Your Cheatin’ Heart

Actually, this post has nothing to do with Hank Williams (Sr. of course, while turning one song into a 20 year career with Monday Night Football is impressive in its way on Jr.’s part, Hank Sr.’s music still holds up today in contrast to Jr.s’ forgettable 1980s country-schlock). What follows is a longish, rambling treatment of why adultery is sinful that I wrote one night when unable to sleep. Actually it doesn’t have all that much to do with adultery either, it is rather a back-door entry into a discussion of relationships (marriage specifically, but really any relationship, erotic or not, should take and participate in suitable degree with this form for the Christian). Any obscurity in it is hopefully explained by how late in the night it was written, but I have no real interest in editing it here. Also there is a bit in there about marriage necessarily producing children and the inability for the adulterous relationship to do likewise. This should not be taken too literally - although there is perhaps some deficiency in a marriage that does not eventually desire children (see Europe) – but is emblematic of the necessity of the relationship to go beyond itself, be fruitful, and not become its own end. Again, this comes from a little notebook I keep and wasn’t originally intended for blogging – think Pascal’s Pensées, except less worthwhile. Also the Paolo and Francesca mentioned are from the first circle of Dante’s Hell and my thoughts here probably draw more than I realize on the notes from Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation of the Comedy and in turn from both my own and her reading of Charles Williams’ The Figure of Beatrice.
Why is adultery sinful: that is, what makes the adulterous relationship different from the marital? Lack of acceptance by the community. Adultery cares nothing for the community at large, does not seek its acceptance, but draws the sphere down to only two. “And the two shall become one flesh.” Without the community, the relationship is cut off from all others; Paolo and Francesca spinning alone for eternity. The relationship becomes an end in itself, neither regarding God or the community for its context or continuance it collapses into itself, into self-love, the mutual gratification of erotic love. It does not seek its own perfection; it seeks only its own gratification. By refusing to be itself publicly (eros expressed in and supported by the community in marriage) it may also cease to be itself privately, the somewhat tenuous bonds of eros failing, unsupported by familial love and refusing to seek perfection in agape. Christian marriage places itself in its correct orientation to God and fellow man. Adultery, precisely because it refuses to place itself in any greater context is unable to seek any end other than itself and thus can grow into solipsistic self-determination – when the other partner no longer meets my needs, I end it. Adultery is unable to forget itself because it has already declared itself to be all that matters. Thus paralyzed, it must continually reaffirm itself, take stock of itself against itself, and justify its own existence by its effects. As it only exists so far as the two individuals will for it to, and its paralyzing self-affirmation stagnates itself (such a relationship can have no children, no other objects of love, it begets nothing) the adulterous relationship must increasingly seek its validation in the effects on the individual rather than on the other. And the one shall become two. Marriage may be perfected, beget (and so forget itself as an end) and create a real union (two as one flesh) as the individual no longer seeks its telos in oneself or in the relationship (which necessarily resides in oneself) but empties oneself and looks not only to one’s own interest, but the interest of others and so shares in the mind of Christ, the Bridegroom.
Hopefully that was helpful as a preliminary foray into this subject, sketching out in broad strokes the trajectory I think we should follow. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the allusion to Philippians 2 in the last sentence, as the Scripture it points to is much more important, has much more to say on the subject than anything written here. Also, I would point you to an essay by C.S. Lewis called “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” that can be found, if nowhere else, among the essays collected in God in the Dock. While I only read it for the first time this morning and didn’t incorporate any of it into what has been written here, I found it to be good, useful thinking on this subject coming from a different angle.
– As a site note, I realize I have not been posting much lately. When the internet is not so readily available, it makes me more discriminating in the things I think merit posting. This may not necessarily increase the quality of my posts, but it certainly does decrease their quantity. I will try and make a note of new postings on facebook from here on out, unless they become somewhat regular again.

Fun with Emperor Marcus Aurelius

Lately before bed I have been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius who was the last in the line of so-called “good Emperors” of Rome in the second century.  They were primarily called good because they really did appear so when put in relief against those that followed.  Marcus Aurelius’ son, the aptly named Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Gladiator) proceeded to flush a lot of the good the previous Emperors had done down, well, the commode.  But that’s not the reason I’m reading the Meditations, and the reason I’m reading the Meditations is not the reason I am posting this.  Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher on the side, and I was interested from a historical standpoint in finding out more about Stoicism.  Turns out it’s near-Christian ethics plus solipsism, making it the perfect philosophy for any occasion from emperors who want to feel good about their isolation at the top to Southern planters that felt justified in enslaving their fellow men because they convinced themselves that their paternalistic care for them really did improve their lives.  Like Christianity, Stoicism commands love for neighbor, but not in order that the neighbor be loved or because they are bearers of the Divine Image, but because the Stoic is the sort of man who loves his neighbor; the object of the love is necessary only so far as it (and the other person can hardly be really conceived as other than “it”, only the self matters, has interiority) allows the self to manifest its love and so keep with the “spark of divinity” within itself. 

