Category: Ruminations

Thoughts, often rambling, on events, past and present, sometimes morphing into fictive narratives meant to continue the theme of those thoughts. For instance, I travel off occasionally to the edge-of-Boston tavern called, The Last Mile. There may, over time, be other escapes.

WINDSWEPT

We are windswept in 2022. Doors are slamming shut all about us.

We stand on an open, windswept plain, questions of the most intimate and critical nature swirl in a vortex — celibacy, friendship, marriage….

Those, at least, are the questions swirling about my individual consciousness at the moment — admittedly essentially spiritual/religious interpersonal matters.

The storm has been raging for decades….around me, around multitudes. But we are all individuals, ultimately alone before whatever earthly or (for those who believe such things) heavenly realities that judge and govern us.

So it was, forty years ago, that I read what someone wrote (rather heavy stuff) — and I pondered it too lightly, and not nearly long enough. But I never forgot it.

I read:

In the tradition of Catholic Christianity, there is a tension between celibacy freely chosen as an image of God’s sacrificial life and marriage freely chosen as a different sort of image of that same love. Celibacy looks to the eschatological* meaning of that love, matrimony to its incarnational** meaning.

I never said it was light reading. Catholic stuff, too, repugnant to multitudes.

Secondly, friendship… is not alone a strong enough word to carry the meaning of marriage. The married have experienced other friendships. The friendship of marriage is of a different order indeed: searing, intimate beyond description, full of mystery and terror, excruciatingly painful, profoundly suited to our nature. ***

Now, that’s peculiar. Pain, suited to our nature. Hmmmm.

By the way, the above is from…

Michael Novak (1933-2017), Catholic philosopher journalist, diplomat, writing in the fall, 1981 issue of the journal Communio, which had been gifted to me and was devoted to the subject of the relations between the sexes. Novak’s contribution was entitled, “Man and Woman He Made Them.”

I’ve always enjoyed Novak’s writing. I think I mentioned elsewhere in this blog that I was once reading a slim volume of his, called. The Experience of Nothingness as I lay recovering from my first kidney stone episode in Doctor’s Hospital in Lanham, Maryland. I think the male nurse attending me was wondering, based on that title, about my overall mental state. Hope that I didn’t scare him too badly. That was 1983, several kidney stones ago. I want no more stones. But I do want to understand the nature of our modern….nothingness.

And I read the treatise on men and women so long ago, forty-one years to be exact. Tom Brady was a toddler, probably barely able to throw a football. A Hail Mary was still just a prayer to his apparently Catholic parents. There was no super model spouse as yet to affirm to him that — Man and Woman He Made US. (Don’t know why I picked on poor Tom as my benchmark.)

But I digress, sort of. I like and admire Tom B. but, come to think of it, he’s my benchmark because he’s my gold standard for what the average, decent and accomplished family man will accept and believe. (And as I update this on a September afternoon in 2023, Tom and his supermodel wife have been divorced for some time and his stellar NFL career is over. Divorce and a subsequent broken family and shared custody, and the forced acknowledgment of age’s onset and accompanying physical limitations — they all might be seem, in our time, as more of what the average, decent, accomplished “family” man is swept — or, windswept — into accepting and believing.

And, no matter how earnestly we undertake them, many-to-most of us born after the atomic year of 1945 no longer believe either permanent marriage or permanent celibacy will be possible for us. Friendship seems to thrive. But how genuinely? How real or intimate are our friendships?

I don’t know what Tom Brady believes. His earned fame and fortune might invest him with the capacity to insolate himself, at least publicly, from caring one way or another about these things or, God knows, publicly talking about them — and maybe that’s the best philosophy. Live, eat well, don’t take yourself too seriously — but take life seriously. (Here I guess I’m putting words and ideas in Tom’s head. And here’s another truth: we don’t really know other people, much less what their thinking.)

Footnotes on the above:

*Eschatology: From the Greek, eschatos (“last things”, i.e., death, resurrection, immortality), logos (“knowledge of”)

**Incarnation: The religious doctrine or belief that God will or has embodied Himself in human form.

***I first read this Novak treatise when I was 34. A son was born to me that fall. Out of wedlock. So, I was reading in one universe, living in another.

