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"Life will go on. Millions of people tonight will eschew prayers and icon, even connubial relations, in favor of Dave (and other ironicists), waiting for their displacement-prophecies and self-caressing lyrics, to lullabye them into meaningless dreams of leftover passions -- a common bizarre experience for a fragmented, disaffected soul.
It's hard to sleep, to rest, nowadays. What's demanded these days is a narcotic to bring on narcosis, since the sleep of good work, grief and joy, is so hard (notice how many sleep clinics there are?). What's wanted is a nightly, fanciful dose of ironic anaphora that repeats, in vain caressing repetition, the invocations of a chuckling world without sin -- sinless because, you know, camouflaged in shadow."
Adapted from Second Terrace.
Over the last week I've a few ideas. Not exactly profound in themselves, I've thought perhaps as notions they could be developed into full-bodied, if I had the time. One came to me while listening to Kentucky's Poet Laureate Gurney Norman this past weekend. Something he said about the way Americans used to craft quilts -- how just about anything could be saved and called to noble quilthood. Then I thought about all the trash we produce in a single day in this great land. In fact, I think about it every day when I buy lunch at the one of the many dispensers of food on campus. At some of these are positioned receptacles with signs that read: "Don't be trashy. Please recycle." The receptacles themselves don't seem to be specifically for recyclables. They contain all manner of waste, save perhaps feces. Every time I use such a bin I drop something in there I think could've been recycled, yet I know it won't be. Obviously the sign is meant to make me feel bad, because beside the general trash bin no recycling bin is provided.
Wednesday I found out that one of my heroes has terminal bone cancer. It has spread throughout his body, and he has a cancerous cyst on his lung. I was very let down and without hope most of the day. I thought to visit him, but I only know him nominally, and barely at that. The most I can say about our familiarity with one another is that he likes one of my bands, which is currently out of commission.
I've been largely absent from the written word for several months now, approaching a year. Somehow my drive and patience to write slipped out of view just as soon as I entered the Church. I read a lot now. Much spiritual material, and I spend way too much time quoting what I read on Facebook. I pop by Lee Bozeman's blog from time to time, and his terse but poignant updates give me a model of how I might still tap out my ideas occasionally. If so, I suspect I'll keep things low key and still at this blog. I started a blog at Wordpress, and intended it for more academic and ambitious discourse. But I'm less concerned about proving faith to anyone now. Truth has been shown, and I trust it.
It's amazing how big the world can still be. Becoming Orthodox has opened me to a near-inexhaustible library of astounding and propounding -- and indeed holy -- literature, both ancient and contemporary (seeing as how the contemporary is also ancient, given its infinite source), as well as in book and blog form. A great example would be Fr. John Tobias' review of David Bentley Hart's new book, Atheist Delusions, a book I have been so eager to read that I'm contemplating pushing back my next summer reading book back a slot. Few, if any, match Hart's eloquence in writing and wit, but Fr. Tobias doesn't leave his readers wanting.
Consider the following passage, in which Fr. Tobias clarifies Hart's thesis, for anyone who may have thought Atheist Delusions could or should be boiled down to "a sure bet in a back alley cockfight with the "new atheists."
His proposition was that the Christian Church brought about a profound revolution, whose effects permeated the world of human society. It established what is facilely known as "Christendom" (West and East): everyone knows that, but Hart proves that what we like to think of as "the West" is fundamentally this very Christendom – despite the current and odious attempt to establish a secular singular Europe. All the liberal things we are justly proud of are in fact Christian inventions; to name just a few: things like hospitals, effective medicine, justice for the powerless, "healthcare and welfare," the prohibition of gladiatorial combat, the eradication of slavery, the full involvement of women in religion (suggesting that the male priesthood contradicts the full participation of women in Orthodoxy is as lamentable as supposing that female motherhood diminishes the participation of males in parenthood, or that female wifehood prohibits the full range of male sexuality).