But this is not the reason I am posting this.  The reason I am posting it is because Marcus Aurelius says some pretty funny, strange things.  To really see how strange these two meditations I am going to post are, it is necessary to see them in light of the rest of his meditations.  Here is a typical example: “Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man, to do steadily what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and a feeling of affection, freedom, and justice.” (Incidentally, this meditation is the one quoted to Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s wonderful novel, The Moviegoer, by his aunt who is representative of Old South Stoicism.)  In contrast to that, the following seems almost intentionally comic, although it is the emperor’s complete seriousness that in the end makes it even funnier “Are you irritated with one whose arm-pits smell? Are you angry with one whose mouth has a foul odor? What good will your anger do you? He has this mouth, he has these arm-pits.  Such emanations must come from such things. “But the man has reason,” you will say, “and he could, if he took pains, discover wherein he offends.”  I wish you well of your discovery.  Now you too have reason; by your rational faculty, stir up his rational faculty; show him his fault, admonish him.  For if he listens, you will cure him, and have no need of anger – you are not a ranter or a whore.”

The final passage I will post from the Meditations is, admittedly not quite so funny in my mind as the last, but it is a strange, melodramatic extension of everyone’s mother’s advice, “If you keep making that face, it will freeze that way.” From the seventh book of his meditations, “A scowling look is quite unnatural. When one often assumes it, the result is that all one’s comeliness fades and is at last so completely extinguished that it cannot again be lighted up at all.  Look to conclude from this that scowls are contrary to reason.  For if all knowledge of doing wrong is lost, what reason is there for living any longer?”

So there you have it: Don’t get mad at folks that smell bad and frowny faces make life not worth living.  Thanks Emperor Marcus Aurelius!

Link about Reading

If you are the type of person who will read something just because it was recommended on a blog, go read this (by way of Alan Jacobs' blog Text Patterns).  It's what I would do.

Neighbors Needed: Why abstract love doesn’t work

               “Unselfish love that is poured out on a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved.  And if the one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied… [his love] has not awakened [the beloved’s] capacity for unselfish love.”

               “Love shares the good with another not by dividing it with him, but identifying itself with him so that his good becomes my own.”   - Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

            In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a woman comes before the elder complaining that she lacks faith.  The elder advises that while nothing can be proven here, one can be convinced, “By the experience of active love.  Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly.  The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.  And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul.  This has been tested.  It is certain.”  To which the woman responds that she does indeed love humanity, to the point where she has dreamed of leaving everything, including her sickly daughter Lise, behind to become a sister of mercy and bind up the wounds and sores of the suffering.  She fears that ingratitude will cause her “active love for humanity” to wilt, an experience which the Elder Zosima corroborates by telling of a doctor he knew who claimed that, “the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular that is, individually, as separate persons.”

            “Active love for humanity” such as the woman claims to have, is a contradiction in terms.  To be active, love must be particular; it must be active upon a concrete, individual person.  As Merton said, love rests in the happiness of the beloved.  (I would have perhaps written “good of the beloved”, if only to avoid confusion.  Happiness has been misconstrued as that which is pleasurable – and so could include sinful activities – rather than as the true joy found in the ultimate good, life with God.)   Regardless of the terminology used, it is only in seeking the other’s good or happiness that the lover really goes about the activity of loving.  It is only through sharing life together, “identifying [oneself] with [the beloved] so that his good becomes my own” that we really love actively, something that cannot be done in distraction.   This is perhaps reflected in the curious Gospel phrase, “Jesus looked at them and loved them.”  In His humanity, Jesus could not be in relation at all times with all people and so could not “love them” in any way that would make sense, so it is only upon apprehending them that Jesus begins to love.  When God is said to “so love the world” He is loving all individuals separately rather than abstractly and seeking to draw each into a relationship of reciprocated love, because that is the beloved’s greatest good.  Abstract love, in contrast, is passive.  It does not seek the good of the beloved because it has no relation with it.  In fact it is a form of self-love, because all its benefits rest in the lover rather than the beloved.  The lover of humanity puffs himself up with fine feelings about himself, but affects no good in the perceived objects of his love.  As I’ve written before on this blog, love for humanity can lead to hatred for individuals perceived to be against the common good, from the conviction that it is better for one man to die for the sake of the nation to killing Jews for the sake of Aryan racial purity.  Love for humanity constitutes a kind of tenderness and sentimentality detached from its moorings, and as Flannery O’Connor wrote, “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.  It ends in forced-labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.” (A Memoir of Mary Ann)  The commandment to love our neighbors is one which has both our neighbor’s good and our own as its end.  Abstract love hopelessly collapses into itself; it is only through sharing in the good with others that we participate in the love of God.          

Great Moments in Southern Literature

(The title is only partially facetious. Imagine it as a recurring segment on your completely inane 24-hour news network of choice. How completely out of character and unexpectedly worthwhile it would be in contrast. You could have passages of Ignatius J. Reilly (bronzed, right) railing against everything while he waits outside the D.H. Holmes in New Orleans interspersed with clips of Lady Gaga’s latest doings or superimposed close-ups of Glenn Beck’s oh so expressive eyes. It would be awesome.)

