Charlotte Mason: "LIX 'Little children abide in Him'" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)

[p164]

LIX

     “Little children abide in Him” (The Disciple)
     “I write unto you, little children, because ye have known the
Father.”
     “I write unto you, little children, because your sins are for-
given you for His name’s sake.”
     “And now, little children, abide in Him.”

     YE children, unto you I write:
          Not strong to overcome are ye,
          Faithful to strive nor wise to flee;—
     But your weak coming was in Light!
          Ye see; though not your feeble thought
          Can shape the knowledge Light has brought,
Yet have ye known the Father long from wisdom
     hid.

     An older breast with pity swells
          For babe in this rude world bereft
          Of parent love, all des’late left!
     Uncareful and at ease he dwells;
          He knows, yet knows not that he knows,
           A care that bears him as he goes,—
The Father he discerns and smiles all fears
     amid!

[p165]

     And, children, unto you I write!
          Ah, not the shining of His face
          Nor shelt’ring of the Father’s grace
     Has kept your garments wholly white:
          Poor babes, ye sin—for strong is ill,
          And small your might and weak your will—
Lo, swift forgiveness lifts anew to His embrace!

     For not on you the burden lies:
          A gracious cloud, a tender tear,
          Is all ye know of hireling fear;
     Then into joy again do rise:
          E’en while ye sin, are ye forgiven
          For His Name’s sake: wherefore in heaven
Your angels evermore behold your Father’s face.

     For, ah, wise little ones, ye know
          To take the Off’ring at the door,
          Nor question aught nor tell the score,
     But enter, free as winds that blow!
          Wherefore, O little ones, I write
          That ye do keep you in the light—
For loving must ye be, O children of His grace!

Charlotte Mason: "LVI 'Lest we cause them to stumble'" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)

[p153]

LVI

“Lest we cause then to stumble”

SILENT and sorrowful the Company went,
Pondering the Master’s word with sinking hearts
And tardy comprehension. Once again,
Their steps turned to Capernaum, the blessed,
And the Lord made His abode in Peter’s house,
High honoured to receive Him; where was she
Late raised by Christ, His grace, from fevered
     bed,
Who would fain speak her love in household
     cares:
Did the Lord comfort there the sorrowing Twelve,
Or sat they there with Him, as those men of old
Sate silent with stricken Job?
                                                   Peter went forth
And was accosted by those men sent out
To gather from Israelites that Temple due
The legal half a shekel. “Doth not your Lord
Contribute to the general fund?” they ask,
Surmising that, perchance, for cause unknown
He might refuse this service to religion.

[p154]

“He doth,” said Peter, knowing well his Lord
Neglected no observance that became
A pious Jew. But th’ Saint went home per-
     plexed,—
Now where should he a shekel find? Full well
He knew that Christ no money owned—though
     He,
The Son of God most high! Entering the house
With anxious brow, the Lord discerns his care,—
Speaks first to him, or e’er he told a word:—
“What think’st thou, Simon, of whom do kings
     take toll,
From their own sons, or from the subject-folk,
The strangers, not their kin, o’er whom they
     rule?”
“Why, sure, from strangers.” “Therefore,” saith
     the Lord,
“The King’s own sons go free and share that
     State
The tributes of the people must support.”

Did Peter understand how the Lord had said,—
These Temple-dues are for God’s worship paid,
That th’ beauty of holiness may be set forth
By outward symbols in the Temple: See,
I and the Father are one; that worship paid
By pious souls to God, is paid to Me—
One with the Father, sharing all His dues:
Is’t fit that I contribute toward those rites
Ye Jews pay punctual to God—and Me?

[p155]


“But we may not impede these men in their
     task,
Nor give them cause for anger or harsh words,
Misjudging thee and Me: so their offence
Were laid at our door who had made them sin:—
Go thou to Gennesareth and cast a hook;
Draw the first fish to land, nor pause to ask
Is’t small or great; when thou hast ope’d his
     mouth,
A shekel thou shalt find; that take and pay
To the men—just Temple-dues for thee and Me.”


A PDF is available here.

