Odd sleep last night. I threw off my own circadian rhythms by eating a late but comprehensive dinner last night and then attempting to read soon afterward. I promptly fell asleep and woke up again around 10 p.m. I had set my alarm so I could go for a run, but that didn’t happen and I pulled the covers around my legs again to sleep for another spell. I woke up again around 1:30 a.m., decided to actually get ready for bed and read for another half hour.<\/p>\n
I’m reading Ender’s Game<\/i>, an influential sci-fi novel written in the mid-eighties by Orson Scott Card. The characterizations are sharply drawn, almost Dickensian, except for the lack of physical description, something which pervades the book as a whole, not just the character descriptions. It’s appropriate. It gives the writing an efficiency, a tautness that fits the events and magnifies them. The book wastes no time getting to the thick of the story and fleshing out the main character, Ender, through the events he goes through. I’m halfway finished with the book and I can already tell that while the events are unfolding in a linear, rudimentary fashion that lacks flash and doesn’t immediately cleave to my creative side, it will be the sort of book that I will think about long afterward. It will work its way into my consciousness even if there aren’t any blinding plot twists or revelatory character shifts later on. Certainly if my dreams are any indication the book will do this.<\/p>\n
Whatever the case, it’s the kind of writing I strive for all the time, in here and elsewhere. Terse. Structured. Efficient. Metaphors that don’t draw attention to themselves but that are so effectively woven into the fabric of the sentences that they combine, like a spice ground into a piece of meat so thoroughly that the two entities bond chemically. The prose becomes more than prose but a synthesis of poetry and traditional sentences. It achieves a magnificent ambiguity; it reaches the plane between conscious and the greater subconscious where I express more than I know, where I don’t understand what I’m writing but feel a greater catharsis than if I had been consciously striving for it. That’s where I want to be.<\/p>\n
And questions. Always questions. I don’t want to preach; I don’t want to sermonize or lecture or even actively teach; I want something more Socratic. I’ve always wanted it, from the days where I first started learning how to make conversation and applied myself to this business of social interaction. I’ve been coming back to this–I think it’s what I strive for in Coffee Theology. I think it’s close, a component maybe, of a vision for the group. Larry says I should take a more “active role” in leading the group, but if in his mind that should mean talking more, expounding my own opinion, it’s the last thing I want. If I can ask a pointed question that unlocks a fifteen-minute discussion in which I don’t say a word but in which people open up and express the issues with which they’re dealing, it would thrill me beyond measure. There was a singular moment of that last Wednesday, after we had exhausted my pithy question sheet and everyone had run out of I thinks<\/i>. Unprompted by a question, Julia began sharing doubts relating to what she felt God wanted her to do in that place in her life. I could tell by her tone and her expression that it was immediate to her thoughts. I could tell she was grappling with questions, pushing forward, that there were thoughts<\/i> in her that rose above the day-to-day and saw life from a more external perspective.<\/p>\n
That’s the place I want the group to be. Those are the kinds of conversations in which I’ve participated in the past where there’s a connection between people, where there’s an understanding and people come along side each other in search of the answers or at least a peace in those places we’re not meant to understand. And I’m not going to get there by lecturing, by sermonizing. Questions, always questions. At once the shield and the key.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Odd sleep last night. I threw off my own circadian rhythms by eating a late but comprehensive dinner last night and then attempting to read soon afterward. I promptly fell asleep and woke up again around 10 p.m. I had set my alarm so I could go for a run, but that didn’t happen and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}