I’ve really been on a bit of a Southern literature kick lately: Faulkner (a difficult but ultimately worthwhile slog it turns out), a Flannery O’Connor bio, the occasional essay by Walker Percy (Signposts in a Strange Land, the posthumous collection of his essays by his Jesuit biographer Patrick Samway has some wonderful essays on Louisiana and the South in general that should interest most readers along with some of a more philosophical bent dealing with the nature of language, art and faith, among other things, for those, like myself, more nerdy in taste. Here’s a quote from his wonderful “New Orleans, Mon Amour” that I particularly liked, “Out and over a watery waste and there it is, a proper enough American city, and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.”), a Civil War novel by Shelby Foote (the guy you remember from Ken Burns’ PBS series if you saw it), and the two authors I will feature here: George W. Cable and Eudora Welty. (Unfortunately, it seems reading Faulkner has done nothing to help the brevity of my parenthetical remarks.) First off, the wonderful Eudora Welty, a sort of amalgam in my mind of every funny old Southern lady I’ve ever met, to the point where I feel constrained to always refer to her as Miss Eudora Welty, out of respect and familiarity.

Despite that, I actually had never read Miss Eudora before this spring when I read both her wonderful short novel The Optimist’s Daughter and a few of her short stories (and was a little miffed no one had forced me to read her growing up, what are English teachers for after all if not forcing us to read good things against our will, there are better and more enjoyable Southern short stories that could be anthologized than “Story of an Hour” and “A Rose for Emily”, both of which still leave me a bit cold – no pun intended on the mortality, presumed or otherwise, of certain supporting characters in either story). I realize in painting her as the beloved Southern lady who sits in the back of the church and, after you chance to sit by them at a pot-luck meal, reveals herself as one of the nicest and simultaneously cuttingly funny people you’ve ever met - the kind that because they are old and because all they say is wrapped in good manners and propriety (prefacing even the meanest remarks with “bless his heart”) hold together these two opposing poles without so much as soiling their dainty white cotton gloves - I may turn some people off; positing her as a feminine, jokey, Mark Twain knock off trotting out that (formerly) highly prized Southern literary commodity: the amusing backwoods country bumpkin for laughs without much substance beyond that (because amusing and beloved as they are, most old church ladies probably shouldn’t be writing books- though I may be wrong on this point). But her humor in no way distracts or masks any potential deficiencies of her art. Think instead of a Jackson-bred Jane Austen, very funny but also a wonderful author. The following passage comes from Losing Battles, (though in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that The Optimist's Daughter is better) as one Miss Beulah describes to her new sister-in-law Aunt Cleo the one brother who is not present at the ongoing family reunion in comparison to the present brothers, Aunt Cleo’s husband included,

     “Handsome! Handsomer than Dolphus ever was, sunnier than Noah Webster, smarter than Percy, more home-loving than Curtis, more quiet-spoken than Nathan, and could let you have a tune quicker and truer than all the rest put together,” said Miss Beulah.
“He sounds like he’s dead,” said Aunt Cleo.

As it turns out, baby brother Sam Dale is dead. But that sums up nicely part of what is so wonderful about Miss Eudora, natural humor in the flow of the story. *Here’s a short story also by Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O.”

