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The Cosmic Conversation
One hypothetical that has always captivated my attention when ensconced in the customary boredom that precedes imaginative pondering is that of a dinner roundtable with who you would invite to a dinner roundtable in the cosmic afterlife. Who would you want to engage in conversation? To ask the burning questions for which the descendants of those bygone eras and experiences are left only to grasp for answers?
I used to engage the hypothetical by thinking about interesting people and how well a conversation would go. This, however, is a self-centered approach. One must first ask, “Why in the world would they want to be disturbed in the afterlife to satiate my appetite for enamored and nervous chattering?” Who am I? No one. A granule of sand to be forgotten within a single tide, perhaps not even granted the privilege of being washed out under a twinkling sky under the band of the Milky Way.
This reality complicates matters. Deceased stars would hardly like to be awakened from their slumber for me to gush and blurt out well-wishes to them, an annoyance they’d long since left to the mortal coil they departed. Freddy Mercury would be out. A lion on the stage, he was anything but in real life; appreciative of his fans, yes, but he guarded jealously his privacy. And what of stars from the more distant past, whose wishes aren’t necessarily well-known? The movie actress Kay Francis, likened to Maya Angelou’s mother Vivian Baxter in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was adamant about being forgotten as quickly as humanly possible: “As long as they pay me my salary, they can give me a broom and I’ll sweep the stage. I don’t give a damn. I want the money … When I die, I want to be cremated so that no sign of my existence is left on this earth. I can’t wait to be forgotten.” How could I possibly drag Kay Francis to a table after reading those words? What good would it do to tell Marilyn Monroe how terribly she was treated but to be in good cheer because Elton John wrote a wonderful song about her?
I also cannot forget the maxim of “Never meet your heroes.” Assholes, bigots, fascists, predators, serial abusers, geniuses beset by temper tantrums, narcissists, homophobes, racists, and that’s a quick skim over famous writers, actors, musicians, and scientists from the 20th century. Oh, you adore “That’s Life”? Now take a thrown phone to the skull chucked by Frank Sinatra. Try to discuss the decay of the decadent West with Hunter S. Thompson, but just be sure to duck when he aims a military flare in your direction and leaves an elk heart for you instead of a share of the check. Ask Elvis about his favorite songs he played, then ask if he actually dated any girls over 14.
But let’s return to the issue of our own lack of importance. You can’t seriously contend that, well, they’d see that I really get them. You very likely wouldn’t. You are in love with their persona, not the person you would be sitting down to chat with. With still others, you’re in love with their works, not their day-to-day character in passing conversation. Yes, you went through a phase of painting your nails black. You bought a couple items from Hot Topic. Cool. Now tell me how you can possibly relate to Edgar Allen Poe.
Don’t feel bad. You’re just average, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re interesting. I haven’t the ego that is in some cases a job requirement, e.g. President of the United States, to think I’m of any more interest than you.
Moving on, what version of the famous and/or inspirational person would you choose? To go with a later version is to converse with someone who experienced it all and has plenty of wisdom and knowledge to share. However…life is capricious. You must know this person’s biography to understand what you’ll be getting into. To send a dinner invitation to the late Oscar Wilde is to understand that post-De Profundis Oscar Wilde was quite removed from the sybaritic Oscar who could liven any occasion. But would you have a choice? Would it not be the final version of the person in the flesh? I don’t think we could allow this into the hypothetical, as it’s too depressing. Alcoholism, depression, bitterness and drug use would have chewed away the creative fibers, a boll weevil on the creative cloth, of so many. It would be difficult to hold court with any incarnation of Ernest Hemingway, but of course an older Hemingway would’ve been incomprehensibly difficult as a conversation partner.
We must also assume that the wrong mix could produce disastrous results. It’s difficult to imagine a privately introverted artist holding any interest in discussions with an obnoxiously extroverted soul. Worse, a progressive mind – at least in the 18th century – engaging in conversation with a member of the opposite sex or a different ethnicity from a later century, e.g. Thomas Paine, who was anti-slavery, conversing with James Baldwin. How would that go? What about different languages? Bertrand Russell and Voltaire could easily chat on the matters of religion and logic in classical French, however, I’d hardly be able to interject with my poorly-constructed 21st century English. Would we just like to meet them, or is there a goal or subjects we’d like to see them engage in?
This is all very exhausting, yes, but it’s quite fun. Who would you choose? After all of this, I haven’t the slightest idea.
