Six more

After tonight, I have six more harrowing fourteen-hour days. Woo hoo! I'm going to be inundated with papers soon, but no matter... I have a mere three weeks until I can rest... unless, that is, Mary goes into labor that day, which she probably will... no rest, eh? No rest.

I've decided to save Gravity's Rainbow for another day--I'm just too involved right now, and the book doesn't break down well like, say, Ovid does. So I'm reading Ovid again, one episode at a time. The poetic insight of the man is phenomenal--I'd always heard about his influence on later poetry, but his own play with the concepts of identity, form, deity, humanity, and such are wonderful. I'll probably be commenting on Ovid for the next few posts as I did on Malory a while back.

One episode that deserves comment today is that of Echo and Narcissus. I'd always heard the story in outline, and I'd encountered it in Apuleius (I think it's in there, anyway), but Ovid's commentary on the love of self is just great:

...Unwittingly,
He wants himself; he praises, but his praise
Is for himself; he is the seeker and
The sought, the longed-for and the one who longs;
He is the arsonist--and is the scorched.

How many futile kisses did he waste
On the deceptive pool! How often had
He clasped the neck he saw but could not grasp
Within the water, where his arms plunged deep!
He knows not what he sees, but what he sees
Invites him. Even as teh pool deceives
His eyes, it tempts them with delights. But why,
O foolish boy, do you persist? Why try
To grip an image? He does not exist--
The one you love and long for. If you turn
Away, he'll fade; the face you discern
Is but a shadow, your own reflected form.
The shape has nothing of its own: it comes
With you, with you it stays; it will retreat
When you have gone--if you can ever leave!

If there's ever been poetry that begged for Christian allegory, this has to be it. The potential commentary on our own self-fashioned gods is tremendous. And it's got to be an influence on Milton when he narrates Satan's incestuous desire for his daughter Sin--if I remember right, Milton even points out that Satan only loves himself in her.

BTW, this is all from Allen Mandelbaum's translation.

Hard Time Remembering

Okay, so there haven't been many posts lately. I attribute this to two things:

1. Working fifteen-hour days over at EC takes a toll, alright?
2. It's dang hard to remember what one dreamed when the first step on the ground is made towards whatever my soon-to-be-born son and his seven-and-a-half-months-pregnant mother need from me.

That said, I suppose I have been doing some thinking during the day, so there might be some merit to blogging those thoughts.

Were I not so tired, I'd probably be writing on my book in these months--I've been reading some phenomenal books myself, and I've got thoughts to contribute. I wish that I were more employable as a preacher. I think I've got enough to offer a congregation now that I'd be worth hiring, but on my resume, the multiple master's degrees and the years of education make me look not thoughtful but dangerous. And dangerous isn't what many churches want. At least not the ones I'd want to serve. Yes, I've become Groucho Marx--"I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member." (I think that was Groucho Marx, but I suppose it could have been Winston Churchill or any of those old famous dudes who seemed to speak in one-liners.)

But since teaching is wearing me out, I keep returning to my favorite opiate--computer games. I'm in season three of my Madden 2003 (I'm cheap, so no, I'm not buying the new version), and when I get home and know that I only have forty minutes before it's time to start cleaning the house, I don't open Word to write. I pick up the controller and become, for a brief spell, a Peyton Manning who on occassion beats the Patriots.

So now I'm waiting. Waiting for Micah to get born. Waiting on Ph.D stuff to come in. Waiting to see whether Mary can find work anywhere. Waiting to see if any of my resumes will yield fruit at any of the churches I've applied to. Not a great situation, but I suppose that's life. I've got so many horses in this race that I still haven't given any thought to the unhappy possibility that none of them wins. I suppose that will come if it comes as well.

Back... for the moment

The things that have happened... it's been nearly a month, probably more than a month, and once again proof positive comes that life can occur without my blogging it. For the next little while, it's going to have to continue--I've got an unbelievably killer schedule right now, and it's not going to let up until mid-February.

So for now, no thoughts on annihilation, no observations about American Christians, no rants about politics... back to work!