Charlotte Mason: "VI The miracle of increase" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)

VI The miracle of increase

THAT miracle of increase—what the steps,
And at what moment did the change take place?
Did broken fragments multiply the while—
The instant’s space—they passed through Jesus’
     hands?
The Disciples’ baskets—were they straightway
     filled
Direct from the hands of the Lord? Or, grew
     the store
In the act of giving, each portion leaving more
Than itself to fill its place? Idle, we ask;
Who tells us how the goodly grain is built,—
The seed, the blade, the ear, full corn in ear—
That man knows th’ processes of miracles,
How thousands may be fed, how tempests, stilled!
Such mysteries, they yield all to one key
Had we the wit to know it, grace to use:
Life feeds upon the living—all we know!
“In Him was life”—our sum of knowledge, see;
No further oracle’s vouchsafed to men
For all their restless searching, arrogant boasts:
That secret place where life doth hide itself
And thence flows forth to animate the worlds—
Rejecting Christ, THE LIFE, what hope have we
That any find it for us? Alternative,
There’s none for us: ’tis Christ, or blank dismay!
As General spies weak point in his defence,
So Christ took His disciples, constraining them,
By force of that strong word they knew t’obey,
Despite their protestations—sure, not they
Would leave Him all alone to deal with this
Tumultuous multitude!—and, straight, they go,
Take boat as they are bid for further side;
And Christ, alone, took leave of all the folk,
Dispersed them to their homes, constrained by
     that
Authority in Him which some knew to name.

And was the Christ alone? Two years had
     passed
Since in the wilderness one came and said,—
“The Kingdoms shall be thine and all their praise
Wilt thou but bow to me!” Two strenuous
     years,
The Lord had carried water in a sieve,
Had urged great boulder up a mountainous slope;
The inconstant people slipped away from Him;
Fast as He raised them, fell to lower depth:
Is any toil like his who high ideal
Urges incessant on unwilling souls?
What if, once more, the Tempter came and
     mocked;—
“Two years gone by—no Kingdom yet to
     show!”
What if he urged, “Nay, try my readier plan,—
Let them make King of Thee, and all the gifts
Which Thou wouldst give to men shall flow from
     Thee!”
What if stress of temptation drove our Lord,
That He clomb up the mountain there to pray!—
And peace attends His prayer, and careful love.

The Lord gazed from His height; quick flash
     revealed
The Disciples toiling on uneasy sea—
Sight piteous out of the dark, their boat a toy,
A plaything of strong waves, tempestuous winds:
The men distressed with rowing make no way;
In the fourth watch of the night, there were they
     still!
“Anon, the Lord was with us, safe were we
’Mid all the turmoil of wild heavens, great seas!
Alone, we perish, late so full of hope!”
What greater strait might be—alone, in the
     night,
Peril of death about them, without hope?
But what is this adds horror to their dread—
Better to drown than demons see abroad
Walking the midnight sea! Spectre abhorred,
They’d heard how such appeared to men fore-
     doomed,
And terror froze their hands to idle oars!
The Shape draws near—a likeness grows on
     them;
More awful fear appals: then,—Is it He,
The Spirit of their Master? He is dead,
And they, indeed, left orphaned, desolate!—
They cried aloud in terror; worse than all,
This apparition unendurable!
A tender voice bids all their fears subside—
They hear through the tempest’s raging, “It is I;
Be of good cheer poor troubled hearts, nor
     fear!”
Too much the joy for Peter, sudden induced
On anguish of his terror:—Lost he his wits,
And cried, “Lord, bid me come if it be
     Thou!”
Hazards of faith are welcome to the Lord,
If so be, He must reckless zeal instruct
Which counts not the cost. “Come,’ saith Christ,
     and he came,
Stepped from the boat with eye fixed on the
     Lord,
And steady walked the waters: then, distract,
He saw the heaving sea; “I perish, Lord,
Save Thou!” Immediately the Lord stretched
     hand,
Took hold of the sinking saint, and spake re-
     proof,—
“O thou of little faith, wherefore didst doubt?”
They in the boat knew all their fears subside;
That dear familiar voice quick calmed their soul;—
How awful the surroundings, here was Christ,
And willingness took the place of shrinking
     dread:
Glad, they in the boat received Him; subsided
     straight
The fury of the storm: those weary leagues
Their sore-tired arms must row were over-past,
In the haven where they would be, were they
     now!
Once more they worshipped Him;—“By this
     we know
Of a truth, our Lord, Thou art the Son of God!”
The Lord, too, was He weary? What confi-
     dence,
The loaves, had they produced in hardened
     hearts
Which had no faith in Him when terror urged?


