I think I was blabbing about this constantly earlier to some of you, that I found a Scottish Pirate Power Metal band.

A-yup. Pirate metal. They have accordians and electric gee-tars.

http://www.myspace.com/alestorm

Only my taste in music could be this bad/good.

They're a new band, so show 'em some love.

People like to cite Augustine as a “real” saint, as a “you too could be this” saint. I am of the personal opinion that people who say this have likely never read any Augustine. If they had, they’d never number one of the greatest Latin stylists of all time as an “accessible saint.” By the same logic, it is also technically possible to develop calculus spontaneously. Possible, but not likely nor expected.

Whereas normal people thoughts dwell in the realm of “What’s For Dinner?” and “Why Does Toast Fall Butter-Side Down?”, St. Augustine’s thoughts live in a lofty, crystalline plane of perfectly structured logic. Reading Augustine in Latin is like catching sunlight through a sheet of ice; all illumination and no warmth. (Reading Augustine in translation has been compared to listening to Mozart on a kazoo.)

Augustine’s wretched life of sin and debauchery can be summarized as follows: as an infant, he selfishly fought his siblings for their mother’s attention. As a single man, he was in a long-term relationship with a woman, and sired a child by her. He enjoyed rhetoric and the theater, and longed for a high-ranking civil service position. A book of saints for children declared that Augustine read “bad books,” by which they meant the works of Cicero. (Apparently, children, Cicero is a bad, bad man. Every time a starving African child dies, that is who to blame. Also, your mother issues are Cicero’s fault. Loud music, degenerate teenagers in baggy pants, huffing glue- Cicero.)

If Augustine is the “sinner-saint,” the rest of us are damned, one mortal sin being enough to damn us forever.

This is the paradox of his being, that the same brilliant intellect which drove Augustine to sin with Cicero drove him hence to God. If he were not a great saint, he would have been a great sinner. His weakness was his strength, but how many lesser mortals have both such weakness and such strength? How many lesser mortals are at once both more than human and less than human? How many are cast from that same alloy of supernatural virtue and subhuman emotion- saints made of metal, stone, and ice- fantastic and terrible?

To Love like Christ

Sometime last year, I was watching a documentary on a pair of Siamese twins when my roommate came in. "Oh my God, I don't see how they live," she said, as if it would have been a mercy for them to have died.

I was an atheist then, but still had a little of the lion in me, and replied, "You call yourself a Christian!"

My anger has abated somewhat after upward of six months, realizing with sadness the difficulty with which people comprehend lives different from their own. After all, regarding the Siamese twins, they are otherwise healthy young girls, with a loving, stable family and friends, who excel in school and sports, who do anything any pair of sisters ought. There is a worse thing in life than being physically attached to someone very special to you, and that thing is to not have anyone special at all.

I have tried to love people with no other friends among 6 billion earthly souls, not because they have no friends (for loving someone because they have no friends is as shallow as loving someone because they have many friends) but because they are good. They are fellow suffering pilgrims. If I could love you more I would love you more, if I could give you more, I would give you more. I shall try to love as much and as often as I dare. I want to love the people who no one else loves.

You are my people. You are my people. You are my people.

Lord, let me love my people like Christ loves us. Let them love Christ like Christ loves us. And let me love you too.

Have mercy on us, Lord.

Let me do your will.

For a little bit I was thinking of being a Druid. For a long time, I thought it was a rather flakey hippie religion, until I was in Hong Kong over the winter, on Lantau island, an island in the South China Sea famous for having a giant bronze Buddha statue on top of a mountain. The Path of Wisdom makes a circuit shaped like the infinity symbol, rising steep and rocky up the scrubby mountainside. Zen proverbs have been charcoal-etched into massive pine columns erected by monks at intervals, striking in their power and simplicity. At the top of the path I look down at the mountain pine forest laid out below me, and across an awesome vista.

Across that unspanned chasm is Phoenix Mountain, a promontory of bare stone that glows when sunlight strikes. All the elements are in harmony. To my right, the mountain drops off into the sea, the sun blazing fire on its liquid surface wreathed in golden mist. Clouds of mist form and unform about the Phoenix peak, transient yet ever-present, undefined yet ever-flowing, against the immutable face of the eternal mountain.

For the first time I hear the voice of a mountain. It is not a voice like one "hears" because it is silent, but a voice one feels. It is not the voice of an individual, and the voice has no words, yet it speaks, and the not-words are. "I AM HERE."

