I recently watched the newest iteration of It at a friend's house. I found the movie to be really excellent. Bill Hader stole the show, combining witty one-liners and expert comedic timing with excellent, emotional acting. Before beginning the movie, one of my friends expressed disinterest in the film for its seeming paranormal themes. What he said made me think about why I avoided horror for so long and why ultimately my opinion has changed about it. It can be easy to look at any number of horror films and see the forces of Hell and the devil at work. Having actually watched some horror movies, now, however, I see that there is more to them than that. Horror movies follow in a long tradition of scary stories that ultimately have a positive message that we all need.
The film tells the story of several childhood friends and their quest to fight a great and evil force, currently in the form of a clown, a disguise which it uses to lure misfit children to their death, which is typically brought about by the entity's massive teeth. In order to defeat this evil being, the friends must team up and together face their worst fears together and defeat them.
This common theme of facing fears to defeat evil can be seen in any number of great horror films. As Above, So Below, a found footage style film about several friends exploring the Parisian catacombs follows this same pattern. Even films like the classic The Sixth Sense or Gothika deal with it indirectly.
The controversial psychologist and philosopher Jordan Peterson has noticed this same pattern across innumerable horror films, and in many other stories humans tell one another, many going back tens of thousands of years. Peterson, following Augustine, notes that a monster is something that shows (Latin monstrum monstrat): monsters show us what we fear, and are at the same time the manifestation of our fears, requiring some sort of response.
It is the response that I believe makes or breaks a horror movie, and is ultimately why I have come to appreciate the horror genre. A good horror movie teaches the viewer to own their own fears, face them, and defeat them through confrontation, rather than running from them. This, I believe, is the underlying message of It and places it in a long tradition of myths. I find this to be a useful discipline in dealing with anxiety, as it often reveals that the problems I must face are often smaller than I initially believed.
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Thursday, April 16, 2020
On Writing a Book
As some of you are aware, I have been working on a book. It chronicles the rise and fall of a soldier serving in a futuristic, trans-galactic imperial army, his rise to prominence, and his subsequent decline. The book explores the tension between a military and political career and an individual's faith, as well as the implicit flaws in any and all political systems.
The story opens with the hero, Colonel Demetrius, a young but successful officer in the fleet of the Basileia, the name I have given to the trans-galactic empire, winning the final battle of a civil war that has been raging for fifteen years. Demetrius is promoted to Strategos, is awarded a triumph, and begins to threaten some of the "old guard" of the political establishment, most notably a Count Hannibalian, the Fabius to Demetrius' Scipio. Demetrius, more soldier than politician, and no hero of the people, is quickly tarnished in their eyes by the clever scheming of the imperial court, and when the people turn on him, he quickly turns against them. When he learns, however, that the political establishment has turned the people against him and that they are just as much at their mercy as he is, he joins a resistance movement modeled on the Bolsheviks, only to realize that the people are even more evil and more concerned with institutional vengeance, and ultimately refuses to work with the revolutionaries anymore and willingly accepts exile to a distant planet, where he serves as the priest of a small community for the remainder of his life.
Wanting to create something like this is a wonderful experience, but it is also a very daunting one. I am drawing on a number of very good sources of inspiration like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and Walter M Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, from poetry, from the Bible, from art and music. These media, almost issuing a challenge, demand some sort of response: it is as if the reactions they generate require some grand outlet for them to be truly felt. I must confess, it is hard to look at something I have written and not laugh, as if I am a child taking themselves too seriously again. Looking at all of those things, I am confronted with the unpleasant realization that I will never be able to create anything remotely comparable. Why bother, if it can't be perfect? It is as if only the seeds of ideas are present in my mind, but that they will never mature.
Writing, I think, may never be perfect, however ultimately, I find it to be a hobby that brings me the greatest of joy, and is worth the trouble in improving.