A PDF is available here.

Charlotte Mason: "V The people would make Him king" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)

V The people would make Him king

“HERE’S of a truth that Prophet of the Lord
Moses foretold should lead the folk like him,
Like him, give bread to spare in the wilderness!”
So spake all they who heard what Christ had
     done:
Full well they spake; who knows to open wide
Men’s mouths with hunger, knows straightway
     to drop
Food that shall animate or fainting flesh,
Or heart sunk low in courage; to give new life
To all the failing goodness of a soul,—
He, Prophet of the World! the One who sees,—
Knows all the needs of men, and ministers!

“This Prophet be our King!” they cry them
     hoarse,
Allured by the hope of bread for men spread
     thick
As manna in the barren wilderness!
What need to labour? All should sit at ease;
His bread provided, each himself should please!
“Why, what’s a King for but his people’s bread

To furnish, liberal, constant: this is He!
Unwilling, He hangs back, but we are strong,
The many people, sure, may make their King!”
And hot, impetuous, by one impulse moved,
They came perforce to seize and make Him
     King!
The disciples stood exultant, from their eyes
Encouragement spake out; all the mad crowd
Knew them supported by these grave good men.


A PDF is available here.

Charlotte Mason: "IV Christ our 'Providence'" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)

IV Christ our “Providence”

“Now make them all sit down:” and that same
     John,
Who splendours saw of the new Jerusalem,
The rainbow throne, the sardius, emerald,—
Here, also, saw what fed his artist-eye;—
Saw much grass in the place; the vivid-hued
Garments of eastern men amongst the flowers,—
Kaleidoscope of colours: soon, the word
Came, bidding all to sit by companies;
See, a score of open squares, with space in midst
Where Christ stood with th’ disciples, and that
     meal—
The little meal which should sustain them all—
Mocking the eyes of thousand hungry folk
Thus bidden to break fast! Did any know
With soft assurance in his inward heart
That, the thing He gives sufficeth, less or more?

How good to us, anhungered, to perceive
The Master’s mind disclosed in all the tale,
See order emanating from His act
As song from throat of throstle! so did John see
A jewelled glory as of painted glass
Reflected on his vision from Christ’s thought! —
How good to see our Saviour in the midst
Dealing out bread to all that multitude
E’en as He deals to us in harvest field!
The harvest’s yellow glory in all lands,
In Egypt, Syria, distant western fields,
The table spread for us as for the birds,—
How this one scene interprets the Lord’s ways!

Lo, that large circle, those five thousand souls,
Raised eyes to Him in their midst; He took the
     loaves,—
The little barley cakes, the fishes two,—
And, looking up to heaven, He blessed the meat
And gave God thanks Who feeds us. That poor
     “Grace”
We say before meat,—convicted, we elude
The eye of Him who taught us! Consider we
This feeding of five thousand, and we perceive
How the very life of God comes with our bread!
He brake the loaves and fishes, gave the meat
To the disciples, they to th’ multitude:—
Behold, our uses! That He hands to us,
For distribution is’t, that all may eat;
We, honoured in His service and in theirs.

The people ate accustomed fare with zest—
The wonder of ’t! And ate the more to try,
Could the supply give out and any lack ?
In time they were all filled; and the ordered
     mind
Of Him, the universe sustains and made,
Appeared in a little matter: “Gather up,”
Said He who fed them with unlaboured act,
“The broken pieces left that none be lost.”
No trifling thing, these fragments of men’s
     food: —
Organic life alone can life sustain;
Cycles of time, processes manifold,
Initial act creative, evolving care
Of Him who first had made,—all these had gone To make rejected crust, fragment of fish:
And those twelve baskets filled with broken
     meat,
Of God’s world-providence tell all the tale!