I was not, nor have I ever been, married. Friendship is not marriage. Cohabitation is not marriage. Man and woman — woman and man, if you will — He made us. Parents are a man and a woman, and they are married, though they may be divorced. They have made a convenant. They have entered into a state implying obligations, toward one another, toward the children, toward society.

They are a family. Modern philosophy is obsessed with the problem of the individual and the state. Novak feels we have, for the most part, “systematically” neglected the family and asserts that “human experience is primordially familial.” Mother, father, offspring.

I chose, back in 1981, as, ultimately, did multitudes, to try to stand apart from all this — to believe it in abstract, but not believe in necessarily was real or applied to me, or, God knows, everybody.

Thus He made us. Man and woman.

No, many no longer believe this., if they ever did. We think we’ve moved on. This assumes God has moved on, too.

Celibacy. Friendship. Marriage.

You can chose God, or the Zeitgeist, Novak, Lord rest his soul, wrote in that same essay….

The Zeitgeist (spirit of the world) is nearlay always both wrong and arrogant. The pendulum of history customarily swings too far. To find the just measure, it is wise to lean against prevailing winds.

But for now, we are windswept.

Hold onto your hats.

Or, if hatless, your souls.

EARLY JANUARY

Early January can be a bleak and somber hour of letdown, a sudden stark plunge out from under the canopy of festive Yuletide nights full of commemorative lights into harsh daylight and reality, shorn of light, save harsh winter light low on the horizon. There is a kind of Cold Turkey quality to it.

I just coiled up a string of lights from out front and hung them in the shed. Will I own this shed or this place or be putting those lights out in front this place next year? The glow of them had outshone anxiety for the future, briefly. Small wonder some people leave their lights up all winter — and that Christmas Shops are popular, even in July.

In recent years, freedom from anxiety, some of it self-inflicted, has never been a given. But I pray for health and emotional and material progress, and some good jokes to tell, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Gentleladies, now and the whole year through.

I haven’t put away the crech yet. I’ll wait for the formal date of epiphany and the traditional arrival of the magi. A hard coming they had of it, writes Eliot of those faith-led astrologers, just the worst time of year/ for a journey, and such a long journey…

The snow is coming up north. We never sing, or dream, of a White January.

On three occassions in my professional life as a television reporter, I have been called into managers’s offices for what I felt were infuriatingly unfair adjustments or assessment of my work. All three were on or about January 7th. I’ve blocked out two of them and am busy erasing memory of the last one. But, again, they came in early January and were a stain on my life that had been so soothed days before by holiday bliss.

It’s all okay, I ended my career with wide respect from colleagues and am feeling great love for the trade I left behind seven years ago.

But what have I been doing these seven years? Well, writing here, at least for part of it. I’m a writer. Writer’s write, as a late professor, Edward Clark, was to often remind me. I need to write more, and better. That’s my –no, I won’t call it a Resolution. It’s a hope — and resolve. It is a professional, dare I say, artisitic aspiration.

But, back to January….

Much ado will be made of this January 6th in light of last year’s January 6th Capitol riot. There was, in a sense, a kind of national Epiphany in that early winter event, its meaning or full long or short-term import unclear amid a blizzard of partisan sniping.

I leave that to God and the modern magi to sort out.

I’m still sorting out early January….

I remembering, years ago, hearing right after the holidays a brief, unremarkable radio new report of the death of a famous actor and major Hollywood figure. It felt, to my young teenaged mind, like the announcement of the return of adult life as usual — no more festive lights or Christmas music (though some lights might had lingered) that allowed us all to be children or, at worst, teenagers. It was once again time for sorrow, war,and the gray light of day. From divine birth to human death — again.

Tragedy reborn. Business as usual.

It’s not that I had any particular love or admiration for this particular actor who died that long-ago early January. I guess it might have occurred to me that he was probably sick all through the holidays. And that was sad.

The actor’s name was Dick Powell — fairly famous actor, director, singer, producer through the years of my early life. I’d seen him on television from time to time. He was only 58 at the time of death. I’ve checked — he died January 2, 1963.

The big crystal ball had dropped in Times Square, the crowd had roared and gone home — and somewhere in the instantly busy world, the once very famous, now nearly forgotten man named Dick Powell died.

That’s life.

The cause of death was cancer. John F. Kennedy, native son of Massachusetts, was President. He was only 46 and riding high after having successfully confronted the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba. Wife Jacquiline, like her husband, a young and popular figure, was probably pregnant by then. New life was on the way.