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SBC: Is Rick Warren Right About Female Pastors?
Did you know the Southern Baptist denomination was founded to protect the institution of slavery? In 1845, Baptists in the northern United States decided that Baptist slaveowners could not function as missionaries. Baptists in the South took that as an affront and a threat to their livelihoods – dependent upon owning other human beings – and so broke from American Baptist Churches USA. You’ll see some churches prefer the moniker “Great Commission Church” as a way of distancing from this rotten origin story. Given recent developments, one may feel this is strictly about self-preservation, not progressive enlightenment; this wouldn’t be out of step with the lackluster record of religion staying updated within at least a century of where secular society has moved.
The SBC sex scandal has been written about in these pages:
This sentiment is quite at odds with their actual response to abuse allegations for more than 15 years. The list of sexual abusers kept growing, but their focus remained on protecting leadership from any potential liability that would lie in addressing the allegations and bringing about some measure of reform. Sexual abusers bounced from congregation to congregation. Paige Patterson, a player in the SBC’s Conservative Resurgence, referred to Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) as being “just as reprehensible as sex criminals.” His friend and fellow former power broker within the SBC, August Boto, said of victims’ efforts for justice and reform: “This whole thing should be seen for what it is. It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”
The Conservative Resurgence, referenced above, is also known as the Fundamentalist Takeover amongst opponents. The short of it is that in 1979, control of the convention turned into open war; moderate and liberal church leaders battled fundamentalist conservatives who wanted to scrub the convention of all traces of moderation. As you can guess, the conservatives were victorious, at the cost of several schisms.
“Just as reprehensible as sex criminals.” That’s how sex abuse survivors who courageously banded together were viewed by crusty old cranks who haven’t the slightest mental capacity to deal with anything more complicated than the fantastical simplicities preached to them in childhood.
As the sex abuse scandal continues to play out, two churches have been formally expelled this week in the Southern Baptist Convention being held in New Orleans. Their crime, grave and unforgivable, was allowing female pastors. The entire SBC institution holds some degree of guilt in protecting abusers, but the real business to attend to is the punishment of anyone who’s elected a pastor with a vagina. One of the offending churches is the megachurch Saddleback, founded by the usually annoying Rick Warren, who we can thank for the obnoxious bestseller The Purpose Driven Life, a bonanza of eisegesis. To be fair, modern Christianity is about as far from rigorous, scholarly analysis as one can get; Warren is one of countless megachurch eisegetes, or those who cherry-pick verses – with many different versions, such as KJV and NIV, at their disposal – that either bolster one’s own point or provide padding for their own confirmation bias. In other words, historical context, which would be a critical component in the search for an author’s meaning, goes out the window.
Warren, whose church received more votes in support than the other pastor who fought against expulsion, Linda Barnes Popham, who is in fact a woman and has led her church for decades, knew what he was doing when he installed three female pastors in 2021, no? He knew the likely end result. What his agenda would be, especially as a retiree, we cannot possibly say with any certainty, though we can of course speculate, which is luckily quite an enjoyable exercise.
The Southern Baptist Convention has been losing members since its peak in 2006, well before the sex scandal arose. As I’ve also covered here, reports point to megachurches being the only segment experiencing growth in numbers. Warren’s Saddleback Church, headquartered in California, has been both SBC-affiliated and a megachurch. Both of these things cannot remain true if a megachurch is to continue the capitalistic march of growth fueled by relatively faster tweaks and adjustments to the desires and determinations of secular society. I say relatively because any dogmatic entity cannot also be a bastion of a society’s rational enlightenment and empowerment, e.g. remaining anti-same-sex marriage but focusing more on activity-driven smaller cells within the larger megachurch biospheric bubble.
Saddleback’s leadership, including Warren, would plainly see that to the broader society they’re marketing to, female pastors would be so inoffensive that the notion they shouldn’t be allowed to preach would be comically antiquated. The SBC sees this as an existential crisis that is all Warren’s fault, whereas their march (back?) into extreme conservatism isn’t to blame. A return to former glory, power, and prestige is hampered by Popham and Warren’s efforts, not enhanced.