That last point sounds abrupt in a bozart age when "full participation" has been jingo-ized into hieretical affirmative action. But Christianity was the first to involve all adherents – rich or poor, slave or free, men or women, Greek, Roman and Jew – cramming them all into one single Liturgy and Sacrament, the same font and cup, the same nave. The question of "why can't I be the celebrant?" was never related to St. Paul's "in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free."
The Christian Revolution went deeper than political enfranchisement, thank God. And thus, all the conservative things, too, that we cherish are at least fulfilled in Christianity, if not inaugurated at the Cross and Pentecost. Truth and the infinite, the beautiful and the good were wrested out of the heave-ho tides of cultural philosophies and political cults. They were solidified, even "realized" (if one wants to sound hackneyed) in the Holy Tradition catapulted by the Third Person and the Apostles.
He has a good deal more to say on that subject and others, touching on even the recent (and suddenly receded) wave of hero worship around our new president. I found this part particularly enjoyable and insightful:
I am glad this book came along when it did, because I was down in the dumps about history and all that – contemporary history, that is, like right now. I wasn't so sad about Obama winning, nor was I very glad. I saw the hoopla all last year, and what brought me by the lee was not that the country is turning socialist (which it's not), or that the masses adulating Obama were like the despotic pep rallies of the Thirties (which they are not). Obama's rallies were more like revival meetings (very familiar to me) and nothing at all like an Amway or Falangista gathering, or any other such synaxis of troglodytes.
But Obama's revival meetings, like all revival meetings, are bound to grow cold and clammy at the press of real tomorrow. Time itself proves too great a challenge for all Protestant endeavors, especially including the fervent myths choreographed by the Democratic Party.
That is not the cause of my diffuse woe. There is nothing new about Democratic disillusionment (for therapy, they should read about Claudius' disillusionment with the Senate). I grieve, rather, for the ongoing illusionment of the Republicans and all who are "right." The divide between authentic conversativism – the sort envisioned by Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot and the Inklings, Richard Weaver and the Agrarians – and the current dreck of right-wing, neo-cheney-con, evangelo-babbulo palinitism is getting more like the gulf between Lazarus and rich man … that is, after the tables were turned. I grieve that Chesterton and Belloc would be certainly damned as socialists and communists by His Cigarness, the Grand Poobah, and His Minister of Michael Scott Impersonation, Dreck of Fox. Already, "distributism" is thrown here and there as a curseword. I would worry for GK and Hillaire more were it not for the sorry fact that they are not read, if they are known at all.
The whole piece, while admittedly I don't quite grasp it all, is quite intriguing, and makes me only more eager to read Hart's book. Can The Brothers Karamozov really stand to be pushed back?
How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.
Approaching Pascha (Easter), it strikes me how uninterested human beings have become with resurrection. That the idea that a person could raise or be raised from the dead could become almost a commodity (even among Christians!) makes little sense to me, though I perceive the tendency just as keenly within myself. At what point did we lose our fascination with the idea that death could be not be as definitely final as we know it to be? Is it that we, having disposed with the religions that seek to make some sense of faith, nevertheless continue to presuppose an afterlife, a syrupy residual that we, deep in our hearts, still hope for even while we recoil from any explicit discussion on the matter?
Of course, there are the skeptics out there who proclaim vigilently the absence of every hope. There's a popular atheistic slogan that started with advertisements on buses in England and is spreading across the West among the new breed of "humanists," which reads: "There's probably no god, so stop worrying and enjoy your life." Another slogan I read from Seattle appeared at Christmas time: "Why believe in a god? Be good for goodness' sake."
This paradigm presupposes nothing. All we have is what we've got, here and now. Let's make the best of it. Of course, these slogans can only make sense among those raised within the efete mentality of the West, and would undoubtedly prove asinine to the majority of humans on the planet, who generally live, move and have their being in what the West considers abject poverty by its own standards, and often under great duress. To those who presuppose nothing, we'd best not talk of resurrection, because that would demand of us hope, but in spite of every fiber within us that struggles to hope, the spirit of this age -- proclaimed from the rooftops and the sides of London buses with the static of a bullhorn -- intones that all we have to hope for in this life is greater comfort, instant pleasure, and not to be alone. This last hope, of course, can only be proffered by others whose hopes amount to as much vacancy, or less, and who at their very best can only offer themselves after they themselves have been satisfied.