The baby would be born that summer in resperatory distress at Cape Cod hospital. Fellow teenagers hanging out on a summer’s afternoon by the First Boston Ten Pin Bowling Alley, told of hearing the armada of sirens as the ambulance carrying the baby sped nearby on the Southeast Expressway en route to Massachusetts General Hospital. The baby — Patrick Bouvior Kennedy, member of one of the most famous families in the world — would die, despite frantic efforts to save him, at one of the best hospitals in the world. (Had there been helecopter medflights and advanced pediatric medical procedures available in 1963, might he have been saved? )

News reports showed the obviously emotional wrung-out young President and his wife, the First Lady, leaving the hospital. There was commentary that a sad chapter was ending for them.

Another cataclysmic chapter would very soon follow.

In November, the President would be assassinated in Dallas. The life of the world would be altered utterly. The baby Kennedy, buried at a family plot in Brookline, would be quietly disinterred and laid to rest with his father at Arlington National Cemetery.

My 53-year-old father witnessed all this in sorrow. He was healthy that prevous Christmas of 1962. But he, like the departed Dick Powell before him in Christmastime, would be dying of cancer by Christmas, 1963 — and would die on Memorial Day, 1964. He would have been 55 on June 11, 1964.

It is January 3, 2022. I should have been thinking of Dick Powell yesterday. I’ll pray for him today — for the repose of his soul, a good Catholic thing.

And for my father — and for former colleague Bill Campbell who died on the last day in January on or about 1976.

And you know what? January is a new beginning for us, the living.

A hard coming we had of it…

And the magi went home, “with an alien people clutching their gods…” The poet tells us “they should be glad for another death.”

But, boy! in the meantime, did they have a good story to tell!

And we’re all listening, this January, and every January.

IN PIECES, IN UNLIT ROOMS

New year. New year. Nothing new. Forever old, forever new.

Something borrowed, something blue.

Diane near tears, no, in tears New Year’s Eve because she does not want the other goldfish to die. We both have COVID. Half the world, at the moment, has COVID. Perhaps it is the little misery inculcated by the virus that makes her tearful and unhappy, not merely the life of a goldfish. I feel it. And I don’t want the goldfish to die, either.

There were two goldfish in the AquaGarden mini-pond. They were the two out of four that survived, the other two disappearing instantly. Disappeared in the five-gallon ocean. Where did they go? Into the abyss.

The remains of one turned up when I probed the waters deep in the dark rear of the small bowl-shaped tank, feeling blindly, because the area is covered by the plastic semi-circle wedge of garden above it, from which spills a little waterfall. That’s why I wanted this aquagarden — for the sound of that waterfall out there in the Florida room.

I wanted a piece of the fabled Garden of Eden in my Florida room, with its little bar of subaqueace light, like a ray of penetrating midnight sunlight, even in the unlit room.

I am going on — on the first day of the near year — about two fish in a plastic bowl of water. Somehow, it seems fitting. Should I write of the wildfires sweeping Colorado? Of the virus? Indirectly, I am. I am speaking of, writing of, the fear and despair it is possible to feel along the smallest ranges of our paltry existences. We express it, unawares, when we speak of the smallest things.

The nature of despair, said the Norwegian philosopher, is that it is unaware of being despair.

God, I’m in pieces today. I fear I’m about to waste another year.

Wait…as the carol asks, ‘do you hear what I hear?’ It will seem a fake and cringe-worthy deus ex machina…but…

I hear bells. I hear the bells of the consecration from the television mass playing in the other room.

William Carlos Williams:

Tho’ I’m no Catholic

I listen hard when the bells

in the yellow-brick tower

of their new church

ring down the leaves

ring in the frost upon them

and the death of the flowers

ring out the grackle…

O bells

ring for the ringing!

the beginning and the end

of the ringing! Ring ring

ring ring ring ring!

Catholic bells –!

I kneel. The world would see a fool, if it could see me, kneeling to bells. At the very idea of — incarnation. God Incarnate. One God in Three Divine Natures. Kid’s stuff.

Baltimore Catechism. Who made us? God made us? Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things.

