PZ's Podcast

The recent death of an old friend (i.e., of 52 years' standing) has brought vividly to mind, in the recollection of the person by their friends and family, a vital distinction: the distinction between what actually took place in one's life and the interpretation/s we place on events in retrospect.

I saw this clearly when my mind, upon hearing the news of their death, turned almost instantly to the music I was listening to when I first knew the person. It was the album "Who's Next" by The Who, which had just come out and featured "Baba O'Riley" and "Behind Blue Eyes", to name just a few. Whenever I think of my now deceased friend, my mind first fixes on "Who's Next".

But if you had asked the person, they would have said, "Oh no, I wasn't listening to The Who back then. I was listening to "Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding, not to mention "Ram" by Paul and Linda McCartney."

The point is, "Who's Next" was my interpretation, albeit contemporary with the events. "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" was the music to which my friend was listening. So if I want to understand them, I need to "Stick with the facts, Ma'am".

This principle, of distinguishing, especially in personal recollection, between what actually happened and one's interpretation of what happened is crucial. It is crucial to understanding the true facts of one's life, let alone that of another. I see this quite clearly in trying to recollect -- let alone evaluate -- the old friend who has died.

This cast proceeds to unlock the so-called "Synoptic Problem", let alone the historicity of ... the Israelites in the Old Testament, from Dan to Beersheba. [Whuh?]

I hope your own gaze personally will sharpen as a result of listening to this podcast. And I hope that my assessment of an unexpectedly deceased old friend will grow not only more accurate, but richer, kinder, more hopeful, and more faithful.

People conceal so much about themselves. They don't always mean to, but in one area or another they are afraid to say what's really going on -- especially inside themselves. Then, over time, they -- we! -- become habituated to not ever saying what they/we are really thinking.

Listening to the Michel-Legrand-like title theme for the 1967 spy thriller _Billion Dollar Brain _put me in mind of so much. Its urgent, lyrical theme made me want to talk somehow. I don't know what sort of music does that for you, but I'll bet you there's something that does. 

From this stirring "signature" piece at the start of the cast, I talk about four different kinds of conversations that go on in people as we go about our day -- from the weather or the traffic, to concrete circumstances and concerns, to internal emotional stresses and anxieties that govern those concerns, to the innermost drives of being and surviving as a human being. Which leads me to Carl Jung and his enduring if humbling insights concerning why men and women "do the things they/we do" (Temptations, 1964). I hope you will identify, at least a little.

The episode closes with another "signature" piece: Los Straitjackets' rendition of the 'Linus and Lucy' theme from Vince Guaraldi's "Peanuts" soundtrack. (With Los Straitjackets, always wait until the last third of the track. That's when it goes through the roof.)

LUV U, and Merry Christmas 2022.  

Herein is a degree of pushing-the-envelope that I hope may speak to you, dear Listener.

One was struck recently when someone announced, "Your problem's been solved". "Come again?", I said. He added, "Your problem's been solved on the astral plane."

Well, normally, that would not have computed. Or at least one's jaw would have dropped. But I did remember Strange Conflict, and the effect that novel had had on me just a few years ago. You remember Strange Conflict. Dennis Wheatley wrote it during the Blitz and published it at the height of WWII. It concerns a French mystic who confounds the Nazis by ascending, during his sleep, to "the astral plane" of consciousness, where he is able to observe and investigate the 'soul'-lives of the people around him. 'Le Duc de Richleau' is able, on the astral plane, to discover the source of the espionage by which English shipping lanes are being betrayed to Nazi submarines. It is a terrific book.

I hadn't realized, though, that I'd sort of become a character in it.

When my mystical friend informed me that my problem had been solved on the astral plane, I was both surprised, encouraged, and mystified. It turned out to be true! I found this out in my dreams subsequent to his announcement. You'll see. Listen to the cast and you'll see.

I told you I would push the envelope. "No Regrets" (Edith Piaf).

Episode 242 of PZ's podcast is dedicated to Paul Walker, who is in the top 5 Episcopal clergy of the 21st Century.

Three recent sudden deaths of old friends have called forth this Christmas podcast.

In two of the cases, the family, let alone the deceased, have been completely unprepared. I mean, completely. No service, no faith, no comfort, no hope. Only shock and abandonment, unsuppressed bewilderment and surprise.  