As an atheist and former Christian, it always piques my interest when there arises such a heated fight over biblical principles and authority. Warren stuck to his age-old strategy of eisegesis to justify female pastors, whereas the SBC sided with texts that were crystal clear on the matter, written by – so we are told – Saint Paul in texts such as 1 Timothy and Titus. If you read the words of this Paul from outside the confines of Christian dogma and authority, he comes across as a misogynistic incel, who found the female form to be so mystical it was full of terrors, though not to such a degree that refused their benefaction.
That word, authority, is not quite as clear as a church would prefer you to believe. Despite the SBC’s reliance on Biblical exegesis, are we not constantly stepping over these ancient landmines? A studious Christian either sidesteps draconian Biblical laws or antiquated views where necessary, in which necessity is dictated by the cultural cues of their day and age. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, at one point in history the extermination of witches was of prime concern as a biblical directive. The Old Testament’s treatment of menstruation would be hilariously prudish, if not for the countless women who were treated as lepers over a natural fact of life that is component of ultimate consequence for the existence of the same whiny men who wrote the laws centered on avoiding its supposed ickiness. Would it not be against the authority of Biblical law if a woman on her period sits in the pews on a Sunday, or that her significant other sleeps in the same bed as her? How many Christians today have tattoos? I haven’t seen stonings for back-talking children, either.
So it would seem that a Christian’s insistence on translating an exegetical, or originalist, interpretation of scriptural law into modern law is a selective process; to my simple mind, this negates the authority of the original texts, which are, as we are well aware, not remotely close to the actual original texts. But, no matter. They are quite ancient, with cultural inputs that are foreign to those of us living in the present day, hence the selectivity. How can it be the ultimate authority if some passages are either skimmed over politely in bible study groups or skipped all together? Why aren’t churches deputizing individuals to examine whether farmers and vineyard owners are leaving grapes and vegetables at the very edges of their fields for the poor, as in Leviticus 19:9-10? How many SBC congregants are wearing clothes made with more than one material? Are you wearing a shirt or pair of pants made with polyester and cotton? You have displeased the Lord your God. Why isn’t there a SBC proclamation outlawing the consumption of medium-rare and medium-well steak, since the blood is still in it? If a Christian were to then “move the goalposts” and say that, well, most of that was in the Old Testament, before Jesus brought a new order, to that I wouldn’t argue a thing; I needn’t say a word. Jesus already replied to this retort: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17–19).
The SBC’s proclamation of what is right and what is wrong in exegetical accordance with the ultimate authority of the Bible is thereby negated by its own negation of the ultimate authority by choosing which laws of the ultimate authority are applicable to the 21st century and which are not. Any congregation, denomination, or sect that does not adhere 100 percent to all Biblical laws, ranging from slaves to period blood, is guilty not only of saying to their god that his law is not the ultimate authority to submit to, but in showing that they have no business insisting that only an originalist interpretation of Scripture, no matter how ensconced in exegesis it is, is the only way one can decide upon who wins modern debates over the formality of Church structure. It is, in a word driven by their own actions, flexible.
Where does this leave us? The crusty cranks – my favorite term of late, if you can’t tell – at the SBC will continue to proudly steer their ship right on through the iceberg of secular society’s ongoing enlightenment, jagged edges and all, with further declines to come. Megachurches will continue to leave the meat of biblical scholarship in the crockpot with it cranked on high, with it continuing to disintegrate into a splintered, mashy, unintelligible mess that will not bear the slightest resemblance to its original intent and meaning, leaving new generations to question what the point is of even acknowledging its existence. Whether you side with Rick Warren or the SBC, it is abundantly clear that assigning any authority to ancient writings from a primitive desert band from thousands of years ago in the service of crafting modern law is a fool’s errand that will not, in the long-term, hold against the onslaught of the continual development of the human intellect and base of knowledge, both scientific and artistic. Can they hold off cultural evolution? Yes, of course. Can they defeat it? Never. History shows both of these answers to be true, in part because we will always fight them, down to the banned books full of knowledge, challenging ideas, and diverse perspectives we collect and share, while they squabble amongst themselves for power within a crumbling castle of antiquity.
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Glitter Lust & Baudelaire
Having ensconced myself in yet another Alison Goldfrapp phase, I began to wonder just how much attention I’ve paid to her lyrics, rather than simply her voice, which is a delectably soothing enticement to let yourself go, be it in the buzz of electronic pop or acoustic folk. Together with Will Gregory, the other half of the duo Goldfrapp, their compositions define what it means to break away from the confines of a daily struggle that is bleached of color and wonder.