Turning to a likewise often neglected (though with better reason than with Welty) Southern author, I present New Orleans’ own George Washington Cable. Cable is an interesting figure; he was a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War who later became an ardent supporter of civil rights for former slaves (which led to his eventual exile from the South). He was also a good friend of Mark Twain who during their joint national book tour (which if you can believe was at the time a highly publicized and culturally significant event, a far cry from the sad and lonely looking authors sitting alone at tables in Barnes and Noble with a pile of unused and unneeded Sharpies and photos) was arguably the headliner and the bigger draw. Twain is still read of course (along with having that ultimate sign of late 90s cultural relevance a movie starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas based on not one, but two of his works, placing him, by extension, on roughly equal footing with Santa Claus in terms of popularity) while Cable is largely forgotten (I only found him available through a small Gretna based publishing house). Cable can be a little bit moralistic at times and has the annoying (to modern readers) habit of writing in dialect, to quote from one of his characters “Mais, fo’ w’y’?” (points for anyone who can figure out how an apostrophe better captures the nuances of a native French-speaker’s pronunciation of “why” than a silent “h”), but he still is of some interest I feel. Cable places the action of all his best works in the society of prewar New Orleans of the 1820s and 30s a time when gens de couleur libres (free men of color) of mixed French and African ancestry and the Freejacks set at liberty for their assistance in the Battle of New Orleans held some rights (even owning slaves in some cases), much more so than in the days of the post-Reconstruction backlash of oppression by the newly empowered Democrats that Cable wrote in. This distance allowed him room to comment on society; much in the way that Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch trials to talk about McCarthyism. With that and Cable’s ardent Christianity in mind, the word’s of his priest Père Jerome in the novella Madame Delphine should be considered, although they seem hardly less applicable today,
“’It is impossible for any finite mind to fix the degree of criminality if any human act or of any human life. The Infinite One alone can know how much of our sin is chargeable to us, and how much to our brothers or our fathers. We all participate in another’s sins. There is a community of responsibility attaching to every misdeed. No human since Adam – nay, nor Adam himself – ever sinned entirely to himself. And so I’m never am called upon to contemplate a crime or a criminal but I feel my conscience pointing at me as one of the accessories.”
Make no mistake, slavery was an American sin, not a peculiarly Southern one (Northern looms were just as hungry for cheaply produced Southern cotton as Southern planters were to produce it, and so jointly profited and sinned). In the same way, the globalized economy expands the circle of our neighbors and we can no longer (if we ever could) claim ignorance about why our Nikes are so cheap. Beyond this our mutual responsibility (an idea found interestingly enough in Dostoevsky’s writings of around the same time, though neither possibly read the other), affects the way I at least interpret the Bible, especially Genesis. But that’s for another post (or two)…
***Before I got around to posting this, I came across this in Terry Teachout’s decent biography of Louis Armstrong, Pops, and this seems as good a place as any to stick it. Here Armstrong discusses his proposal to his future wife Lucille after originally being rebuffed by concerns on the part of Lucille, (the idiosyncratic capitalization is Armstrong’s),
“That’s when I stopped her from Talking by slowly reaching for her Cute little Beautifully Manicured hand And said to her, ‘Can you Cook Red Beans and Rice?’ Which Amused her very much. Then it dawned on her that I was very serious. She – being a Northern girl and Me a Southern Boy from N.O. She could see why I asked her that question. So She said: “I’ve never cooked that kind of food before. But – Just give me a little time and I think that I can fix it for you.” That’s All that I wanted to hear, and right away I said “How about Inviting me to your house for dinner tomorrow night.”
A few nights later Louis went and ate red beans at Lucille’s parents house which he reported to be, “Very much delicious and I Ate Just like a dog,” and repeated his proposal, which was accepted the second time asking.

Multiculturalism and Taste

Pretty exciting title huh? I thought about entitling this post “Why silly liberal college professors should stop pretending to like underground hip-hop, Indian dance, and obscure subtitled movies from Mongolia and Thailand out of a sense of moral superiority and distrusting the rectitude of those who don’t share their enthusiasm and instead try to build up the steam-rolled mainstream American culture that produces drivel like Twilight, Two and a Half Men, and Miley Cyrus today when it used to put forth works like Absalom, Absalom! and Huck Finn, and artists like Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash,” but the present title seemed more succinct somehow, punchier. – You may have noticed that all the cultural products given as positive examples are from the South, while for the moment it is enough to note with pride (assuming you’re Southern) that all the most natural examples of American excellence in these fields happen to be from the South – the only that could perhaps be added would be Moby Dick, Dylan, and Elvis (who was also from the South of course), it is important that the examples are local I think, but more on that later. (Also as much I like, say, Fleet Foxes or Iron & Wine for example, it will be interesting to see how they hold up over time; survival to posterity is broadly a meritocracy although there are always some good things that slip through the cracks.)

 Despite all possible appearances to the contrary, this will not be a takedown of multiple cultures; it will be a takedown of the culture of multiculturalism that values diversity as an end in itself.  Rather being broadly catholic in taste and accepting the products of a given culture on the basis of merit, many seem to value these products of other cultures simply for their exotic nature – proof above all else that the multiculturalist is not a racist.  This comes, I think to the heart of the problem: multiculturalism identifies the physical or intellectual products of a culture so completely with the members of said culture that rejection of the products constitutes a rejection of the culture’s members (e.g. accusations that musical critics who dislike rap are therefore racist).  Thus their support for the products of a minority culture becomes a moral act, lending to them the cachet of an insider finding exotic products to astound their friends with and the moral superiority of being globally conscious and broadly accepting.  The actual members of the culture, the concrete individuals, the images of God, are secondary to their cultural products; they are not valued in themselves for those things which unite the two (producer and, unfortunately, what can only be described as consumer), but rather they are valued simply for their diversity, instead of their excellence.  Excellence is of course diverse in nature, it seems because God has willed it so (in sharp contrast to the popular conception of faceless cherubs sitting on identical clouds strumming non-descriptly on their harps, it is Hell that, as Lewis writes in The Great Divorce is the “grey town”).  In some ways it is the multiculturalist who is more susceptible to a type of racism (or culturalism, if that, despite spell check’s testimony to the contrary, is a word), patronizing others for diversity’s sake regardless of their merit.  It is quite possible to dislike the entire production of a culture while still loving individual members of it.  As a Christian this goes from the realm of possibility to that of a command to “love thy neighbor”, though this does not, I assume, preclude discriminating taste in music.

