the sunlight, and in the dim overgrown brambles and tree branches you are drenched by an ever present dripping wetness. The green has to be right, though, because it's a relaxing color. So you'd have to portray the image as containing dark, blackish-brown needles: maybe a forest of dead firs. Have it at night, actually. A moonlight forest shows no color, and if you're alone it would be scary as heck. But then, that's not the concept that I was thinking about, either. The third manifestation of the blog was a soul bearing lament. Hardly appropriate for a blog.

Anyway, this is going nowhere, also. I'll leave it as a testament to my creative inabilities.

I saw a sad movie tonight, an Israeli government point-of-view on the history of the current Palestinian infantada and Oslo accords. It had lots of images of people dying, very tragic. Lots of blood, and sick people rejoicing over death. They had the video of the Isreali soldiers, off duty, who were lynched after straying into Palestinian territory. They were arrested, but the police didn't try to protect them when the mob stormed the building. After they were finished, they threw the bodies out of the window into the crowd, where they were desecrated. It makes one sick. Another video showed a man dragging the body of a Palestinian who collaborated with the Israelies through the street by a rope tied to his heel, Achilles and Hector. I don't remember if it was this body, or another one, but they took and hung one by its foot by a tower so that people wouldn't make the same mistake he did. It could make someone sick.

Aren't humans pleasant?

Ah, Plato, the cool breeze of frustration, passing over the intellect and leaving disturbed thoughts in his wake. Thank God for good authors like him.

This weekend has been Platonic. On Friday night Dr. Al Geier, professor at the University of Rochester, came to speak at Biola. He gave a speech on the winged nature of souls. Both Plato, in the Phaedrus, and Dante, in The Divine Comedy, speak of winged souls. Souls that mount up on wings, among the intelligible world.

It's difficult, after reading a book like Phaedrus, to write my own opinions on this blog. It is a dangerous thing to state this or that, because what does anyone learn from reading? If I tell you something, will you believe it? What will you do with the words that I write? What should you do with the words that I write?

I think that by reading this book and having a discussion about it and the Divine Comedy with some other students, Dr. Geier, and Dr. Reynolds, I've come to more of an understanding of the importance of the Torrey system of learning. It was a good reminder of things we hear Freshmen year, and then forget.

I had a good discussion with a good person Saturday. It illustrated the experience that Plato talks about in the Phaedrus. Really neat. I can't describe it. It's the sort of thing that poets try to describe. So I'll leave it to them.

A good movie to watch: Brother Sun, Sister Moon

It's a movie about Saint Francis of Assisi. It follows his life up to his meeting with Pope Innocent III. Made by Zepherelli during the Hippy Era, it reaks of a humanistic view of life and interprets the life of Francis in such a way that God might be excusable, or at least made weaker. That in itself is inexcusable.

However, it is more than possible to see the piety and Christ-driven goodness of the true character of Francis throughout the film, and I found it not only very spiritually edifying passively, but a motivating and driving film that really tugged at my desire to do good works in the world and love God more.

Francis is just such an amazing person. I often have wondered how a person such as myself could combine my great love for nature with my relationship with God. God, having made nature, is definitely evident in it. The first way that I considered when I was in high school was science. Biology would provide a means of understanding the order of the universe and God's intelligence in it. But something seems wrong with it to me. You have to take apart the things you love, divide them from their essence, to understand their function. You cannot enjoy a bird's heart as you can enjoy a living bird. I need not know that a bird has hollow bones to wonder at its mystery of flight. As Gandalf says, "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."

So the tack of Saint Francis, who sees the work of God in all of nature, is a valid alternative to enjoying nature in our Truth starved culture. Francis enjoys the bird for itself. He wonders at Brother Sun, and Sister Moon in an engaging canticle. He blesses all of creation as he sees it struggling to praise God. He even gives a sermon to the birds that he loves. He's bizarre, in short, but he's bizarre because of how much he loves God. He simply and humbly submits to his place in creation, trusting wholly on the provision of God to live, and follows without question his understanding of God's universe.

There are a lot of great scenes in the movie, if you can stand the campy 60s ballads that accompany them. One of these is Francis' renunciation of the world. He takes all of his clothes off as he stands in the middle of the town square, in front of the Bishop, and gives them to his father. Then he walks out of the town butt naked! It's great. The best scene of the movie, however, takes place in Rome. When Francis meets the Pope, wonderful things happen. But I won't say anything about them. Further proof, though not in the movie, of Francis' holiness, is the gift of Stigmata bestowed upon him by the Lord.

I need to read Chesterton's book on Francis, and Bonaventure's Life of Saint Francis as soon as I can. Unfortunately I haven't the time with 3 papers due soon and Phaedrus being my only reading for entertainment that I have access to.

salmonella...

good word.

bad disease.

