Tag: metaphor

by jad

#Route101: Another New Year

As we recover from the motion blur of our epic #Route101 road trip, much of the past year is coming into focus for me in the rearview mirror. I spent much of 2022 and a good chunk of 2021 thinking and writing about meaning—discerning it, making it, communicating it. I tried every personality test and even got into tarot. I turned inward, coiling up tighter and tighter until I got sick of that spiritual exhibitionism and the leering that comes with it. I wanted out and I found an unexpected exit in photography, an ecstatic eye to thread new lines through. But … Continue reading “#Route101: Another New Year” →

by jad

AdventWord 2022—TRAVELER

Today’s #AdventWord is TRAVELER, and for the longest time, I’ve been fixated on a phrase that came to me repurposed from an album title, a phrase that became a kind of philosophy of life in molecular form: “I am traveling with another.” I ran that through a readability analyzer and it apparently corresponds to a 10th/12th grade level, which makes sense, because in many ways it captures a high school senior’s style of overthinking the world. Like an essay about serendipity that compares the concept to looking over the school yard fence and noticing a storybook style house you describe like a … Continue reading “AdventWord 2022—TRAVELER” →

by jad

Let The Reader Understand

Over the years journeying with Christ, I’ve found myself returning again and again to the same sort of affect when searching for God: a sense of feeling God’s presence most deeply in the margins and fringes—the uncanny things that reach out and grab ya, as the Halloweentide song goes. My theological reflections have almost become predictable; sooner or later, I’ll be using the word “strange”—and this Advent reflection is no different. What a strange line we have in this already bizarre Gospel telling by Matthew: “let the reader understand.” It’s the only interjection of its kind in the whole New … Continue reading “Let The Reader Understand” →

by jad

Composition #2

Every time I think of Kundera I recall my favorite line from Unbearable Lightness: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” And as I wrote these words, I went back to refresh my memory and was surprised to see that sentence on page 4—page 4!—of the book. Could something so meaningful to me have come so early in the text? Does that make it any more or any less significant? I’m pretty sure the man would say: both. Kundera opens his Unbearable Lightness with a reflection on the concept of “eternal … Continue reading “Composition #2” →

by jad

Metafiction

A non-negligible number of books I’ve read of late have shared a common conceit: a chapter that holds the key to unlock the mystery of the whole. Granted, a climax or conclusion is pretty standard fair in any standard text, but that’s not what I’ve been reading. In ‘Camera Lucida,’ we have the clean break along the middle of the spine; in ‘Devil House,’ a whole number of a-ha moments, but only one chapter that literally fractured the narrative (read: act of narrating) in faux-Fraktur; in ‘Immortality,’ it’s part 6. Kundera tells us ahead of time what he’s going to … Continue reading “Metafiction” →

by jad

Consolations

A Pentecost sermon is many things, but you don’t often expect to hear about the fear of heights, let alone the kind of morbid ideation that sometimes accompanies that phobic vertigo: “what if I just flung myself over the edge,” the preacher intimated, illustrating his larger point about the fragility of trust in the self in contrast with the solidity of trusting in God. I suspect that his moment of vulnerability was encouraged by an editor who left a comment in the margin urging him to “tell us something of what you’re afraid of here.” I wonder if he worried … Continue reading “Consolations” →

by jad

The Meaning of 888

For years, a running joke I told was that I was born on Antichristmas—June 25, the symbolic antipode of Christmas Day. And while the season’s greetings I text my friends have become a lot less sarcastic, I am beginning to see a lesson in the turning of that wheel, again & again, and the spiral path it’s made. As a species we seem to be formed by contrast. “Kikhhh,” the Lebanese mother will sound out to the child who has tried to taste something he’d picked up off the ground, establishing his boundary between clean and unclean. If this line … Continue reading “The Meaning of 888” →

by jad

The Meaning of Six Six Six

And what spot does X mark? X is you and I, the coming together of diagonals—an intersection and ideal symbol for the very search for meaning. X can mean the unknown variable or the buried loot at the center of a treasure map; X is both a placeholder and a destination—a deliberate holding pattern, or, perhaps, a refusal to land on familiar terms. In our cultural consciousness, we have Generation X, The X-Files, and Malcom X. Let your eyes shift back & forth between these correspondences. Contemplate their polarities—if strange patterns emerge, what you are now experiencing is what Umberto … Continue reading “The Meaning of Six Six Six” →

by jad

The Meaning of 1, 2, 3

Knowing thyself can serve a practical purpose as well; it’s a shorthand that short-circuits the rookie writer’s evergreen anxiety: how to tell a story that is not a long series of introductions introducing more introductions. I-dentity draws the “I”—a line in the sand—and brings the point to focus. I am traveling with another; this is my story. And yet, as with all quick-fixes, identity begs more questions than it answers. Where exactly is the starting line? At a recent staff retreat, I came ill-prepared to a team-building session with a scrapbook as my story-prompt that I planned to turn into … Continue reading “The Meaning of 1, 2, 3” →

by jad

INTRODUCING INCONJUNCT

I want to tell you about a little project called @INCONJUNCT. But first, a few words about “inconjunction,” a technical term from astrology that’s neither “conjunction” nor “opposition.” It might not even be anything at all as, indeed, it wasn’t for ancient writers like Ptolemy who called it a “non-relationship.” To understand the concept, you may want to hold in your mind a certain metaphysic of cosmic influence—as above, so below, etc—but even that is not entirely necessary; you may choose to follow the symbolic geometry instead: “Dividing a circle into two parts creates a diameter and two points on a circumference separated … Continue reading “INTRODUCING INCONJUNCT” →