This multiculturalism is, I think, more a Northern phenomenon than a Southern one.  The North has always had a voracious appetite for other cultures it seems, eating up anything to fill the void within itself.  An example may help say for example you were set up on two blind dates the first girl is described to you as, “your typical Southern belle, from Savanna, Georgia,” the second as, “your typical girl from Branson, Missouri.”  Which one was easier to picture? Which would you feel more comfortable meeting now, knowing what you do?  The upshot is that it is difficult to imagine the stereotypical Northerner.  Would it have made any difference in your picture of the second girl if she was instead from Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon?  Lacking any real sense of a cultural identity, the Yankee has taken to identifying with many cultures, eclecticism being the humanizing aspect as it is all nominally run through the consumer’s taste.  The person thus becomes identified through their stuff, rather than producing culture from their own identity, resulting in turn in superficiality when the consumer tries to turn producer themselves.  It is only it seems the minority, that because of their differences from the prevailing culture can identify themselves, that is capable of producing lasting cultural products.  One can talk for example of the Harlem renascence or that of the South, or praise the Jewish literature of such authors as Chaim Potok or Saul Bellow (the former I have read and heartily recommend, the latter I haven’t, but have heard good things and invite you, dear reader, to go read him and tell me if I’m missing something), but the Great White North has produced no such movements.  The problem with the South is that bright, bustling Atlanta and oil-and-space rich Houston have replaced old seedy New Orleans and the (formerly at least) insane denizens of South Carolina and Charleston as the leading  cities of the New South, more reconciled and lest distinct than the South has ever been in its history.  This creates two possible solutions, manifesting themselves as symptoms of a common disease: one either accepts his places, feels alienated and rootless, and stocks up on cultural products wherever he may find them, or else embraces the relics of Southern culture root and branch, often stressing the parts most controversial and least accepted by the rest of the country as primary to distinguish himself all the more clearly from the rest of the country (e.g. the Rebel flag).  Lying back behind all this is the intuition that the prime days of the South have passed by and that either an anachronistic, sometimes belligerent self-imposed exile to the mythic past or an uneasy acceptance of the shallow present are the only viable options left.

All this said, no culture is monolithic and one must talk of Southern cultures as seen in the earlier example of perhaps the two most outstanding Southern musicians (excluding Delta bluesman like Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters who might also merit a place) Louis Armstrong and Hank Williams who came from quite different contexts but nevertheless can both be considered Southern.  Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles releasing albums of country music or Johnny Cash covering old blues songs serve as good examples of what from the outside appear to be cross-cultural exchanges but to their practitioners seemed natural.  Ideally this would still be true and locality would be the determining factor in culture, but media technology has progressed to the point where this is no longer the case.  In music for instance, the lack of local DJs (in the old sense of people on the radio selecting the music, not folks doing funny things with turntables) and the shriveling local music scene (related to the lack of local radio) mean that individuals are no longer limited in their access to music by location.  Splintered locals, uprooted from any tie to their soil, form virtual communities around their tastes, but it is unclear yet if such communities will be able to produce a coherent style in the same way local ones have in the past (e.g. Dixieland jazz or the 60s and 70s New Orleans funk of Dr. John and the Meters).  Multiculturalism seems to me to be an enemy of this, pursuing eclecticism and globalism at the expense of depth and a local culture.  At its extreme end, diversity becomes an end in itself, not a natural product of excellence in its many forms.  Inter-cultural borrowing is a very natural process, but without a coherent culture of one’s own by which others may be understood, superficiality is the only possible outcome

Good Article from NY Times on Narcicism and Activism

The article here

I've said pretty much all I have to say in the title, but for those just itching for more, here's a little lagniappe: I've been thinking something somewhat on the same lines for awhile, touching on it briefly here.  I've also some vague plans in the works for a post on why project (red), Toms, and the like while being wonderful corporately and doing much good are not really charities and potentially dangerous for the customer if they replace true Charity (big "C" because I mean it in the old sense as the Christian virtue of love).  The marriage of apparent charity with materialism, especially when this charity benefits some unseen (and so abstracted) person- not a neighbor in the traditional sense- can potentially collapse all attempts to do good into self-love, the good done to our neighbor across the world superseded by personal fulfillment granted by simultaneously thinking oneself to be generous and gratifying the desire for more stuff.  Saving the world while you destroy yourself.

Like I said, there is a rant coming, that was just a taste.  I'm sure I leave you both tantalized and anticipatory...

The Footnote to Poetry

I don’t want you to think I am starting a trend here and turning this in to some sort of poetry blog, but I want to post one more that explains what I try and do in most all my poems, how sub-creating (as Tolkien would call it) points to the Creator, even when it seems to be doing something else.  No more comments for this one, just a posthumous shout-out to Jack Lewis whose title I, well, jacked. 

