Elsewhere in Dreams

All the great themes have been revised and re-revised a thousand times. There is nothing left to be invented. No devices lie uncovered waiting to be picked up. The revolution has happened and happened and happened again.

There is nothing but a single desk lamp. Perfectly formed, lighting its patch of workspace exactly as it was designed to, functioning according to its schematic; it is the saddest lamp in the world. No drama lies hidden in its gunmetal and moulded plastic. It will function: Someone will turn it off and on and off and on again until the day it finally gives up the ghost. It will be replaced. Perhaps it will be replaced long before that day. Someone will decide it is too this or it is too that or it does not match this or that bit of décor and some landfill will inherit its husk. It will be casually tossed aside in any case. It was not made to be treasured.

It is brilliantly and beautifully lighting a typewriter whose letters now barely deign to show up on the paper it formerly so furiously devoured. They still make the oil that lubricates its well-worn machinery but no-one remembers how to make that crucial bit of ink. Soon it too will become an artefact, perhaps even a treasure. It will transition from usefulness to another more sublime existence: It will become something of a museum. You see this, this is how we used to write.

The pages beside it haven’t been touched in years. They pile up one after another after another and no-one dares move them. They grow from the floor and desk and chairs as if planted there and left in the dark like mushrooms to cover every surface. Dense with ideas and fragments of conversations, one might gather them into a book with too many themes and too many characters. One might read them quickly like scanning faces in a crowd. But they weren’t written to be read.

For instance. A city street. The sounds of night time and I am alone. It is better this way. I have crossed the tracks and seen your freight train barrelling past. I have continued. You have continued. There is nothing left to say.

These are the words of a thousand people and of one person. They are a wide brush to paint so many walls which one could name as Oh that was Opportunity, Oh that was Love, Oh that was Death, Oh we ran parallel for a while and then diverged. The hidden artist always has one face and one particular expression but of course you will take his painting and apply your own to it. You may read the pages and sense yourself in them when of course you are not.

He is in the bed across the hall under a different lamp that has been passed down through many generations. It requires a device of its own to connect it to the electrical grid. It requires and adapter, it is that old. He is lying there with his eyes closed but of course he is not asleep.

If he were to burn them the bonfire would go on for days. This is the constant question he asks himself: To light a match is so little effort: To destroy those measured hours would take a mere flick of the wrist.

Those uniformed men might dig through the ashes and gather phrases. They might say, Oh he was writing a novel, Oh one should not keep so much paper in one room, Oh perhaps this was once a typewriter.

If he were to burn them the bonfire would take everything with it. All his memories. They would scatter into the wind and the ground and the lungs of his neighbours. He would never be able to turn to a page and vaguely recall, Oh yes I was there, Oh yes I said that, Oh what was I thinking?

He is beginning to believe this is a good thing.

True story.

I have written the greatest post-rock ever!

Except it’s just me and my electric guitar and my foot pedal and my microphone and Ardour and Hydrogen and Jack on Ubuntu. But it works!

Through all the world, your radiant glory’s shining,
though dimly now, one day in all its light;
when you appear and tear the veil wide open
what we can see in part we’ll see in full.

When we turn and you are there
with healing fire in your hands.
With justice for the oppressed
we will sing a new song.

You make all things new.
You find the damaged and you bind their wounds.
You alone can heal
the world and everything that’s so broken in it.

You’ve been sure for two hundred centuries now.
On the mountain while a merchant pockets your gold.
Do you mind? Put your hand to the plough.

Was there a time when the water fattened the fold?
Or have you been shuttered and boarded up for that long?
Is the wine and the bread gathering mould?

Are you really what you think you are?
Do you guard the words but forget the song?
Fabulous muscles meant to move the world,
can barely move a mountain now.

Beat the dead horse with the stable door swinging wide.
All the best souls flinch to see its fragmented bones.
Can you find better gifts for the bride?

Are you really what you think you are?
Do you guard the word but forget the song?
Fabulous muscles meant to move the world,
can barely move a mountain now.

You will make his casket out of glass,
and put it in the kitchen on display
as if to say that nothing good can last
as you make dinner next to his decay.