Without resurrection, this life is a vacuum.
(For more compelling and well-expressed thoughts on this and similar matters, read this.)
By St. Nikolai Velimirovich XLI With fasting I gladden my hope in You, my Lord, Who are to come again. Fasting hastens my preparation for Your coming, the sole expectation of my days and nights. Fasting makes my body thinner, so that what remains can more easily shine with the spirit. While waiting for You, I wish neither to nourish myself with blood nor to take life–so that the animals may sense the joy of my expectation. But truly, abstaining from food will not save me. Even if I were to eat only the sand from the lake, You would not come to me, unless the fasting penetrated deeper into my soul. I have come to know through my prayer, that bodily fasting is more a symbol of true fasting, very beneficial for someone who has only just begun to hope in You, and nevertheless very difficult for someone who merely practices it. Therefore I have brought fasting into my soul to purge her of many impudent fiancés and to prepare her for You like a virgin. And I have brought fasting into my mind, to expel from it all daydreams about worldly matters and to demolish all the air castles, fabricated from those daydreams. I have brought fasting into my mind, so that it might jettison the world and prepare to receive Your Wisdom. And I have brought fasting into my heart, so that by means of it my heart might quell all passions and worldly selfishness. I have brought fasting into my heart, so that heavenly peace might ineffably reign over my heart, when Your stormy Spirit encounters it. I prescribe fasting for my tongue, to break itself of the habit of idle chatter and to speak reservedly only those words that clear the way for You to come. And I have imposed fasting on my worries so that it may blow them all away before itself like the wind that blows away the mist, lest they stand like dense fog between me and You, and lest they turn my gaze back to the world. And fasting has brought into my soul tranquility in the face of uncreated and created realms, and humility towards men and creatures. And it has instilled in me courage, the likes of which I never knew when I was armed with every sort of worldly weapon. What was my hope before I began to fast except merely another story told by others, which passed from mouth to mouth? The story told by others about salvation through prayer and fasting became my own. False fasting accompanies false hope, just as no fasting accompanies hopelessness. But just as a wheel follows behind a wheel, so true fasting follows true hope. Help me to fast joyfully and to hope joyously, for You, my Most Joyful Feast, are drawing near to me with Your radiant smile.
Recently while at dinner with friends, someone commented admiringly on my current style of hair. He said I "look like a poet." I was simultaneously flattered and crushed. The tragic irony in what he meant only as a compliment was that -- regardless of how I look -- I am not a poet, and yet how I've longed to be. Over the past year I've written hardly a line I've liked. I'd like to blame it all on the utter misery my current schooling causes me, but truly I think it goes much deeper than this. Yes, school has sapped my strength of spirit, and left me with little to no time to wander as I must to see what I must write in night hollows and the common passer-by. But the current silence from my pen stems from something more existential than academic ennui. Perhaps it is as much medicinal as it is painful.
Stripped from the Second Terrace:
Why is it necessary for nutcases to deny the Holocaust? Is there some benefit (material or psychic) that is realized? Moreover, how is it possible for a denier to become a bishop? I hear today that the Vatican is demanding a complete renunciation of these views (which the media have labeled, of course, "ultraconservative"). I guess if he says the right things and spins around three times and clicks his heels he'll be hunky dory for the mitre. But "renunciation" means "repentance," and "repentance" means (everywhere except fantasy island) never asking, never expecting, never demanding rights, privilege or position. Williamson should be happy to come back into the Church as a layman. Never as clergy. And God forbid, never as a bishop. Is that not the meaning of repentance learned by the Prodigal Son?