The Footnote to Poetry

I am, author, poet

sole actor, setting down

determining, giving to each in season

Marshalling words and ink, filling

void with meaning, writing

on the face of the deep

Proud but comforted rebel

“Restless is our heart ‘til we find rest in You”

And rest is offered, assured

Rebellion tempered,

by expected parry and riposte

ironic twist to show me false

Justification of foolish lines

Truth, freeing falsehood

to be entirely false

that even what it has shall be taken from it

and given- testimony to the Truth

and there was evening, and there was morning

Dawn of the ironic eighth

10/16/08

A Good Friday Poem, On Pentecost

Having chosen not to take summer classes, along with the job market’s collective decision to, as yet, not take me, has given me sufficient free time and boredom to type another post- this the promised poem of the last post.  While this particular promise is, doubtless, one no one would hold me to, nevertheless for want of anything else to write about, I’ll keep it.  I seem to remember including in my previous post some ridiculous metaphor comparing the writing of poetry to walking about the house naked- either is acceptable enough in itself, so long as not put forward for public exhibition.  Awkward metaphors aside, it does point to the embarrassment experienced by others when faced with poetry and why it has been forced into such a peripheral role.  Mine tend to take the form of versified prose- neither rhyming nor scanning particularly well, almost a form of symbolic and extremely short story rather than “Poetry” writ large.

Anyway, this particular poem needs a bit of a disclaimer first and will be followed, as always, by some discussion of it.  While a better poet perhaps would not need these after-thoughts to serve as a sort of support where the form did not quite attain to the meaning I proposed to set out and such discussion does indeed weaken, in some respects, the poem itself (in the sense that the poem itself is what the author meant, the meaning of a poem- or novel for that matter- is not a second thing exterior to the work, but intrinsic to it, the whole of the work is its meaning), I like to nevertheless because the subject of the poem, in this case especially as will be seen, is the end and not the poem itself.  More on this later.  I also want, at the outset to make an apology (in the old sense of the term) for the use of a “cuss” word- earmuffs please- “damn”, in this case.  While I think passages such as James 3 on taming the tongue are much more concerned with what we say of our fellow image bearers- cursing them- than the use or disuse of certain culturally agreed upon “out” words- which I will call cussing and perhaps has more to do with the Puritans than the Bible- I realize that some folks may disagree with me.  For this reason I try to restrain my use of them, both for fear of offending the “weaker brother” and because it usually signifies either a failure of language or tact.  It is interesting, I think, that our “cuss words” come from a very limited range of categories: damnation (crap, I said it again), sexual, excremental, questions of ancestry (the “b” words), but I don’t really know why that is.  Nevertheless, I do think it serves a purpose here. So there. Besides, it’s my blog and I’ll write what I dang well please.  And so to the poem, complete with Latin title and Bonhoeffer epigraph…

Lancea Longini

“There are only two possible ways of encountering Jesus: one must die or one must put Jesus to death. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center

Cock-crow or morning trump awakens

whatever the means, the result is the same-

I roll out, automatic being, devoid of thought,

‘til shocking cold greets my feet, and reminds me

Why I hate this damned desert.

Welcome routine softens, redirects my hatred

boots and girdle, lorica and scabbard, separate;

allow me to step, to wake to new modes of being,

that whatever may be the work of death

that today must be done through me,

I have ceased responsibility.

I is swallowed by Empire.

Festal days here mean work;

Work, welcome respite from imbecile monotony,

of the endless procession of eventless days

in this provincial backwater.

Today a last, frenzied gasp of activity

before the slow, ceaseless silence,

the death that marks Saturn’s day.

A whole slate of executions is marked for today

(the locals seem fond enough of death, of spectacle

but stop on Saturdays, though the buzzards still feed)

I’m not sure of the names or numbers; I like it better that way.                                                                                                                    

A named man has existence, stands as fact,

draws me out of unnamed, Legion-state

into being, choice, judgment

no longer does Empire stand in my stead

I measure the merits of following duty and preserving my life,

and taking and punishing my fellow guilty man

(I’ve killed three named men in my life

I remember each face)

Being a centurion has its benefits,

I can usually avoid trials if I wish.

Today, I wish I had.

They bring into the praetorium a poor, thin local

the charge seems a bit absurd-

this man of clear eyes and a strong silence

is charged with claiming to be king,

King of the Jews

He is stripped and beaten and mocked

Silence

And then it happens; eye contact, a spear to my heart

It’s a look I’ve seen once before

So long age it seems, like a forgotten dream

or haunting nightmare – it came from Father.

In arrogant youth I slept with a whore,

then killed her husband when caught

I returned home shaken-

I desired a look of utter disgust from Father

Instead a haunting, withering love,

fully conscious of my betrayal, meeting me in my wrong

with love.

I rush out of the palace, but not before I hear

a name- Yeshua

Today will not be a good Friday.

I’m forced to walk this Yeshua up

to walk him up to the place of my skull and decide-

what an absurd figure he is:

carrying his cross

King of the Jews, with the weight of my government upon his shoulders

the battered face of love

haunting – I decide.

I must kill it, even if that means killing him

Or such a face will be the death of me.