This is under Lesson 1: The Purpose of Man’s Existence

(Oh, yeah? What about “Woman Existence?”, I hear someone, a man, formerly a woman, but now married to a woman who was formerly a man, snidely bellowing in protest from out of the dark galleries of 2021, now ever darker in 2022.

Hoc est enim corpus meum

Religion is for fools. A radio reporter colleague of mine, now semi or fully retired — and a very decent guy — once uttered, in passing, that religion is for sheep. I happened to learn later that his daughter was going to divinity school.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi…

The pope, the holy father, the boss has gone to war with those who pray Latin at mass, traditional people. He’s obviously, by slow measures, wants to cancel their tradition. We wants us to be modernists. He is spreading despair — the holy pontiff, smiling, spreading despair and division in the name of God. The world loves him, but wonders why he fails to change everything, bring the whole rotten Catholic house down, since it is clearly only some cruel, anachronistic resurgent soviet empire in need of repurposing as a kind of Red Cross or club. He needs to say gender is a choice. He hasn’t, and won’t. He’s Catholic, after all. Every fool is a Catholic, right?

The smaller of the two goldfish is, perhaps, dead somewhere in that murky pool below fake lilly pad and rocks I bought at the Florida rock and garden store. (One must BUY rocks in Florida.) The water may have grown toxic, maybe killing the fish. Perhaps global warming has come to the Florida room, killing off species.

Diane loves the fish. She loves the birds. She is a loving person. She loves me, even though I ignore her like the vilest of sinners, like some cold fish. I guess I model my religion by being insufferable.

Happy New Year.

Fish in the little artificial pond, birds that too seldom visit the almost exhausted feeders out in the scrub of the little back yard — here is sorrow, perplexity and despair.

The choir is singing in the other room.

Robinson Jeffers wrote in 1928 in the poem “Meditation on Saviours” (sic), I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death nor in a walled garden,

In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that easily lock the world out of doors.

What does he mean? It doesn’t sound good. Poets can be so deliberately and passionately ambiguous. But I guess that’s life. What’s clear? Life’s an ambiguous poem that we all wish went, simply, roses are red, violets are blue, the goldfish swim in brown, dirty water — and I love you.

Isn’t reading a poem or living a life a leap of faith, a leap into the abyss? What’s an abyss? Webster calls it anything too deep for measurement. Sounds about right.

Jeffers, when he invokes the name of Christ, calls His followers “apes.” Sounds about right where I’m concerned, anyway. Can someone make an angel of this ape that is you and me? Isn’t that the promise?

I see the monks, the world over, at prayer on this New Year’s Day, which the Catholic Church, even its divisive, autocratic and quirky pontiff, observes as the Solemnity of Mary, The Mother of God. Who among the millions waking with hangovers knows that? Or cares?

Damn that church with its Mary stuff! Its Mother and Father stuff.

The apes of Christ itch for a sickness they have never known; words and the little envies will hardly

Measure against that blinding fire behind the tragic eyes they have

never dared to confront.

What the hell is old Robinson talking about? Damned if I know. But I feel, however ambiguously, an indictment poking out of the poet’s 1928 mind filled with the sorrowful rubble of bombed out cathedrals and temples. It was, after all, just ten years after that cataclysim — that abysmal (WORLDWIDE) War To End All Wars and just ten year before the start of the Next (WORLDWIDE) War. Virginia Woolf was in such despair over the march to a new war that she filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself in a stream, in death joining the fish, ungolden, in their gray element.

…and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill in the earthquake, against the eclipse (Jeffers)

The infant Jewish child, the Savior, is still in the manger of my little creche. I must now put Him away, with the shepherds and magi. I must march into another year…

I must learn to write 2022 on the checks. And I must go and spend a great deal of money to fix a tooth that fell apart when I bit into a submarine sandwhich on New Year’s Eve. I must go back to the hard-driving “sponsor” who is pushing me through the “steps”. Up the steps, or down down the steps — to a cement floor somewhere at the bottom of that measureless — abyss?

In 1851, Matthew Arnold visited the famous Carthusian monastery in the French Alps — The Grand Chartreuse. Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused/ With rain, where thick ther crocus blows, / Past the dark forges long disused…..

Robinson Jeffers, not unlike me, would have preferred to stay out there with the flowers, not in the dark, prayerful interior of that retreat. Arnold, too. Can’t blame them.

But inside….

