Anything I thought I knew

I've always loved the Book of Job, even though it's a deeply unsatisfying (maybe even dissatisfying) book. It deals with perhaps the hardest of life's questions - why good people suffer - only to give no answer whatsoever. People tend to find that annoying. It's a long book, and they endure every beautiful but tortured word of it to find that the answer, when God does finally answer, is more or less, "So you think you know better than me?" It's a rhetorical question in the truest form. The answer is obvious; so obvious that it will never be required. All Job can really say at the end of it all is, "Sorry...", only to have wealth and prosperity restored to him. The meaning of all this? Who knows.

The way most people talk about Job, you wonder if they think the Bible-compilers overlooked the fact that, oops, there's no clear answer at the end. "Bugger," they're probably thinking (or "Ugger-bay", because, given the time period, they no doubt spoke (Pig) Latin), "we didn't notice that. Oops. Should've put in that other book about suffering that gives a clear-cut, completely satisfying answer." Yeah, someone really stuffed up there, eh?

My favourite album of the moment (note, Esther, that I've said "of the moment") is mewithoutYou's 2006 effort, "Brother Sister", and it's an absolute masterpiece, but a lot of it makes little sense (interpretations of "Orange/Yellow/Brownish Spider", anyone?). Part of that, I suspect, comes from an admirable willingness to accept, even embrace, uncertainty. In "Wolf Am I!", for example, there's a wonderful, Plato-esque, notion of the world as we know it being fairly pale and insignificant in the light of eternity. We're shadows, the song suggests, and so is the world around us - so who can really comprehend what we can barely see, what may not even be all that real?:

So SHADOW AM I!
The material world seems to me like a newspaper headline -
it explicitly demands your attention
and it may even contain some truth,
but what's really going on here?

"Who knows?" seems to be an apt answer, although mewithoutYou are happy enough to not even say that much.

In another terrific song, "The Sun and the Moon", Job's name is evoked in the line, "There was hope for Job like a cut down tree/I hope that there's such hope for me". Where did Job's hope lie? In God, apparently, in the roots of the tree which remain after it's been cut down. No-one looks at a cut down tree and sees it as being especially hopeful, but this band aren't particularly interested in how things appear. After all, the following line declares that "Dust be on my mind's conceptions/and anything I thought I knew". Thought I knew - there's the key phrase, I think. What do we really know? Here we are asking the "big" questions, angry when there's no clear cut answer. But what hope do we really have to understand the answers when we get them?

mewithoutYou's label friends, As Cities Burn, say it all in their song, "Clouds", with the line, "I think our god isn't God/if he fits inside our heads". It's a fair point, really. No wonder Job could only say, "Sorry." There will always be an answer to every question, but that answer will rarely be simple. I don't agree with many things that H.L. Mencken said, but there is one famous quote of his that I think is apt to finish with: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."

Love, love is a verb

If you had asked me a few years ago what was the greatest album ever recorded, I would have said, without a moment's hesitation, "Mezzanine" by Massive Attack. And if you had then asked what was the greatest song, I would have said "Teardrop" off the same album.

While the album remains in my collection, I must admit I've gone a while without listening to it, but the gorgeous Jose Gonzales reminded me recently of my love for "Teardrop" (his version is pretty much as good as the original) and today, despite being November, is a very wet and wintry day in Melbourne, exactly the sort of day for whipping out "Mezzanine" again.

It isn't a happy album, I must admit. I was always aware of that fact, but I guess being much happier now than I was in my early years of University the general gloom of it all is that little bit more noticeable. That said, it remains incredibly brilliant, and quite cutting edge, despite being ten years old (gasp), and "Teardrop" remains one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

The lyrics, of course, are bollocks, because the wonderfully loopy Elizabeth Fraser wrote them (and she is responsible for some of the most endearing goobledegook ever penned, including that Cocteau's song with the lyrics "Fafa lala faskata"). However, the song does begin with that amazing opening line, "Love, love is a verb/Love is a doing word". dc Talk, of course, made the same observation several years earlier, but their song was crap, whereas Liz's is a masterpiece. The rest of the lyrics, most of which I've never understood, are poetic but seem a bit nonsensical - "Tear drop on the fire of a confession/Feathers on my breath/Most faithful my love" (which I'd always heard as "Most fearful mirror"), and so on. It's not really clear how it all relates to love being a verb/doing word, but the words serve as an amazing accompaniment to some of the most breathtakingly beautiful vocals to ever be recorded.

Is this really a love song? It's not so clear. If it is, it's not a happy one; hence the crying into the "fire of confession". But I suppose love doesn't always make us happy, does it? Sometimes love requires the kind of honesty that will hurt all involved. But love is, after all, an action, not mere sentiment. It's good to be reminded of that every now and then.

And good also to remember what a wonderful song "Teardrop" was, and still is. The rest of the album is pretty damn good too.

Blah

Well, it's been a while now since I last wrote on this blog, and that's mostly because, outside of the classroom, my brain is scarcely functioning. A bit of an exaggeration, I realise, but I certainly haven't had sufficient brain-function to write anything particularly interesting or incisive (assuming, of course, that what I write here usually is interesting and incisive!). If I'm not marking, or preparing lessons for the next day, I'm eating, or sleeping. That, or engaged in something incredibly mindless, like playing Spider Solitaire on my computer, or trying to achieve the next level of SuperPoke.

A friend of mine who is doing her Honours year at Uni this year responded to my claims of being "braindead" by saying that she was feeling the same way, and said how sad it was that currently both the educators and the educated were braindead. She has a good point. It's that time of year, I suppose, when all involved in education wish they were somewhere else, doing something that doesn't require thinking.

Now the Melbourne Cup long weekend looms, and, much as I disapprove of the races in general, I'm incredibly thankful that they give me four days off. Hopefully we can all recharge a little bit, and go in next week with enough fuel to take us through to the end of term.

And maybe I'll regain the brain capacity to write something more interesting on my blog. Assuming I ever had the capacity in the first place.