A good character can really captivate you. I remember as a child comparing all experiences to what I read in books. The mundane becomes epic if taken in the right mindset. I was thinking about this today because I was re-reading The Man Who Was Thursday and I really want to be like Gabriel Symes, the main character. He's a poet, wandering through life with the mindset that makes the mundane epic, continually. He can take an ecclesiastical lantern, and angrily confront the horrors of anarchy, using the cross-marked flaming symbol to bolster his rhetorical outburst of righteous indignation. Check this out, read it with the anger it needs. Outloud! Trust me, it's worth it.

"Judas before Herod!" he said, and struck the Colonel down upon the stones. Then he turned to the Secretary, whose frightful mouth was almost foaming now, and held the lamp high with so rigid and arresting a gesture that the man was, as it were, frozen for a moment, and forced to hear.
"Do you see this lantern?" cried Syme in a terrible voice. "Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it."
He struck the Secretary once with the lantern so that he staggered; and then, whirling it twice round his head, sent it flying far out to sea, where it flared like a roaring rocket and fell.

The passion of the scene is arresting as the gesture that Chesterton describes. Boy, this man can write.

And he writes good things. Chesteron inspires me to submit to the Church wholly in the intellect, as I wash tired and achy back to shore from my constant struggle for knowledge of the inexhaustible Divine. "Mystery, tradition, love," she whispers motherly, gathering me in her arms.

But I'm a protestant, so I feel like I'm fighting on against the unbreachable tide, riding terrible breakers extending high over my head, constantly at risk of being plunged beneath the dangerous deep that is Revelation.

Two things happened yesterday worth telling:

One, I came to a critical point in understanding the organizing and central purpose behind G.K. Chesteron's The Man Who Was Thursday. This is quite an accomplishment - one Isaac Pletcher was a big help.

Second, we pulled a desk chair around a parking lot behind a car at night.... with people sitting on the chair. That was fun: not getting caught was also quite an accomplishment.

Here's something to check off my to-do list:

Tonight I went for a walk barefoot in the Halloween rain. At first I just stood there, and let the icy pin-pricks of the rain pepper my face and legs. Then I ran back upstairs and got Coleridge. What better way to read a Romantic, I thought to myself, than by the crinkled yellow light of a street lamp in a snow-drop cold rain? When I returned, though, it was raining harder. The rain dimpled the pages of my book, lifting the paper into little smile-wrinkles. I sketched a few short lines into my mind, but it wasn't enough and I wasn't willing to ruin the book, so I put it away, turned left, and started walking. I say, if you can't read the Romantics, live the Romantics.

So, wandering down the street in front of our apartment, I mused melancholy on the dark night, lit gaudily by street, stop, car and house lights. The dark pools of water settling into the middle of the street seemed an ample metaphor for the emotions of my heart. But something odd happened to me tonight: despite my best efforts, melancholy couldn't set in. Instead, to keep warm in the deluge I had to hurry on my way. If I took quick steps, walking briskly, I would warm up, and as my body warmed, my heart and mind warmed as well, gently nudging me involuntarily into a light heart. Soon I was dashing the dark puddles, spreading glittering drops of water across the sheening surface of the street, each reflecting the many lights that belong to a cloudy city night.

As I approached campus, my destination, I stopped and turned around. It was cold, I thought, and this experience, as marvelous as it could be, is not worth catching my death of cold. So I started down the side street that runs behind Tropicana, avoiding a few rushing cars, illuminating the flutter of a thousand drops in the beams of their headlights, each headlight a tiny meteorshower captured for a moment, then gone. The street became dark and empty; as I was crossing the lane, and as I reached the center, I turned, and gazed straight up the middle of it. It enticed me, drew me, unexplainably. Perhaps that's how the spawning salmon feels, facing the rushing current with mighty strokes of his tail. I can't really speak for him, but as for me, I turned up the middle of the street and started running. I threw my head back, let my bare feet thud a quick rhythm on the black asphalt, and inhaled dewy drops of rain, steeped in sweet poesy. My hair, soaked in the wine, lifted from my forehead, and streamed behind me as I grinned a foolish gaping smile and let myself go. Each step was exhilirating, mixed pain and pleasure, water splashing all around my feet, water stinging my face in a tatoo rythm, increasing as I gained speed. It was a moment of pure youthfulness, Peter Pan taking off from amongst the Lost Boys, swooping wildly through forest and glade, bent on the rescue of an Indian Princess.

The problem with running is that it gets you where you're going faster than when you walk. In a minute I was home, warm, and wet. My face was plastered with water, my heart beating warmly in my chest, as I burst open the door of my apartment. I put on water for hot chocolate, opened Coleridge, and read some empty poetry for a few minutes. And I realized that it was over. I couldn't go back outside again. All these kinds of ecstatic experiences end.

It's funny how running can be such a childlike thing. Childhood is a time of more energy, enthusiasm, and innocence than we have now. When we run for no reason, or for no apparent reason, we revisit the times when we always ran, attempting to outpace our peers in a mad dash to nowhere.