A PDF is available here.

Charlotte Mason: "III A venture of faith" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)

III A venture of faith

THE Lord sat wearied after day-long speech,
Passing of “virtue” from Him in those signs—
Compassionate miracles—He wrought for them.
The people looked and heard and took their fill
Of the life that was in Jesus. (Wherefore, then,
But a handful gathered in that upper room
To fulfil their last obedience, when multitudes,
Arrested by His signs, had paid that due—
Attention to His words—which should lead to life?
Alack, an active part was theirs to play:
’Tis not enough to feed—e’en on the Word:
To assimilate that we take is our concern,
Else, go we empty!)
                                    Lifting up His eyes,—
He sees great multitudes have come to Him:
Ah, good for us that one was by who loved,
And garnered bread for Christendom’s fond heart!
Blessèd to know that, there He sat, our LORD;
Where lies the spot, we know not, but rejoice
With brooding mind to know that, on a place,
Here on our very earth, the Saviour sat!
Bless’d, to know surely that He raised His
     eyes;—
Love treasures such things up; the love of John
Made record for us; our love tells her gains;
Surpassing reverence transports the heart
To note the Lord’s regard, observe Him, sit!
And now the Master tests that growth in faith—
The disciples’ sole concern, our only care:
One picks He out; turning to Philip, saith,
(Our testing finds us ever one by one!)
“Whence buy we bread that all these folk may
     eat?”
As when a King calls young knight to his side—
“Thou art a man of valour—knightly hest
I lay on thee; go, do this valiant deed!”—
Was Philip honoured that day ’mongst his peers
With opportunity for splendid faith,
More in regard of Christ than any work!
Would we’d been there to answer, “Lord, I
     know
That thou canst feed men, heal them, give them
     life!”—
Such chance was Philip’s: but perceived he not
Himself, a school-boy called to say his task;
The lesson, is it conned? Go higher, thou;
But, stumblest in the saying? Go thou down:
So, Philip had his chance to praise the Lord!

By what perverseness harden we our heart
When friend makes meek appeal for sympathy
In noble purpose, soul-uplifting thought?
Then, practical, are we; would count the cost,
Bid him beware of that generosity,
Or sneering men will ask, ‘What hast in bank,
What coin or credit with the Highest?’ So,
Did Philip answer, reckoning up the cost:
“Two hundred pennyworth is not enough
To afford a little bread to each of these.”—

Alas, for Philip! One chance, they say, men
     have,
One single chance of greatness in a life:
Philip lost his for common sordid thought—
What good’s done on the earth, that, money does;
And, Were we rich, what great things would we
     do!

Another heard, one of a generous stock,
Whose brother cast his all on one great throw,
One lottery of faith,—Peter, who owned,
“Thou art the Christ of God!”—Now, Andrew
     saith,
“A lad’s here with five loaves, two fishes small;”—
And in his heart he thought, “Enough for one,
May’t in His hands feed all this numerous host?”
Sudden ashamed of his temerity,
Fall’n cowardly, he adds—“but what are they
For all this multitude?” With failing heart,
He launched his petty bark, the “Little Faith”:
Ah, were’t an ocean vessel for this voyage!


A PDF is available here.

Charlotte Mason: "II Jesus went up into the mountain" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)

II “Jesus went up into the mountain”

HE climbed the slope in sight of all the folk;
They watched, nor looked away, and knew at
     heart,
Unknowing that they knew, that in Him alone
Was all their hope, their life; without Him,
     nought!
He sat with His disciples there; He spake
Of the Kingdom of God and how men enter in:
Of what, we know not save by gathering up
Words elsewhere He had uttered, other time;
By conceiving baffling thought of parables
And sayings precious, unregarded pearls,
That no man gathered for our after-use!