The story opens with the hero, Colonel Demetrius, a young but successful officer in the fleet of the Basileia, the name I have given to the trans-galactic empire, winning the final battle of a civil war that has been raging for fifteen years. Demetrius is promoted to Strategos, is awarded a triumph, and begins to threaten some of the "old guard" of the political establishment, most notably a Count Hannibalian, the Fabius to Demetrius' Scipio. Demetrius, more soldier than politician, and no hero of the people, is quickly tarnished in their eyes by the clever scheming of the imperial court, and when the people turn on him, he quickly turns against them. When he learns, however, that the political establishment has turned the people against him and that they are just as much at their mercy as he is, he joins a resistance movement modeled on the Bolsheviks, only to realize that the people are even more evil and more concerned with institutional vengeance, and ultimately refuses to work with the revolutionaries anymore and willingly accepts exile to a distant planet, where he serves as the priest of a small community for the remainder of his life.
Wanting to create something like this is a wonderful experience, but it is also a very daunting one. I am drawing on a number of very good sources of inspiration like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and Walter M Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, from poetry, from the Bible, from art and music. These media, almost issuing a challenge, demand some sort of response: it is as if the reactions they generate require some grand outlet for them to be truly felt. I must confess, it is hard to look at something I have written and not laugh, as if I am a child taking themselves too seriously again. Looking at all of those things, I am confronted with the unpleasant realization that I will never be able to create anything remotely comparable. Why bother, if it can't be perfect? It is as if only the seeds of ideas are present in my mind, but that they will never mature.
Writing, I think, may never be perfect, however ultimately, I find it to be a hobby that brings me the greatest of joy, and is worth the trouble in improving.
Beauty Will Save the World
Hello again, the internet. As you are now well aware, I tend to write blogs when I travel. No doubt some of you will be familiar with Daily Dose of Dan: The Land of Harry Potter and Truffles chronicling my time in the UK, Daily Dose of Dan Goes to the Holy Land, and, most recently, Daily Dose of Dan: Reise Zum Vaterland. I have, in a great exercise of irony, decided to write from a society-imposed exile, known to the vulgar masses as the "Coronacation". What is the scope of this blog? Anything that might cross through my mind, though often loosely with the theme of "the end of the world", "exile", and the like, as these seem to be common themes on this adventure. Thus, I come now to the beginning of this staycation to end all staycations.
The title of this first post of my latest blog is quoted of the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, living under the thumb of communist oppression almost a century later, considered this idea childish. He, like Dostoevsky, was an Orthodox Christian, but suffered greatly under the thumb of communist oppression and witnessed some of the greatest evils of which humanity was capable. No doubt shaped by his experiences, he saw beauty as a great intangibility, something beyond human control, which we are forever seeking to control. Always trying to build Edens and destroying them in a berserk fury, to quote another author.
The idea expressed by Dostoevsky may sound vacuous, overused, or even cliche, however when one understands that Dostoevsky saw no distinction between beauty, truth, and the good (a very ancient idea), the quote transcends its isolated, out-of-touch-ness and takes on a much greater significance. St. John records Jesus saying that He is the way, the truth, and the life. Perhaps these two ideas of beauty are like God, intangible and indescribable, as Solzhenitsyn writes, and not far from us, as Dostoevsky believed, lifting us heavenward, "ever winging up and up".
Hans Urs Von Balthazar, the great theologian of the last century, in many ways echoing Dostoevsky's idea, believed in looking to the beautiful first, rather than the true or the good (in opposition to Kant), because he wisely saw the compelling nature of the beautiful. To paraphrase Bishop Robert Barron, the beautiful has a way of disarming us.
Why am I going on talking about how beauty is like God, or about any of this? Because this has been something that has been in my mind for a while now. My move toward an Eastern expression of Christianity has, in many ways, been guided by the great beauty and depth that I have seen and experienced, almost as much as I have been jaded by the often quasi-anti-intellectual, slipshod nature of evangelicalism, which succeeds at drawing big crowds and leading people to that first step, but never seems to fully be able to make the rubber meet the road on anything beyond the realm of justification. Some will say that the high cringe level of evangelicalism today is not representative of either the entirety of Protestantism, or of evangelicalism, and they would be right to say so. Protestantism gave the world Bach, it freed the slaves in the United States, and it even gave us the United States, the greatest country in the world today. It continues to give us the beauty of zealous, passionate faith, and ways to win converts that are far more in line with Von Balthazar's ideas. So where does this leave any of us? It leaves us in the predicament of so many today, of being so good at identifying any number of problems, but hardly able to make any change. So what advice would I, an amateur's amateur who probably shouldn't have as many opinions as he does, give?