Above and around me the Zen columns rise against a blue mountain sky, cold and pure. I can't read the Chinese characters. According to a broad English translation, they are about the nature of non-existance, and the impermanence of self. I have learned more by not-reading them. This is why they call it the Path of Wisdom.

I used to believe in humanity and in the March of Human Progress. Things would get better; science would let us live lives in glory and splendor unparalleled in times before us, unthinkable to our ancestors. Society would advance, a sort of Darwinian manifest destiny, moving from laborers cowed by the lash of whip and god-priest-king, to feudal warlords ruling self-sufficient serfdoms, to centralized nation-states of Church and King, to democratic republic where all men are equal, to God knows what next, each state marking an improvement in the rights, liberty, and happiness of those involved. In each state we grew to understand a moral truth that our ancestors in all their smallness, brutality and cruelty did not know. One day we would reach utopia and perfection.

We were noble, beautiful, and rational, given our ability to love, reason, and decide our own fates by God, or the Watchmaker, or the Prime Mover, or perhaps mere miraculous chance. Around us the sky and firmament stood strong, and the spheres circled in their celestial orbits. Above us stood God and the angels, below us the beasts of the earth, air, and water, each in its rightful kingdom. I didn't believe in sin or hellfire, but rather that a universal morality and intuitive natural decency resided in all this glorious humanity. Life well spent was self improvement, insatiable curiosity, public virtue, civic duty, and above all, the happiness of self and others. A life well spent was good company for dinner and lively conversation, music, art, a little mischief, a deep regard for natural beauty, and deep compassion for others less fortunate.

Yet I think myself unwise to ignore science. The science which I have so steadfastly endorsed says in shouts and whispers that am wrong. Every objective, impartial scientific study has said that humans are a wretched, dismal species. What am I to think of Stanley Milgram? What am I to think of the Stanford Prison? What am I to think of an idle crowd that time after time in controlled studies will idly allow a woman to be raped on a bus? We are easily warped by habit, culture, and prejudice. Given conditioning and genetic predisposition, we are not so different from Pavlov's dog after all.

I am an irrational atheist, meaning I take my atheism on faith. Unlike many people I did not develop the atheism rash after years of religious infection. :P I kind of just always was. I don't have the sort of self-righteous pride where I declare myself so much smarter than all religious people. I enjoy my irrational, internally inconsistent (and alliterating) beliefs full well knowing how stupid most of them are. I enjoy ghost stories, believe in UFOs and telepathy, play Dungeons and Dragons ("magic missle!"), and daydream about winning the lotto. Most of it is rubbish but if I'm going to be dead within the next century and experiencing the next gabillion years as an icy rock hurling towards the depth of space, I might as well distort my reality so it's irrational and interesting, rather than rational and boring. Does all this show me lacking intellectual rigor and discipline? That I have not the maturity or moral fiber to handle truth and all its attendant responsibilities? I wonder sometimes. The other times, I enjoy myself.

I've been hit by some pretty intense waves of nostalgia recently, now that I'm about to graduate. Which is weird, because most of the things I'm nostalgic for I've pretty much stopped doing long before The End, and many of the things I'm nostalgic for I wasn't too keen on while I was doing them. Most of this semester has been spent being depressed, anxious, tired and stressed out.

The last time I remember being happy, not merely laid-back or content, was during the last snowfall in February, when we had the whole day off school and I spent the day sledding with friends in pirate regalia, hoisting my skull-and-crossbones flag, broad-rimmed feathered hat, and plastic hook hand. None of us had actual sleds, so others used recycling bin lids, shower curtains, broken pieces of plastic. I took my painted cardboard Roman legion shield ("SOL INVICTVS") on the last joyride of its short life. We spent the night watching Return of the King¹, cocooned by the swirling fury of a blizzard, me shouting joyously at the TV screen during battle scenes and reciting all the lines by heart, thoroughly making a fool of myself and not giving a damn.

Things I'm Nostalgic For

• Taking two hour lunches and sitting around with a mug of coffee knowing I have the whole damn afternoon to eat lunch.

• The big Sunday dinners we used to do with the guys, which Jose constantly missed out on. K, wielding lemon juice and Mrs. Dash, would bust out his Italian cooking skills, pesto pasta with pine nuts and sauteed red peppers and asparagus spears wrapped in prosciutto. There was that one time we baked a pineapple ham with cheesy potatoes, and the time when we did a barbecue and introduced Zaira (the foreign exchange student) to sweet potatoes ("Why is it orange???") and completely destroyed Brian K's free promotional frisbee.

