In some ways it makes no difference that M/L seminary has moved out of the building created specifically for them. They never really integrated with what was going on around the U of Chicago except for the Div School program and whatever forays individual students made. For a cross-disciplinary person like me (teaching, psych, art, writing, natural science, anthropology, etc) this was too bad. Through books, later on, I found my way to Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlin -- part of a community of thinkers who were redefining culture and how to survive in it. And then I found that their offices were two doors down from M/L. I had lived across the street but no one mentioned them.
In a way, that’s good, because now there is YouTube, which probably gives me far more personal access than if I’d gone over and knocked on their door. At that time (’78-‘82) I would have defined myself more as a client anyway. (Certainly M/L saw me that way, as well as a pass-through for money -- they called it “tuition.”) Now I am a better parallel thinker for this core group and their enterprise is also much farther along. Take a look at these three vids from Eugene Gendlin’s “Thinking on the Edge,” which are very relevant to what I’m trying to say about using “liminal” liturgy to access the felt sense of the Holy. (If these puzzle you, try YouTube for “Eugene Gendlin Focusing.”)
The Div School at the time was not inclined to be friendly to the phenomenological, considering it to be secular. They disallowed my struggle to express what was just below the surface of words, because their work was based on the Word and the Book. To them the Sacred could only be contained by the institutional church. That’s who paid their bills and hired those graduates who became ministers, though most of the students became Ph.D. certified professors of religion. Comparative religions were as close as anyone would go outside the faith circle.
For my uses, Gendlin is still not as skilled in the language of metaphor and image as I would like to be. What he knows is the process of helping people access the body-knowledge in themselves as an extension of psychoanalysis that doesn’t need words. He pulls them across the threshold into speech. Not unlike Gestalt and the red chair.
Most of what I have learned comes from watching Tim Barrus, a poet but non-academic who in the last half-decade has been developing concepts in videos made by boys who are so far out on the edge that no one can see them: boys who have been able to survive only by doing sex work. Some have found ways to cope. Some have simply died. Along the middle are boys who can find their way if they can name it or frame it, even if not in words. Maybe it’s an empty swing set, maybe it’s a bed of kelp, maybe it’s a road through a forest, but most of us will respond to these images in “felt” concepts. Not in words. Not even under words. Apart from words, but possibly leading to words.
The great thing about images is that they are a language that crosses national boundaries among French-English-Bantu-Chinese-signtalk. Computers are capable of a good deal of rough language translation for print (still far from perfect) but a long ocean shoreline, a laughing dog, a mug on a windowsill, all say something that anyone can understand. Sometimes I think that our fascination with the most extreme images -- torture/sex/electronic microscopic images/cosmic star nurseries -- has to do with all our curiosities and varying willingness to confront things that cannot be put into words.
This way of communicating has always been possible through the arts, but now it has exploded in the way that the printing press exploded writing. Beginning with music videos and porn, both of them deplored by “civilized” adults, the image-in-service-to-relationship and even narrative has swept the world the way film in theatres once captured hearts and, um, minds. First on television, ballooning to four-foot flat screens, and now shrinking to inches on handheld devices, sometimes with only earplugs, letting your imagination create the visuals -- this material goes everywhere. It cannot be copyrighted, it cannot make a profit, it cannot be sequestered -- it just goes like water everywhere people go, and along the way it sweeps ideas into the flood. How else could American culture change so quickly?
These images are not formless and their interaction is according to a grammar that most narrative artists know. Juxtapositions, gaps, overlays, surprises and sometimes long long long boring pieces -- ten minutes of watching a technician copy DVD’s, only his hands going back and forth among machines, adjusting a knob, moving a dial. Even that makes a point. Dry humor, Warhol-style. For the past six years I’ve had the advantage of watching this shifting group of videographers, most of them kids, develop a vocabulary of photos and strategies. They have something to say: something desperate but central to our larger culture. It is NOT commercially developed nor from “standard” assumptions because it has been underground and counterculture, released by technology the way that uncovering ancient seeds and watering them will cause an irruption of growth.
I would like Eugene and Mary Gendlin and their group to take this work seriously. No doubt they’ve never seen it, so how could they? It’s not QUITE invisible, but almost. The University of Chicago has a long history of turning esoteric intellectual consideration to the local, the humble, the underestimated. Young black men on street corners, for instance. So I thought, why isn’t it perfectly respectable for me, a grad, to bring high principles to bear on these guys and their work?
So far it turns out that the academics panic, just like the bureaucrats. Many scholars certified to work on underground or counterculture issues are from the same background themselves. That means they have to be solidly irreproachable; they know that the people judging them will be middle-class and upper-class. Those judges don’t watch music vids. If they go to YouTube at all, it’s to watch lectures. If minority scholars get too far out of the norm, they won’t be able to pay off their loans.
My profs at M/L, or at least some of them in their early years, identified with the working class. They wore work shirts with reverse collars and were proud to know guys who sweat for a living. But once the same men were faculty, that was all just nostalgia. Two profs at U of C have worked with troubled boys. One is Martin Marty who in his earliest years of ministry was the mentor for the Blackstone Rangers on behalf of his Lutheran congregation and the other is Franklin Zimring, a law prof now in California, who has done a lot of research on boys “in the system.” Neither had a therapy background.
My church internship was in Hartford, Connecticut, which is a major therapeutic community. I was in a group specifically for future ministers and also in a one-on-one, a very sharp woman counselor. The issue was mostly authority: I didn’t respect my ministerial supervisor. I empathize with bad boys. In the earliest stories they are often a source of the Sacred.
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