The time wore on; for many hours the folk,
A moved and swaying throng, gave heed to words
That Christ let fall among them. The day far
     spent,
The Disciples came to Him, urged common
     sense;
(Nay, sure, in this thing, they more wise than
     He!
So the crowd scores o’er poets and the rest,
Who top them by head and shoulders; they
     have sense!)
Sententious spake they, in dull human wise;
“See, here’s a desert place, night’s drawing on,
A great multitude’s about with nought to eat,—
Forgetting hunger now, but, by-and-by?—
Good Master, be advised; send them away
That they may lodge in villages at hand
And buy somewhat to eat!” “What need that
     they
Should go away? give ye them bread to eat.”
Were ever men of sense brought quicker up
Before th’impossible, preposterous!
All high things knew the Lord, but this small
     thing—
The people’s supper, how to get them home,—
How should great minds descend to small con-
     cerns?
Their plan was good, but He must have His way,
And theirs, to abide the thing He willed to do!


A PDF is available here.

Charlotte Mason: "I In a desert place" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)

I In a desert place

“COME ye apart to a desert place and rest,”
Saith Christ to His Chosen Twelve, returned to
     Him
From wanderings, healings, teachings, manifold.
But, see, the people will not be outdone,
Nor let their Lord, theirs also, out of sight!
They watched Him enter the boat with those, His
     friends;
Tumultuous, eager, followed they on foot
Round the head of the lake, heedless of noon-day
     heat;
Crowds gathered to them from the cities round,
And, lo, that desert place the Lord had sought—
Spot lovely and remembered, was’t, perhaps,
For many a prayerful vigil, solitary,—
The crowd, iconoclast, had broke the spell,
Shattered that image of sweet solitude
Which refreshed the Master’s thought! See,
     multitudes
Are there before Him, waiting for His words.

Men of sweet nature, sure, might feel annoy
At such rude trespass on hour set apart
For rest and converse with their chosen friends:
They of sweet nature, aye, but not the Christ:
Tender, He welcomed all those scattered sheep
Having no shepherd; diligently taught
Through the long day things that concerned
     their peace—
Things of the Kingdom which was for each of
     them:
They heard with greedy ear: all learned that
     day,
That, whoso comes to Christ comes always well;
Never intrudes on secret communings,
Hears words for other ears, presumes on hours
Devoted to great matters; all’s for him,
Poor wretch who has no claim!


A PDF is available here

Of Desperation and Desire in The Killers’ Battle Born

This paper was presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music - Canadian Branch Annual Conference in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2013. Some of the material here went on to a book review on Virilio that was published by Philosophy in Review. Some Virilio material also found its way into my book on Bowie, released by McFarland in 2015.

This paper will explore transience, desire, desperation and labour in the songs of The Killer’s Battle Born. It will take into account theoretical notions of desire and transience, in order to demonstrate how the album encapsulates these notions, creating a vivid picture, a desperate moment in time.

The celebrated Las Vegas band, The Killers, released their fourth studio album in 2012, called Battle Born. The band has also released 3 music videos in association with the album. Not all of the reviews seem to exactly legitimize the band’s output; while the reviewers of the song and video are mostly positive in their assessment, they are not always entirely serious. Jason Lipshutz, writing for Billboard, encourages the fans to “Let your fists punch the cold night air, rock fans—this one’s for you.” Writing for Rolling Stone, Jon Dolan describes Brandon Flowers’ singing with the following: “singer Brandon Flowers’ unmistakable commitment to unmistakable commitment. . . . Kind of cool, kind of ridiculous, and Vegas all the way.”

“Runaways,” though, recounts the experience of requited teenage love which blossoms to engagement because of pregnancy. Unfortunately, the male narrator of the song seems to have some trouble with the arrangement: “but I got the tendency to slip when the nights get wild.” Now married, the protagonist seems unsettled, pining for their happy past together. Nevertheless, the protagonist ends the song with the resolution that he will not let her go, since, after all, we are just “runaways.” What is particularly interesting for this present study is the nature of the lyrics: Flowers creates descriptive verses that seem to carry the song along a loose narrative. He writes of “blonde hair blowin’ in the summer wind / a blue-eyed girl playing in the sand,” and of their time later, “at night I come home after they [that is, the protagonist’s wife and child] go to sleep / like a stumbling ghost, I haunt these halls / There’s a picture of us on our wedding day.” These are vivid images that both involve and evoke photographs. Can the various vivid images that are captured in the lyrics of “Runaways” be likened to photographs, mediated “slices” of a sort of reality, arresting an image and enticing the viewer to discover the greater narrative?