So I decided to describe two ladies I know, both characters in Enid Bagnold's late plays "The Chinese Prime Minister" and "A Matter of Gravity". Enid Bagnold was an English playwright who once had a string of stage and movie successes. Near the end of her life, she decided to look backward and forward at the content of her life. She portrayed -- these characters were acted by Margaret Leighton and Katherine Hepburn -- two women in their 70s who are given to resolve their lives through visits from their adult children and one estranged husband; and who do! Not only that, but the supernatural suddenly comes into it. The heroine of "The Chinese Prime Minister" is confronted by her butler's literal resurrection from the dead; and the heroine of "A Matter of Gravity", by her cook's repeated levitations to the ceiling of her house. Each of these women comes to terms with their physical lives, and each of them is thus enabled to move forward towards a new beginning. These are astonishing, surprising plays.

I end with a Dedication to Brent White. Brent is a Mockingbirder who serves a parish in Toccoa, Georgia, and who has a wide-ranging pop sensibility that is a total treat. Recently he has helped me re-discover Los Straitjackets' Christmas tracks. With one of these, "Christmas Weekend", I close this cast. I have often toyed with the idea of having "Christmas Weekend" played as the postlude at one's funeral. It is just so 'up up and away' in feel. I want you to soar after you abreact.  

What do our favorite songs, movies, and shows -- and even places -- say about us? Why do we like the media we do? What draws us to one form of art rather than another -- to one sort of setting rather than another? Why R.E.O. Speedwagon, for some strange reason, rather than Dylan? Why "Next Plane to London" rather than "A Day in the Life"?

Whatever the draw is, I think it has more to do with us than with the thing. Or rather, the object or medium that catalyzes one's deep feelings is less important than the feelings being catalyzed.

This cast starts with a reflection I first encountered through Mockingbird. It is from Frederick Buechner (R.i.P.). The cast then careens into George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead -- to which I dragged poor Mary back in '73 when we were courting. (That particular date was almost as much a disaster as when my friend Lloyd and I dragged her to see Jean-Luc Godard's Wind from the East in 1970.) But George Romero's Damascus-Road experience in terms of his future direction in life and art turns out to have been... Tales of Hoffmann. I mean...

Then Jerry Garcia gets a hearing, with his Damascus-Road experience. Time and again, and I believe you can see it in your own life, the thing that moved you was accidental. You, however, and your vulnerability were not. Try to focus on the latter, not the former.

We close with an immortal and illustrative song by Jimmy Webb, as performed by Johnny Rivers. Please hear it through to the very last line. LUV U.

The Gospel of God's One-Way Love can find an appealing, commodious platform within the Anglican tradition. This is because when that tradition is allowed to be fully itself -- historically, theologically, and even aesthetically -- it supports the Good News and pastorally embodies it.

On the other hand, like any ancient tradition, 'Anglicanism' can become dry and even choking. When the tradition becomes an end rather than a means to an end -- a "thing" rather than a fountain -- then it can desiccate the very soil on which it was first planted.

In this cast I tell something of my own Anglican story, which goes back to 1960. There is within it some of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly -- and when it comes to the Church of England, mostly the Good.

If you're an Episcopalian, I hope you'll be encouraged. Mary's and my story within the Church is also quite funny (at least to me). Hope you'll laugh along.

Incidentally, the opening music is the very first song my suite-mates played for me when I arrived at a C. of E. theological college in September 1973. It was counter-intuitive, to say the least. LUV U!

P.S. The second song they played was... "China Grove" by the Doobie Brothers. (That one I knew.)

The vehement secularism all around us is no secret. I have seen its pointed perseverance in at least three settings recently, and most powerfully at my 50th Harvard College class reunion.

In all three settings, 'God' was sedulously left out of the discourse, and, it felt to me, conscientiously. Nothing new in that, to be sure; but it made me reflect on the Christian Church, at least in its traditional manifestation, and what is it that "triggers" the sharp antagonism.

But I came up with a slightly different answer.

Had recently read John Weaver's book Evangelicals and the Arts in Fiction from McFarland Books, that wonderful publishing house which specializes in sincerest monographs on subjects such as the history of wax-museum horror films or 1940s Mummy movies.

Weaver's book is counter-intuitive in the extreme, and contributes an insight that I have read nowhere else. So maybe we can learn from contemporary secularism, albeit from a different direction.

