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Layers of Time

September 21, 2019 — Leave a comment

One of my favorite experiences in Rome was exploring the Basilica of Saint Clement. Tami and I stumbled upon it in the few blocks between our room and the Colosseum. But as it seemed a fairly ordinary church for Rome, built around 1100, we passed by it a number of times before noticing a sign on the door inviting tourists to see what lay below. After descending a staircase some twenty feet down, we emerged amid the mosaics and fading frescoes of a fourth century church. More than the fact that it lay under the above church told us it was ancient. Rather than the renaissance realism found in the art above, the iconography here had a cartoonish quality typical of Ancient Rome. The church had clearly been in use a long time. At sometime in its history, several walls had been added by stacking ruble in the empty spaces between once decorative pillars. But centuries of debris outside eventually raised the ground level, entombing this space in subterranean silence. And yet it wasn’t the only building resting beneath the 12th century church.

We descended another set of stairs and entered the oldest building constructed on this spot, a series of twisted passageways and dimly lit rooms quite unlike the two churches above it. Here some thirty feet down, we could hear the sound of an underground stream echoing in its halls. To our left, we found the walled up archway that once opened to the street. And around the corner, the reason for the building, a room containing a large block of marble carved with a man grabbing a bull by the horns. It was an altar dedicated to the god Mithra. And on both sides was a typical Roman dining bench where the members of this cult would recline to share a meal in dedication to their god. All of this was destroyed in Rome’s Great Fire of 64AD and filled in.

Revelation 6

September 21, 2019 — Leave a comment

Most martyrs don’t die because they want to. They’re propelled by their faith to a place from which they can find no escape. Most trusted God for a better life and would have lived on if they could. But instead, the beautiful promise which encouraged them on ends broken not just in their body but also their soul. There’s no immediate glory in that, just an emptiness, a hope left unfulfilled.

I can hear their hurt in Revelation 6. “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, ‘Oh Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell in the earth? Then they were given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.”

They address God ”Sovereign Lord, holy and true” but its partly a challenge and a lament. “This is who you said you’d be and yet you haven’t been!” In the same way, there’s pain and fear in their asking, “How long?” “We believed in you once can we believe in you now!?! We had hopes for a future, a better world than the box of bones we’re living in now. We trusted your promises! Are you going to come through? Are you going to pay out the promises which cost us our lives?”

“A little longer” is all that is said.

I’m no martyr but I identify with the hurt. I’ve been propelled on by God’s promises to a place from which it seems I can find no escape. The dreams I had are daily being broken, left unfulfilled in the passage of time. And I feel at times like Thomas A’Kempis, the author the Imitation of Christ, who awoke one day to find himself buried in his own coffin. Wait, this isn’t how it was suppose to go! And like him, I’ve clawed so fiercely at my chamber walls that my nails have broken off bloody in the boards. Am I suppose to be at peace with it? Do saints die clinging to life like this, calling God out on his unfulfilled promises? It seems so. Remember the words of Jesus, “My God my God why have you forsaken me?”

“A little longer.”

I hope so.

This is A Quiet Place, the film that tells the story of the Abbott family who find themselves living among monsters that hunt and kill everything they hear. To stay alive, the Abbotts must keep quiet and that silence makes for a unique film experience. With so little sound and spoken dialogue, we also, like this family, become aware of everything WE hear.

But the true heart of A Quiet Place goes beyond unique premise and experience with sound, to the way it deals with the concept of listening.

At the very beginning of the film, Father Lee Abbott tells his youngest son to listen – without ever making a sound, setting up a clear contrast between this word and its literal sense. Listening here isn’t about opening the ear to sound but rather about openings the heart to a message.

And heeding the message is what Lee’s children fail to do. His son fails to listen and is quickly killed by the monsters. While Lee’s oldest daughter, Regan, plays a role in her brothers death, giving him the toy that her father warned him against. She is literally and figuratively deaf, a threat to herself and her families survival which her father works to overcome for the rest of the film.

Like the best horror films, A Quiet Place has plenty of frights even as uses them to express deeper and more universal anxieties. And it’s the focus on what’s truly at stake which makes this film so special. Rather than lingering on the macrabe, A Quiet Place often feels more like a Norman Rockwell painting, with long stretches of peace and quiet, in which we’re invited to meditate on this otherwise idyllic family life. And it’s the ideal nature of this life which points to its representative quality. The Abbott’s aren’t just one family; they represent all families, what it means to be a family. It’s thus the things which threaten the peace and survival of family, diversion and death, which we find personified in the monsters. A symbolic role which is made evident in the climax of the film when for the first time we’re shown news articles referring to them as “angels of death”. The monsters represent and define the boundaries of life, killing anything that transgresses them. And it’s Lee’s role, as a father, to teach his kids to live by remaining within these boundaries. His name, Lee, means “the sheltered or protected side.” This is why the film shows him leading his family in a single file line and setting up safe – quiet pathways in which they can walk. And most significantly, it’s why he makes his daughter a new hearing aid.