If so, do they contain what Roland Barthes calls an “air,” the notion of the soul, the shadow, that makes an image “true”? Then this is the locus of the listener’s desire, what keeps the listener listening, and what makes, for that listener, the songs “true.” In his novelistic study of photography as a cultural process published in 1980, Camera Lucida, Barthes writes about the desire that he confronts when dealing with certain photographs. He wishes to “enter the paper’s depth,” a desire to see something more than simply the image that is presented. (100) He refers to notions of desire here: “I can have the fond hope of discovering truth,” though he admits he will not find it. (99)

He suggests that, sometimes, he perceives something of the truth in a photograph, what he calls “a likeness,” but the likeness is imprecise or imaginary. He concludes, “I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph.” The photograph is unlike the text; that is, “our vision of it is certain,” a curious thing for a semiologist to suggest. The photograph arrests interpretation: “this-has-been.” (106-107)

Barthes’ frustration is evident here: he still seeks (more properly, desires) something more in the photograph. He wishes to discover the person in the photograph completely. It seems here that Barthes is grasping at straws, so to speak. He wants to find the truth in a photograph, and so he finds, as the locus of his desires, the air (or the expression). But then he immediately writes, “The air of a face is unanalyzable.” (107) But it evokes for the observer, “little individual soul, good in one person, bad in another.” (109) The air is what allows Barthes to identify his mother in the Winter Garden photograph.

For Barthes, this is the culmination of his desperate search through photographs, something that began as a phenomenological study of why photographs, these “slices of reality,” papers imbued with such memory and power, were so effective, and what draws people to view and keep them. Partly, the study emerges from the mourning that Barthes was experiencing due to the death of his mother in 1978.

Brian Dillon puts it this way:

Having lost his mother, with whom he had lived most of his life, he goes looking for her among old photographs; time and again the face he finds is not quite hers, even if objectively she looks like herself. At last, he discovers her true likeness, the “air” that he remembers, in a picture of Henriette aged five, taken in a winter garden in 1898. (In the journal entry that recounts this discovery, Barthes simply notes: “Je pleure.”)

Barthes explains it as follows:

All the photographs of my mother which I was looking through were a little like so many masks; at the last, suddenly the mask vanished: there remained a soul, ageless but not timeless, since this air was the person I used to see, consubstantial with her face, each day of her long life. (110)

This is what makes a true photograph: the capturing of the air (one’s soul, one’s shadow). But then consider Flowers’ words to the song “Here with Me,” in which he sings, “Don’t want your picture / on my cell phone / I want you here with me.” In this instance, the cell phone as carrier of images, does not allow the transmission of the “air” of the subject of the photograph. The narrator desires to have the person with them, physically present, rather than present in the photograph.

If one can think of the narrative and descriptive moments in the songs as photographs, can one think of the songs as fleeting and transient as well? Paul Virilio speaks of a kind of desperation in the transience of modern global society.

Is such transience also depicted in the spacial aspects of the music, such as on the track “Battle Born”? Writers at Billboard describe the song this way: “Rather than descend back towards earth on the album’s final song, the Killers come out guns blazing on ‘Battle Born’s’ finale.” The song begins with a single guitar playing over some soft strings until the full band joins it, until succumbing to a more sparse accompaniment once Flowers begins singing the first verse. With the chorus, the guitars rise in volume and the listener hears the first instance of strong background vocals (evoking Queen’s choir-like backing vocals). These vocals contribute to an increasing intensity as the song develops to a sort of climax, during which Flowers and the backing vocals alternate their delivery, in a sort of two-pronged attack that not only builds intensity, but also contributes to a sense of greater aural space. This might be why the writers at billboard use the following phrases to describe the album’s sounds: Battle Born contains songs that come close to “stadium size”; “stadium ready”; “aspiring anthem,” that is, songs that are aspiring to be anthemic; and songs “rooted in 80s arena riffage.” What is particularly compelling here is not only the description of aural space that the writers describe, but also the memory or nostalgia that is evoked in these sorts of phrases. The Killers and its lead singer Flowers cannot stand on their—or his—own, but must instead be situated among other artists, be it Queen, Bruce Springsteen or U2. Just as photographs point directly to their referents, so The Killers point to those bands that precede them. In a way, like photography, The Killers keep their referents alive. Of photography, Walter Benjamin writes,