They are the worst photographs,
dripping with vinegar and bile,
soldered to a goose-stepping yesteryear
electrically passing, draped
in slow-decaying binary light.
Insecticide in amber, grisly
tainted hollow ugly strange
isn’t it how my better angels
grow ever toward the light?
Past the six by four window
into another less favourable
time.

Okay, so I installed the KDE4 Remix package over my Ubuntu 8.04 install (which is still chugging away despite me wanting to downgrade to 7.10). I just wanted to get a lay of the land and see what all the buzz is about.

When I booted into KDE4, my first thought was, Wow, this is pretty. After about five minutes using it, I thought, Wow, this is awful. I respect what the devs are trying to do with KDE4. And the beginnings they have are very nice. From what I’ve read, what’s under the hood is very nice as well. But it’s simply not ready for prime time anything. Ubuntu — for once, with this release — wisely chose not to designate Kubuntu Remix an LTS. There’s no way anyone could run this for five years or whatever. It’s barely usable. The rough edges made me want to cry.

I don’t know who designated KDE4 a release in the condition it’s in. Whoever that person is, kindly let someone else handle the releasing of things. You’re not very good at it. This is an 0.5 release, not a 4.0. Or a 4.0.4. Even early adopters do not deserve this much flagellation.

So back to Gnome I went, trailing the wounds of my experience. Literally. Removing the Kubuntu package didn’t remove all the programs that went with it, and now I’m left floundering in a sea of “K”s.

This is what I get for reading Ubuntu Planet. Another meme to make the people happy. This one is, what do you have open on your desktop? I’m including things that are living in my system tray as well.

Tranmission
Amarok
gTwitter
padevchooser
Firefox (with four tabs)
gnome-terminal
F-Spot
Hydrogen

Blessed are the amateurs, the vanity presses,
the unkerned letters of the world.

Blessed who’ve not yet begun
listlessly manipulating English
and calling it verse;
who scribble relentless words
like quartz singing from the quarry,
jagged and still three quarters slag;
who have something to say!
who are going to say it!

They have not yet bent double
under the weight of language
and its gravitas.

This Sunday’s sermon really hit me. Jeff preached on the fact that God is near and what that means, why God doesn’t just show up all the time, and why our human senses can’t really see much of God except the evidence of his working.

I specifically identified with the quantum mechanics and string theory illustrations: if there is that much we don’t understand about the universe, if there are things hidden from our sight and from our understanding, how can we understand where God is and what he is doing? I love physics, and I love sermons with physics in them… even if I’m the only one in the congregation that feels that way.

This is the thing I really appreciate about Jeff’s preaching; I don’t know if he’s a trained preacher by trade, but what he says is pretty much always spot on, and he doesn’t resort to clichés and pat answers to get his point across. I can always get on board with an innovative explanation, or a new way of looking at an old issue. It seems to me that saying things the same way for a long time can create a mental bypass in the listener’s mind: creativity in preaching is a great didactic tool for that reason among others.

I am really looking forward to Joel coming back from his little conference. I hope he’s preaching this Sunday, as I think he’s a superior speaker, but also a superior communicator. I especially like his exploration of the history surrounding scripture (an implicit nod, I think, to the fact that all truth is contextual). Anyone — yeah, even me — can do a surface treatment of some of the subject matter Joel has taken on, but I think it takes a better preacher to dig into it and get his hands dirty. As the rabbis used to say, scripture is a many-faceted jewel: you hold it up to a new light and get a new reflection you’ve never seen before.

I don’t know who ever convinced Joel he’s not a good preacher; I’ve heard him hint at as much. Laura and I didn’t originally start attending Freshwater because of the atmosphere or the music or the people — though all those things are huge factors — but because when Joel spoke we were both like, wow, this guy is telling the truth. And that’s really what matters.

So yeah, Joel, if you ever read this, the next time you say something depreciating about your messages and speaking ability, I’m going to (in all Christian love) punch you in the face. Okay, not really.

(Or… will I?)

–

After the service we went over to Tanya and Trevor’s palace. I mean, house. It’s quite nice. They have a sublime sense of interior. And Trevor makes a mean rib. It was nice to get to know them better; they seem like good people.

–

You know Christians are all like, “Come back quickly, Lord Jesus?” I totally get that now. So if I may, come back quickly, Tim and Candace. I hope you’ve having a nice holiday. But seriously, get back here.