Rather than a manifesto on their brilliance, this is regrettably nothing more than a granular analysis of but a small snippet of their poetry. Specifically, in “Ooh La La”:
Dial up my number now
Weaving it through the wire
Switch me on, turn me up
Don’t want it Baudelaire
Just glitter lust
Switch me on, turn me up
I want to touch you you’re just
Made for love“Don’t want it Baudelaire, just glitter lust.” The song is delicious enough that one may gloss over this Baudelaire line, but it is to our detriment. “Glitter lust,” oh my, but who is Baudelaire? A 19th century French poet, he was considered an heir of Romanticism. Notably, six of his poems were condemned and banned for offense against morality and religion, only in 1949.
“You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (Fleurs du mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience…I don’t care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public…” – Baudelaire in a letter to his mother, during the prosecution in 1857.
His poetry – and prose poetique – scraped the basement floor of sex and death, love, lesbianism, depression, and the oppressive drudgery of daily life, with a call-out to his holier-than-thou readers along the way in “To The Reader”:
Our brains teem with a race of Fiends, who frolic
thick as a million gut-worms; with each breath,
Our lungs drink deep, suck down a stream of Death—
Dim-lit—to low-moaned whimpers melancholic.If poison, fire, blade, rape do not succeed
In sewing on that dull embroidery
Of our pathetic lives their artistry,
It’s that our soul, alas, shrinks from the deed.And yet, among the beasts and creatures all—
Panther, snake, scorpion, jackal, ape, hound, hawk—
Monsters that crawl, and shriek, and grunt, and squawk,
In our vice-filled menagerie’s caterwaul,One worse is there, fit to heap scorn upon—
More ugly, rank! Though noiseless, calm and still,
yet would he turn the earth to scraps and swill,
swallow it whole in one great, gaping yawn:Ennui! That monster frail!—With eye wherein
A chance tear gleams, he dreams of gibbets, while
Smoking his hookah, with a dainty smile. . .
—You know him, reader,—hypocrite,—my twin!We are all in the gutter, indeed. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the actions and behaviors that define our very existence. The vacuous reader, Baudelaire’s twin, is worse than a scorpion in the sense that their monstrous nature lies not in action, but in the decay of daily boredom from a lack of it; weak, yet possessing universes within the rarest form of consciousness, the reader yawns and brings about the destruction of all the fruits this world may offer.
But what of the profound love Alison Goldfrapp references? What is this depth that is to be avoided in a moment of audacious hedonistic pleasure, when Baudelaire himself would have had such a labelled applied to him? What differentiates glitter lust from Baudelaire’s pleasure? We find something of an answer in Her Hair:
Languorous Asia, burning Africa,
And a far world, defunct almost, absent,
Within your aromatic forest stay!
As other souls on music drift away,
Mine, O my love! still floats upon your scent.I shall go there where, full of sap, both tree
And man swoon in the heat of the southern climates;
Strong tresses be the swell that carries me!
I dream upon your sea of amber
Of dazzling sails, of oarsmen, masts, and flames:…
A long time! always! my hand in your hair
Will sow the stars of sapphire, pearl, ruby,
That you be never deaf to my desire,
My oasis and my gourd whence I aspire
To drink deep of the wine of memory.We find a carnal appetite within Baudelaire’s master poetry and Goldfrapp’s blunt call for bodily lust. The difference we find is within the context of Goldfrapp’s time and environment. No longer are we idly lounging as hookah-smoking hypocrites, practically unconcerned with the alarming rate at which our sun sets. We are now overworked hypocrites who are entirely devoted to our concern over our setting sun, who cannot for a kingdom or castle enjoy ourselves – our bodies and appetites – in the most pleasurable of moments, the present. Religious rubes of Baudelaire’s day who denied him “everything” are – at least for now in the West – replaced by the great corporation who demands not that one ceases to speak of their pleasure, but of their energy to desire it. There isn’t time to swim in a sea of amber, and perhaps that’s why Goldfrapp didn’t “want it Baudelaire.”
As for the desire for a richer existence, this humble correspondent does not view her and Gregory’s words as an inelegant call for a tawdry experience, but an alarm call that if one is to feel, this is the time, now, which is by definition what experience is. Love is in the touch.You can neither presently experience the perfume of a lover’s hair – only nostalgically – nor can you lay proper plans for it with spreadsheets. Our song remains the same.
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Hypatia Wilde 