No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. (510)

As Steve Edwards explains, in his brief history of photography, “Memory is, after all, a trace or impression of the past that takes place in the present.” (120)

One must also consider Brandon Flowers’ singing voice in this discussion: Flowers employs a very quick vibrato, which evokes the feeling that he is pushing his voice. His intonation is often slightly sharp, a consequence often blamed on tension in the singing voice. Both tension and the notion of pushing the voice both connote desparation, or the manic working out of some issue.

Desperation is often manifest in a kind of labour, in getting “worked up.” Both Barthes and Paul Virilio hint at this, in that desire demands a certain amount of work, in expressing, of searching and consuming, of effort in moving from one place to another to escape congestion, to long for another place or the next place.

Consider the depiction of airfields and road vehicles in “The Way it Was,” and the transience and soft relationships of new communications technologies in “Here with Me” (with images on cell phones rather than personal intimacy)?

Paul Virilio, in his book The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject, approaches the subject of future environmental migrants, those displaced by conflict as well as by development projects. If earlier eras were about ‘sustainable staying-put,’ this new era will be one of ‘habitable circulation,’ which calls into question notions of citizenship and nationhood. He calls the resulting upheavals the ‘portable revolution,’ which, along with revolutions in transportation and transmission technologies, will lead to what he calls an ‘interactive planisphere.’ Throughout the work, Virilio moves from the smaller scale (for instance, discussing the loading dock or the train station) to the larger scale (the city as a whole, or the whole world in movement), suggesting that these spaces of movement are ultimately ungovernable, at least in terms of conventional legal governance.

Throughout the book, Virilio explores the idea of speed in the early twenty-first century and its results. His text is formatted for speed: he mentions issues and leaves them, moving on to a new issue with a new paragraph; this is not unlike the fragmentary nature of song lyrics. His book is an uncompromising look at the power of what he calls révolution de l’emport, or what translator Julie Rose has deemed the ‘portable revolution,’ a movement enacted because of the increases in the ‘payload capacity,’ or capacité d’emport, of the twenty-first century, in terms of transportation and communications technologies. If space is problematized in the twenty-first century, due to progress in terms of communication and transportation technologies, so is time, as Virilio argues in the third section of the book, ‘The Futurism of the Instant.’ What he calls ‘the balance of computerized terror’ leads to a loss of memory—a loss of the past, but also a loss of the future. Virilio argues, rather, that the result is the experience of a kind of perpetual instant.

What Virilio sees as a blight he also sees as a solution: in order to solve problems such as the erasure of space and time, and the chronic consumption of the Earth by its occupants, he suggests that we become nomads, to counteract the sedentary characteristics of the Ultracity. In its constant communication and transportation flows, one can find, in a way, rootedness. This is a rootedness in the notion of global citizenship, a community of all peoples, for the sake of the planet. If Virilio’s work seems too negative, he at least offers some glimmer of hope in a method of reversal of what, in other parts of his book, seem to be inevitable results of technological and spacial globalization.

The Killers are fundamentally, then, a band without roots: drawing musically from the 1980s, informed by the 2000s, inspired by English and Irish bands, and situated in the western United States. Their “unrootedness,” their supeficiality as recognized by reviewers, is manifest in their desperation, as they exist as a sort of photograph of the “perpetual instant.”


Sources:

Author Unknown. “The Killers, ‘Battle Born’: Track-By-Track Review.” billboard.com (17 September 2012). Available from http://www.billboard.com/articles/review/1066848/the-killers-battle-born-track-by-track-review. Internet. Accessed 30 April 2013.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” Selected Writings, Volume 2 (1927-1934). Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999.