1. Stop reinventing the wheel. Don't be afraid of the wisdom of the ancients, and don't always think new is better.
2. Get rid of contemporary Christian music in church. Church is not a concert. It is where we go to commune with God.
3. Be intentional. Call out heresy and condemn it. Bring beauty back: put effort into worship, don't be content with not giving God the best.
4. Don't neglect the intellectual needs, don't look down on intellectual people.
5. Ask good questions, and don't accept shut-downs.
6. Encourage art. Fill the churches with pictures, words, and the like.
7. Get a longer memory! The church is 2,000 years old.
8. (More a reminder for myself) Don't be unhappy if no one cares or wants things to change, and also don't put your own ideas on a pedestal. Don't try to do things yourself, but instead pray for pure motives and for humility as often as you pray for things to change.
The title of this first post of my latest blog is quoted of the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, living under the thumb of communist oppression almost a century later, considered this idea childish. He, like Dostoevsky, was an Orthodox Christian, but suffered greatly under the thumb of communist oppression and witnessed some of the greatest evils of which humanity was capable. No doubt shaped by his experiences, he saw beauty as a great intangibility, something beyond human control, which we are forever seeking to control. Always trying to build Edens and destroying them in a berserk fury, to quote another author.
The idea expressed by Dostoevsky may sound vacuous, overused, or even cliche, however when one understands that Dostoevsky saw no distinction between beauty, truth, and the good (a very ancient idea), the quote transcends its isolated, out-of-touch-ness and takes on a much greater significance. St. John records Jesus saying that He is the way, the truth, and the life. Perhaps these two ideas of beauty are like God, intangible and indescribable, as Solzhenitsyn writes, and not far from us, as Dostoevsky believed, lifting us heavenward, "ever winging up and up".
Hans Urs Von Balthazar, the great theologian of the last century, in many ways echoing Dostoevsky's idea, believed in looking to the beautiful first, rather than the true or the good (in opposition to Kant), because he wisely saw the compelling nature of the beautiful. To paraphrase Bishop Robert Barron, the beautiful has a way of disarming us.
Why am I going on talking about how beauty is like God, or about any of this? Because this has been something that has been in my mind for a while now. My move toward an Eastern expression of Christianity has, in many ways, been guided by the great beauty and depth that I have seen and experienced, almost as much as I have been jaded by the often quasi-anti-intellectual, slipshod nature of evangelicalism, which succeeds at drawing big crowds and leading people to that first step, but never seems to fully be able to make the rubber meet the road on anything beyond the realm of justification. Some will say that the high cringe level of evangelicalism today is not representative of either the entirety of Protestantism, or of evangelicalism, and they would be right to say so. Protestantism gave the world Bach, it freed the slaves in the United States, and it even gave us the United States, the greatest country in the world today. It continues to give us the beauty of zealous, passionate faith, and ways to win converts that are far more in line with Von Balthazar's ideas. So where does this leave any of us? It leaves us in the predicament of so many today, of being so good at identifying any number of problems, but hardly able to make any change. So what advice would I, an amateur's amateur who probably shouldn't have as many opinions as he does, give?
1. Stop reinventing the wheel. Don't be afraid of the wisdom of the ancients, and don't always think new is better.
2. Get rid of contemporary Christian music in church. Church is not a concert. It is where we go to commune with God.
3. Be intentional. Call out heresy and condemn it. Bring beauty back: put effort into worship, don't be content with not giving God the best.
4. Don't neglect the intellectual needs, don't look down on intellectual people.
5. Ask good questions, and don't accept shut-downs.
6. Encourage art. Fill the churches with pictures, words, and the like.
7. Get a longer memory! The church is 2,000 years old.
8. (More a reminder for myself) Don't be unhappy if no one cares or wants things to change, and also don't put your own ideas on a pedestal. Don't try to do things yourself, but instead pray for pure motives and for humility as often as you pray for things to change.
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