The hearing aid symbolizes Lee’s correction and vicarious protection, his instruction which must be heeded in order to work. But Regan thinks it won’t work. And even though Three times we’re shown it working as the monsters’ singular weakness. She remains unaware of its power. All she knows is that it hurts. In trying to open his daughter’s ears, Lee only serves to remind her of the role she played in her brother’s death. She perceives her father’s efforts as him not liking who she is. And the third time she experiences the pain, she shuts it off completely

This is the true problem posed by the film. How do parents open their children’s ears to what pains them to hear?

The answer is found in Lee’s sacrificial love for his children.

Lee cries out to draw the monsters away but also to open his daughters ears, echoing the old man’s suicidal cry for loss of his wife and Evelyn’s life giving cry in birth. By these comparisons, the film suggests that a father in sacrificing his life for his kids undergoes a similar labor and delivery. And it’s Regan’s recognition and embracing of her father’s ear which symbolizes her new birth.

Regan not only listens she turns what she’s heard into something others can hear. And it’s this act which defeat the monsters. That… and her dad’s good old fashioned shotgun.

A Quiet Place is far more than a horror film; it’s a family film, intended to draw parents and kids together. Kids are meant to realize the reason for their parents instructions while parents are reminded that to open their children’s ears requires a love without condition.

The Listeners

September 1, 2018 — Leave a comment

The poem ‘The Listeners’ by Walter De La Mare is haunting in its atmosphere and engaging in the way it elicits so many questions.

Here’s a quick synopsis. Deep in a forest on a moonlit night a Traveler knocks insistently on a ‘lone house’ door. “Is there anyone there”, he cries. But no one answers. From somewhere in the house a ‘host of phantom listeners’ hear him and the Traveler calls out to them instead, ‘tell them I came and no one answered / that I kept my word.’ And with that, he climbs on his horse and leaves.

Who exactly is this Traveler? Where are the people for the whom the Traveler has called? And who are the ‘phantom listeners’?

I’ve thought about this poem for years and I think I might have some answers. The interpretation of poetry is, of course, not as objective as other forms of literature. Poetry emphasizes the evocation of a feeling over the defining of a concrete ideas. De La Mare himself said of poetry that ‘how it is said is what it means”’and ‘you can’t prove a poem it proves you.’ In this sense, a poet isn’t so much communicating their own ideas but creating a mirror in which others can find their own. And yet that’s not to say the meaning of a poem is totally subjective. Something is being communicated and defined. And to say that a poem can simply mean anything is ridiculous. The poem points in a direction even as it leaves that direction open to a number of possibilities.

De La Mare said almost nothing about the meaning of the Listeners which he published in 1912. But in the 1950’s, near the end of his life, he would cryptically tell a friend “it’s about a man encountering a universe.” The man, presumably the Traveler, keeps his word to the universe but finds in it no response. One way to read The Listeners is, thus, to see the Traveller as ourselves, keeping our word to a universe which demonstrates no reciprocal concern. De La Mare could be alluding to Stephen Crane’s poem “a man said to the universe” which was written a little more than a decade before the Listeners was published.

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

We may keep our word to the universe but the universe could really care less. There is no god who hears us only a ‘host of phantom listeners’ who’ve experienced, like the traveler, the silence and emptiness of the house.

But De La Mare’s statement is cryptic enough to be taken in another way. The Listeners tells the story of a man who returns at night by horse to knock on a door only to find the occupants unprepared and or asleep. Given the context of the poem’s original audience, the allusions to the return of Christ seems almost a given. In the Bible Jesus promises to return and tells his followers to watch and stay awake because his coming will come like a thief in the night. And in the book of Revelation, he returns riding on a horse and there he also declares,

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.”

It would seem the poem may not only be pointing to the absence of God in the universe but to his presence which has simply been missed. God has sought us but we were asleep.

Either way it’s a haunting poem.

The “phantom listeners”, at bottom, are the readers and hearers of the poem, the only ones who actually hear the Travaler’s call. We exist in this world, apart from the narrative. We hear his call and yet are unable to respond. He senses us and speaks to us but all we can do is listen. Will we heed what we’ve heard?

The Listeners
BY WALTER DE LA MARE
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.