Dillon, Brian. “Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes.” The Guardian (26 March 2011). Available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.

Dolan, Jon. “Reviews: The Killers—‘Runaways.’” Rolling Stone (13 July 2012). Available from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/songreviews/runaways-20120713. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.

Edwards, Steve. Photography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Lipshutz, Jason. “Watch The Killers Be Epic in Their ‘Runaways’ Music Video.” billboard.com (26 July 2012). Available from http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/480765/watch-the-killers-be-epic-in-their-runaways-music-video. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.

Virilio, Paul. The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.

Father Elijah

Father Elijah was the first Michael O'Brien book that I ever read, on the recommendation of a friend. As a young Evangelical Protestant, the story of a priest, along with (what I thought was) Vatican intrigue and Stato (the Vatican Secretary of State) and Dottrina (the Vatican Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) was a sort of exotic Other for me. I thought the story was a great read and a glimpse into a world that I found both mysterious and a bit forbidden (being a Protestant, after all). Rereading the book many years later, I didn't find it as effective as I did when I was younger: there are moments in the narrative during which the pages turn quickly (if you will), but there are others where O'Brien seems to step on his own soap-box, decrying societal lack or spiritual insensitivity. This is not to say that there isn't a very sincere and proper heart to the book. I think it does something quite daring, if not a bit theatrical. It tries to be a Roman Catholic take on apocalyptic--Dispensational-flavoured-- literature. In 2016, O'Brien published a follow-up to Father Elijah called Elijah in Jerusalem, a new book which spurred me on to read the older works. Part of the experience was nostalgic: I'm in a very different place personally than I was upon first reading. I must thank O'Brien, though, for this earlier book, a sort of guide for where I would be today, and a sincere and proper heart at the centre of his work.

The Handmaid's Tale

In preparation of watching Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, I decided to read Margaret Atwood's original novel of the same name. This was the first time I had ever read the novel; I was not fortunate enough to read it in high school or during my university days. One of the saving graces for this novel--that actually allowed me to finish reading the novel--were its short chapters. I am notorious for not finishing a book, but I finished this one. I attribute my success not only to Atwood's short chapters, but also my fondness for dystopian fiction. The world that Atwood creates is rich, though terrifying. I think, though, that, at the end, the book is slightly less satisfying than I was expecting. Atwood creates a rich world, but leaves a lot to the imagination, in terms of the continued details of the world. I understand that world creation is not necessarily the final point of the book (rather, the control of the body and the tyranny of both unbridled feminism and misogyny), but the ending left me thinking that the narrative might need a bit more. Perhaps the details of the world will come through the visuals of the series. The trailers suggest as such, so I'm looking forward to it.

The Bad Beginning

I am embarking on a reading binge (more accurately, I have already begun a reading binge) and thought that I would write a very short review of the books as I complete them. The first book that I have finished is The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events. I have been watching the Netflix series of the same title and thought I'd begin to read the series again. The first time through, I only read up to the middle of Book 5; there are 13 books in the series, so I still have a long way to go. I believe this was the third time I have read The Bad Beginning.

I have a love-hate relationship with these books, I think. This relationship extends to the Jim Carrey movie and these Netflix episodes as well. I like the idea of the books: the world that Snicket (AKA Handler) creates is whimsical, but not in a Diagon Alley way. To explain, I was immediately perturbed by the first Harry Potter book because of the reference to Diagon Alley, which seemed a silly name for a place, a place that is supposed to exist in the real world (not in some alternate dimension). There is little reference in The Bad Beginning to the real world (though the Netflix series talks about Winnipeg).

What I found pleasurable in reading this book this time, though, was the feel of the physical book in my hands: the print was big, the chapters short. The story was simple and humourous. It was a bit of a break from Proust, which I am trying to slog through in this reading binge. My plans are not to read the second book right away (I'll try to get through one of my other books first). My reading binge began with too many books at once (12, I think).

So, look forward to these write-ups after each book is completed. I'll refrain from doing a sort of Barthesian reading of this book at this point. Don't think it will never happen, though.