• Studying in the library and falling asleep in their comfy chairs.

• Going out with K and Chris and Jose to every big-budget hack-slash-n-explosion PG-13 comic book movie that came out at Muvico and K insisting afterwards that the movie was "so totally awesome!!!" even though it really, uh, wasn't. I would go bonkers because it's the only opportunity I get to drag guys to the mall. Then we would go to the Olive Garden or somewhere because despite the fact that K is Italian for some reason he doesn't ever get sick of Italian food, and Niall would order some drinks he'd regret in the morning.

• Sitting and reading pulpy fantasy novels on the steps by the UC, surrounded by smokers, punks, lesbians, and smoker-punk-lesbians. I'm nostalgic for lying back on the bricks and staring up through the leafy canopy of the solitary tree, my novel long forgotten.

• Pushing all the tables together in the dining hall into one big uber-table, in freshman year when everyone would converge at the same time so that we didn't have room to fit all the trays on one table, as if some big mama in the sky had rung a college-student dinner bell.

• Flying my rainbow-sailed pirate ship kite in Erickson field and getting the damn thing stuck on the library roof, and the string entangled in the newly budding spring saplings.

• Walking through Erickson and randomly yet consistently finding dropped ballpoint pens, and thinking it was my lucky day.

• Our roleplaying games at Triangle frat house, where I'd wonder how many taps and bottles could possibly be in one apartment, and Curt would microwave hot dogs and ramen, because that's all the food the place has. The hyper demon puppy would slobber all over me, and we'd loaf around rolling ten-sided dice in the basement on comfy, discolored sofas smelling like dog drool and car seats plundered from minivans, complete with intact seat belts.

• Roleplaying Sundays in our apartment, when we'd take turns cooking and throw things at each other (mostly at Jose, who'd fallen asleep). Curt would flirt with Katie and pinch her and give her foot rubs, much to her half-hearted protests. Halfway through, despite the cool white light of the energy-saving bulb, it'd get way too hot and stuffy in the room and we'd have to throw open the front door for a refreshing gust of night wind.

• Walking down the hall of my dorm and seeing every boy in their room with their bigass earphones, playing either Counterstrike or World of Warcraft.

• Sitting around in a lecture hall in class, staring at washed-out slides and paying attention to something genuinely interesting.

• Being able to walk around randomly on campus and hearing music, drums from the upper open windows of the Fine Arts building, a man with a guitar and the sounds of laughter from a balcony in the cool evening air of summer, spring, or approaching autumn, a violin and flute duo on a courtyard bench.

One of the things I think sometimes is that if I die, heaven will be like a perfect college campus where bells toll the hour on the quad amidst august buildings and leafy oaks, with none of the sturm und strang of living, and all of the good things memories are made of.

--
¹ BTW, I believe the funnest way to watch Return of the King is to be interactive. For example, when they're thundering on the gates of Minas Tirith with that giant beast of a wolf-headed battering ram, chant "GROND! GROND! GROND!". When Theoden yells, "RIDE NOW! RIDE NOW!", clattering his sword against the Rohirrim's extended line of spears, shout back at him. Bonus points if you also blast on a ram's horn. More bonus points if you have an entire theater's worth of people to do it with you. If not, fuck 'em and do it yourself.

At St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the priests was attending to a service. I was listening to the tranquil, melodious echo of his voice disembodied amid the stone vaults. From the dome there was a shaft of pure white light that was more than simply photons. I will not say that it was God in the Christian sense, but there was something else there, illumination of the soul and a preternatural stillness. It stirred a deep yearning in me, to be close to that something, that deep majesty and peace, and something quite unlike the raw natural power at Phoenix Peak.

I was with other people, Steve, an atheist, and Sandi, a Wiccan. Having not shared my experience with anyone, I heard Steve muse about the wasted resources, devotion, toil, and inspiration for what to him was ultimately a useless phantom superstition. I was startled and asked if anyone had felt what I felt. I pretty much got in response a resounding "no" - both of them had felt absolutely nothing, and Sandi was uncomfortable with the service to boot (which I guess is natural if you're a Wiccan listening to Christian prayer). All of which goes to show the complete subjectiveness of religious experience, but rather dismaying all the same. On the other hand, both of them waxed rapturously (perhaps not religiously) at Stonehenge and Oxford's Blackwell's (what?! why, Steve, why?? :P), while all I saw was a circle of falling rocks.

Happy Ides of March!!

Don't trust the people in front of you.