The cast concludes with one of the most unusual Christian pop songs ever recorded, and filmed, from Peter Watkins' 1967 "anti-Establishment" movie Privilege, starring Paul Jones, the lead singer of Manfred Mann (i.e., "Doo Wah Diddy").

In brief, you can learn something about yourself by studying what others dislike about you. LUV U.

Mockingbird's 14th annual New York City conference, entitled "Hope for a Weary World", was a kind of summit for this utterly needed Word. I'll bet almost everyone there felt the same way.

Was it the fact that we hadn't met in person for two years? Is that what made this conference so refreshing? Was it the depth of the content, let alone the humor, the music and the sheer joy of the message? What was it?

For me it was the unique chord of utter realism with electric Hope. You could hear it in everything -- in Aaron's Zimmerman's timely video/s and tone, in David Zahl's Titian and St. Dismas, in the video by the German hardware company Hornbach that encapsulated base-line empathy, in Simeon (and Bonnie) Zahl's phrase "theory of change"; in the trenchant, applicable breakouts; in the delicious meals that we wanted never to end; in the tracks of JAZ's eternal 'Episco Disco'. The main thing was that chord of realism (even tragic realism) assimilated to us personally by means of Divine Hope.

Oh, and there was also a special guest among us. Did you see him? Not sure you did. He's been dead awhile but he came back for Mockingbird 2022. He was actually there!

He signaled to me, first, from the balcony. Then later, during "Drinks with PZ", from the back of the church. And he sent me something he had written ... to read to you. Which I include at the end of this cast.

All My Love -- and in its after-glow, which I hope will never fade.

It seems as if almost everybody is a little like the "Death Star" in Star Wars. There's a way in to our inner reality, but it's very small -- tiny, in fact -- and it takes a sure shot to get inside.

With people, it is often serious stress or failure of some sort that opens up the portal; and even then, it seems rare that some healing hope makes contact with the real you.

I remember how gripping Dr. Frank Lake's essay was, from the mid-70s, entitled "The Presence of Christ in the Healing of Primal Pain". He pointed us, you might say, to the cure for one's profoundest trouble. But how many didn't take him up on it? Didn't take God up on it?

This cast starts with an illustration from Jacques Demy's despairing masterpiece A Room in Town ("Une Chambre en Ville") from 1982. A Communist labor organizer's "Death Star Portal" is pierced by an entrancing person -- and all his "primary" commitments turn "secondary" in exactly five minutes. His portal opens and his world explodes. Sadly for the activist, known as 'Guilbout' , things happen too fast for him to understand what has happened. (Wish I'd been there in the script to try and help him towards a transformed life.)

The cast proceeds to talk about Spotify and iTunes playlists. (I make a new one every single day, absurd as that sounds.) But there's a portal lurking there that is also probably important.

Oh, and here's to brevity. Episode 336 is short.

Can you ever "over"-impute? Can you treat a person as they actually are not to such an extent that you lose yourself and are ultimately taken advantage of?

The short answer to the question is No. Imputation can never go too far. Of course the 'imputor' may lose himself/herself in the act of treating someone as they are (objectively speaking) not. Christ did. But the effect of imputation in 99% of its enactions is transformative. Yes, you may have to take it pretty far. And yes, you may lose your "boundaries" and self-protections in loving someone the imputation-way. But it almost always, finally, works.

Case in point -- trying to sound like Rod Serling for a sec -- is the amazing movie The Big Street, which came out in 1942. Based on a short story by Damon Runyon entitled "Little Pinks", The Big Street stars Henry Fonda as a busboy who makes his life's work the enablement, protection, and care of an impossible woman, played by Lucille Ball. The woman could care less about him. Poor 'Little Pinks' is taken gross advantage of by a scheming harridan who appears interested only in money, things and ruling over men -- but never 'Pinks'! The audience keeps wanting to shout at 'Pinks': "Leave her. Forget about her. She will only use you, for good, and then cast you off. You have no future with her." That's what the audience keeps wanting to, literally, scream.

But watch the movie through. Even the Lucille Ball character has her limits -- that is, the limits of her resistance to self-sacrificing love. I think The Big Street is probably unique in the annals of Hollywood depictions of Christ-like romantic love. It goes all the way.

I stand by my meme, which someone in Dallas has apparently placed behind the piano in an elementary school classroom: "ONE WAY LOVE IS THE CHANGE AGENT OF LIFE."