10/23/08

After a long poem, prefaced with an overly long tangent on the propriety of cussin’, the last thing this post needs is a lengthy discussion of the poem.  Oh well.  First, a few explanatory notes, starting with the title.  The Latin is not there to impress with my incredible ability to use google and Wikipedia, but to be evocative without spelling out clearly from the outset what is going on.  Translated it means the spear (lancea) of Longinus, which unless you are up to date on your obscure, semi-fictional saints, will not mean much to you.  The narrator is of course the centurion who, in Mark’s gospel and elsewhere exclaims at Christ’s death, “Surely this was the Son of God.” Church tradition holds that he later became a Christian and has come down to us a Saint Longinus (hence his somewhat dubious status, although he seems more legitimate than Saint Lazarus- not the brother of Mary and Martha, but the one from the parable whose wounds are licked by the dogs).  What is important to the poem at hand is that all this occurs somewhere outside the bounds of the poem.  Indeed, in a sense it is only once he becomes a Christian that he passes from being a nameless centurion into genuine existence and possesses a name- Longinus- all of which I associate with that enigmatic passage in Revelation about the members of the church at Pergamum receiving a white stone with their name on it, emblematic of their true identity, found in Christ.  W.H. Auden has argued that proper names can mean nothing in poetry because one might just as easily replace one name with another.  What he was getting at was that one cannot, by virtue of naming, call up that person into the poem as a sort of short cut; their presence must be intrinsic to the poem or else we create something analogous to an idol, a golden calf of our making that we then name- “Behold your god, O Israel”.  Given this, I could not, simply by calling this man Yeshua make him the historical Jesus- he could be anyone and faith is required regardless, even if this man that we see suffering, being crucified is the man Jesus, we still need eyes to see that, “This man was the Son of God.” Since the name in itself cannot signify, instead I had to make possession of a name emblematic of authentic existence.  No one else, not even the narrator, is named in the poem and as has been seen the narrator is in fact only named in so far as he relates to Christ (in his later canonization by some perhaps creative members of the Church).  In His incarnation He escapes reduction to a theological abstraction that makes our system work (like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who has no need for Christ Incarnate), and demands both a response to Himself personally and if He is God, a consideration of how we treat His fellow image bearers.  Thus, encounter with Jesus is a confrontation, requiring as Bonhoeffer said, we either be crucified with Him or nail Him up to be crucified; He does not bring peace, but a sword.

One might wonder why, at least on the basis of my last two poems, there are never any good Christians in my poetry (not that you probably spend much time wondering about my poetry, but they are conspicuously absent and I want to talk about why).  Much of the reason lies in the explanation Lewis gave for never writing a counter book to the Screwtape Letters containing the correspondence of angels rather than demons- it would require a saint to write it.  There is a more fundamental problem, I think, in the structure of drama itself.  As I wrote last time (you can scroll, I’m not hyper-linking), comedy is the fundamental Christian form of drama because it mirrors the Christian eschaton, the consummation of marriage- between Christ and His Bride, the Church, and between Heaven and Earth as the New Jerusalem comes down.  Comedy always ends shortly after the marriage, often with the trite assurance that “they lived happily ever after”; when the marriage occurs, the dramatic tension goes slack, the story is over.  Any continuation of the story must reintroduce conflict to drive along the narrative.  Because of this, the Christian life can never be dramatized in its completion; it must always be a movement towards, never, except at the end perhaps, an arrival at.  The Gospel cannot be dramatized, only proclaimed.  The indirect method, with God conspicuous in His absence, in the faults and accidental allusions of the characters is the only way forward. Irony, the sinner-character’s wild, lunging attacks easily parried and riposted by God, amounts to the implicit proclamation of something else, other- the Gospel.  This is what the great Catholic author Flannery O’Connor was doing in her fiction as she explains her essay “The Fiction Writer & His Country”, “When you can assume that your audience shares the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that is does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”  I hope better things for y’all that read me, but you never know.

Whew. Word tells me I clocked in at about 2,000 words on this one.  I need to hide that word counter somehow, so that, in the future, instead of feeling discouragingly long-winded upon completing a post, I can be blissfully and ignorantly long-winded.  Also in searching for this poem, I came across a note concerning it, written it seems when I was only begin to conceive it.  The note recommends some sort of ironic play on the command to Peter, “Arise, kill, and eat,” lining out the structure of the centurion’s day with he becoming in the end a partaker in the Eucharist.  Doubtless this would have made for a better poem, but it apparently slipped through the cracks.  As it is doubtful I would have been up to implementing it, it seems better to let it float out there, an interesting idea that can be idealized for its not being executed.

How Not to Relaunch a Blog

Taking a page from my playbook of how not to launch a blog, I’m rebooting the Underground with some poetry.  It is well known that lots of folks write poetry, don’t read anyone else’s poetry, and then occasionally publish their poems to the web, in order that they might be ignored by a broader audience.  Publishing poetry to one’s blog is much like walking around one’s house completely naked when no one else is around; if your friends find out, they make think it odd, but since it really doesn’t affect them (given that they neither read your poems nor peek through your blinds), they regard it merely as a forgivable, perhaps even endearing quirk.  In keeping with this illustrious tradition then, I here publish two poems for you to disregard.  Afterward I want to comment a bit about what is going on in them; if there is one thing that galvanizes an audience more than collectively ignoring a poem, its collectively ignoring commentary on poetry.  My readership is soaring, I can feel it…

The Hippopotamus

It is as if in creating us God asked a question and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question. –Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Strange, at the end of pilgrimage

When friends have failed,

Wife given bad advice,

houses collapsed, sons entombed,

daughters dead, and sheep stolen;

to be offered, tendered

as some way of explanation

when the answer is a question

and I am given the task of being

Both: answer and question

You seem satisfied, which is good-

you know, I almost envy you,

Tragedy is not without benefits.

