A Practice in Difficult Times

 'I have decided to keep a journal...To set down all my thoughts and the simple events of my day factually and without hiding anything. When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy.' Reverend Ernst Toller, First Reformed

Paul Schrader's First Reformed is a film I think about a lot. Probably more than I think about The Card Counter, even though I have written about that on this blog before whereas I haven't said much about the film which preceded it. I think about it a lot for a number of reasons. Ethan Hawke's Reverend Ernst Toller is a Lutheran pastor and I am a Catholic - well, a Catholic of sorts,  I ceased going to church a long time ago, and have been kept away by everything I have learned since about the corruption of the Holy See, (and that was before the current Pope started comparing people like me to nuclear weapons), but the training, the sincere engagement with the ideas of God and morality and the accounting of one's own conduct, never really leaves you, and these are the same ideas we see Toller engage with in the film. It could be said that he is a very Catholic Lutheran, or it could perhaps be said that everyone who engages seriously with Christianity or maybe even any religion at all shares these qualities. But they are certainly not shared by many of the other 'Christians' Toller meets in this movie, and that is another reason I love it - the way it shows the stark difference between a person who engages seriously with Christianity as a philosophy and those for whom it is a business or a tribal affiliation. There are far too many of the latter in our world, and they are far too loud, and their intellectual laziness and loudness is why we have been hearing lately about grotesque notions like 'the sin of empathy.' 

If empathy is indeed a sin, then Toller certainly commits it. And his willingness to do so, to extend his empathy to not just his congregation but to the natural world and generations yet unborn, is another reason this film is often in my thoughts. 

And let's be honest - it is rare that a day goes by on which I do not think of pulling on a suicide vest and walking into a location where its deployment could do a substantial amount of good. 

The reason I am writing about First Reformed right now, though, is writing - Toller's practice of keeping a journal. And it occurs to me that this is not something I have done on this blog for quite some time. I have done a lot of other things: promoted my gigs and videos, published fiction, written essays (and indeed this post, too, is in a lot of ways an essay, as much as it is, as some of you may already have guessed, an announcement), but 'set[ting] down all my thoughts and the simple events of my day factually and without hiding anything' is an aspect of blogging I have long paid little attention to. 

I think, in the year to come, that I am going to change this, to some extent. I will certainly not record every 'simple event of my day' in the sense of logging every burp, sneeze and bowel movement, but I will try, as often as I can, if not every day, to set down here what has struck me on that particular day, in thought or action. Perhaps I will reflect on some piece of visual art I have produced during the day, or some other activity, but these reflections will be, usually, less polished than the longer essays. Not that those will disappear completely from this blog - I have been working, since last year, on an essay about Todd Field's movie Tàr, a film I think about even more than First Reformed, and that will show up here when I finally have my ideas down in a way that I consider satisfying. But there will probably be other, briefer, less organised reflections on movies, books and other media that I encounter on here too, as the year progresses. And we will likewise return to what is going on in the Albian timeline with those mysterious orbs, but again, that piece of work will be spaced out with more mundane matter. 

Why do this? Well, on one level, simply to get the blog going again after I took a longer than planned Christmas break from it. But there is another, deeper reason, and it is here that we return again to First Reformed, and to Toller. It is the duty, and in some ways the privilege, of bearing witness to the end. 

'The bad times, they will begin, and from that point everything moves very quickly. You know, this social structure can't bear the stress of multiple crises. Opportunistic diseases, anarchy, martial law, the tipping point. And this isn't in some like distant future. You will live to see this.' - Michael Mensana, First Reformed

'This journal is a form of speaking...It is a form of prayer.' - Reverend Ernst Toller, First Reformed

You do not have to look very hard for signs that things are not looking good out here. The climate crisis continues to get worse, and at exactly the point when drastic action on climate is most needed, the current global hegemon is ruled by some of the most immoral, stupid and short-sighted people on Earth. So stupid and short-sighted are they, indeed, that it seems almost certain that they will bring about the end of their period as the global hegemon, and that is in some ways a mercy, but it remains to be seen whether or not the power that will succeed them can do enough to avert the worst of the calamity. And in the meantime those same immoral, idiotic scum, and those figures in other countries who pander to them and seek their favour, seem Hellbent on doing everything they can to make life difficult for people like me. There are times when it feels almost comical how much every new pronouncement from our Prime Minister, a man who is such a moral vacuum that he made a perfect physical host for the spectral body of Jimmy Savile, seems to be almost directly targeted at me. I suppose I shouldn't take it personally. He just hates women, trannies, queers, cripples, the unemployed and people of colour, and when you happen to fit five of those six categories it's hard not to feel targeted. Which, unsurprisingly, has taken its toll on my mental health.

All of which is to say, one reason I want to treat this blog more like a journal again is the fact that, for reasons both political and personal, I quite simply do not know how many more entries I have left. And I want to leave a record: of what I witnessed, of what was done to me and people like me, of how it felt to live through. Maybe such a record will be useful to people who come after me. Maybe it can, in some way, provide hope to those who are also witnessing these times, even if that is just the comfort of knowing they are not alone. But beyond its utility or inutility as historical record or morale-booster, it will also be, as Toller's journal is in First Reformed, a form of prayer.