It may sound romantic in verse

to lie among the lotus

I of iron limbs and bronze tubed bones,

I assure you: it is a stinking mire

the river rushes, but my feet remain

stuck here – a pilgrimage in place.

That is, in time I move

occasionally called up

as something counter, spare, original, strange

by Him- whose beauty is past change.

Praise Him.

I do, I try at least

But my vocation disheartens

Perhaps I should take out an ad,

begin looking for my replacement.

Wanted: One to prove

the inscrutability of God.

Apply within.

2/11/09

If you can but defer your excitement to rush on to another poem and will bear with me a bit, I want to talk a bit about what I tried to do here.  If you’re one of those types that like to form your own opinions about these sort of things or frankly want to get as far away from the previous poem as possible, feel free to skip on down to the next section. (As an aside, it is fortunate in a way that this blog hasn’t really taken off yet.  The plan is eventually to get James Earl Jones to do voiceovers for the audio version of all these posts on a podcast.  If you were listening to that you would have to cover your ears and hum through this entire section to avoid the commentary.  And no one really wants to do that.)  Anyway, in case you missed it, this is told from the perspective of the behemoth (which seems decidedly hippopotamus-y to me) that God directs Job’s attention to at the end of the book (of Job- but hopefully you figured that out).  Also, if you must continue thinking about the narrator as a hippopotamus, think about him more like a hippo you might find in Narnia rather than a hungry, hungry one that spends all its time trying to eat tiny white plastic balls; it is a rational and moral being.  One more thing needs to be pointed out before continuing, the last few lines of the penultimate stanza are from a wonderful little poem by Hopkins called “Pied Beauty”, if they look out of place (you know by rhyming, being good lines of poetry, ect.) that’s why.

A couple things do need to be said, I think, about why this poem takes the form it does and why I felt it necessary to write it in this way (this will also help show what the next poem is trying for).  The poem is not explicitly Christian, in fact the narrator has an ambiguous, sometimes subversive stance towards the faith.  The key part is that he is wrong.  He cannot, of course, leave his vocation because it is (take the leap with me here) the human condition.  In Jesus Christ, God has declared His love and His decision to be for us.  Whether in the alienated boredom of the hippo or the anguish of Job, the declaration of the beloved state is in the end the proof of God’s inscrutability.  The narrator’s desire to know (anything, even the certainty of tragedy) is subverted by the necessity of his fundamental acceptance of the mystery- the declaration that God is Love in and through Christ.  Far from rejecting his office or finding a replacement, the hippo embodies and invites others into the mystery found in the Gospel, to the praise of God.  The previous sentence if taken out of context is of course silly in the extreme, but this is entirely appropriate to the colossal comedy of the Gospel.  Comedy (in the old Shakespearian sense that the story ends in marriage) is the most appropriate way of dramatizing the Gospel.  However, like many of Shakespeare’s later comedies (The Merchant of Venice, to take one example) a good deal of tragedy is mixed in- the Christian is not to be unrealistic or “pie-in-the-sky, we’ll all escape to Heaven by and by” about the tragedies that still are inflicted on the world on a daily basis, but they are not to despair.  “Take heart, for I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

-Word tells me that I’ve now reached near a thousand words in this post, so I’ll defer my other poem to another, later post.  Try to contain your excitement in the interim.

  

I return from hiatus to announce my hiatus...

Feels like time for ab update, so here goes.  I haven't posted for awhile now for a variety of reasons, chief among them that, no longer living at home in post-graduate limbo, I have better things to do.  I just recently started at Truett Seminary in Waco which also seems unable to really decide if its conservative or liberal and so is a good fit for me.  Also, I don't have a working computer or internet at the moment (which perhaps makes the origin of this a post a mystery to many), which has contributed to this blog's sorry neglect recently as it stands like some lonely orphan in a forgotten corner of the internet.  On the bright side, I've been able to get quite a lot of reading done, including starting Dickens' wonderful David Copperfield (which is perhaps what occasioned my orphan metaphor in the preceding sentence).  I feel that I've have perhaps been to effusive in my praise  of some books in previous posts and so have no room to communicate how wonderful this novel really is.  It is quite an undertaking (my copy comes in at some 700 pages), but is so light and enjoyable (if not necessarily in content, in style) that one should not feel intimidated, as I do before, say War and Peace- I know I should probably read it, but how to begin?

Anyway all that to say that this blog is not dead and I do plan to return to it at some point.   I probably will not blog with the frequency I once did upon return (it got to the point where even I didn't read everything I wrote), but like General MacArthur said upon leaving the Philippines, "I will return"- in a not altogether unrelated aside, on my return this time I found the comments section inexplicably overrun by Asian characters of some sort.