There were images of the suffering Son of Man on the walls and by the knee-w0rn floor

Noone, to this day, in that same monastary or wherever one finds Carthusian monks, sacrafices more, isolates more, prays more, works more in solitude and silence, producing the famous Chartreuse liqueur. How many monks? I don’t know. (I recall, in dimly remembered Cambridge day in my small redoubt, adding sweet Chartreuse to a solitary drunk, wishing to enchance it however slightly to something beatific. It didn’t. I recall darkness only.

It is a hard calling, a hard life, the monks life, that much of the world, like Robinson Jeffers, saw only as a tragic case of simean fools in slavery to an illusion.

Jeffers seems to embrace mortality, the inevitability of entropy, of the beauty of nature though it all, fish and fowl and plant must die, after which comes the the dark abyss — the grave unconscious depths that lie beneath the shining, roaring blue surface of the Pacific beside which he, Jeffers, lived and loved and wrote.

Arnold, contemplating that Alpine cloister, proclaimed, we are like children rear’d in shade/ Beneath some old-world abbey wall,/ Forgotten in a forest-glade…

Two apes unawars, perhaps. Three, counting me. Or, perhaps, we’re aware, as I am on this New Year’s Day – that January 2nd is coming quickly. I’ll watch some fellow, much younger apes play football on my electronic devices with their big screens and colorful images and voices simulating distant reality, real only in some remote way incomprehensible to me as I sit in my cloister, recovering from infection by a headline-making pathogen invisible to me — knowing I’m looking at paying over a grand to get a broken-down tooth crowned and that it sits right next to another tooth that fell apart years ago and also needs to be crowned for another grand, or more.

Right now, I feel like I’m just dripping paint on a canvas. My Pollock.

Salve Mater misericordiae/ Mater spei et Mater veniae…

Hail, Mother of Mercy, Mother of hope and of pardon, Mother of God and of grace, Mother full of holy joy.

Her feast. My failures to love, my faltering faith. God, forgive me. God, help me.

God, in 2022, I must trust in You. But I don’t really know You.

I believe you can pull me from the abyss.

There is nothing I can explain to the poets. My poet’s soul, my child’s faith flies me over the abyss — toward home….

We stand about in open spaces

And shiver in unlit rooms

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

Oremus.

Pray for us.

A TENNYSON CHRISTMAS

From “In Memoriam” in which, the poet, deep in mourning, over hundreds of stanzas, gropes for the light over three Christmases, as time slowly closes over the loss of a dear friend and faith slowly covers over his mourning. Christmas and a new year were the milepost at every painful turning. November is the month in which we especially remember the dead. December, and Christmas, are when we miss them the most.

FROM STANZA XXVIII

The time draws near the birth of Christ.

The moon is hid, the night is still;

The Christmas bells from hill to hill

Answer each other in the mist.

FROM STANZA LXXVIII

Again at Christmas did we weave

The holly round the Christmas hearth;

The silent snow possess’d the earth

And calmly fell our Christmas-eve.

The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,

No wing of wind the region swept,

But over all things brooding slept

The quiet sense of something lost.

FROM STANZA CIV

The time draws near the birth of Christ;

The moon is hid, the night is still;

A single church below the hill

Is pealing, folded in he mists.

A single peal of bells below,

That awakens in this hour of rest

A single murmur in the breast

That these are not the bells I know.

Like stranger’s voices here they sound,

In lands where not a memory strays,

Nor landmark breaths of other days,

But all is new unhallow’d ground.

FROM STANZA CV

Tonight ungather’d let us leave

This laurel, let this holly stand:

We live within the stranger’s land,

And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.

FROM STANZA CVI

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying clouds, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

FROM STANZA CXXXI (CONCLUDING)

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

1850

Just fragments in which earth and mortals regenerate, mid-way in a century that was struggling to retain the “old” faith. Tennyson, nonetheless moves from despair to hope. Tennyson is not my poetic soul-mate in many particulars, out of sorts — along with the likes of Charles Kingsley — with the important Oxford Movement, in which Saint John Henry Newman was about to remove himself, and lead other churchmen, out of the slowly sinking barque of Anglicanism.

But he knew Christmas for what it was and must always be for us, however great the darkness.

2021

ADVENT IS UPON US

‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of year for a journey:

The way steep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

T.S. Eliot

Journey of the Magi

Our journey begins again today, this 28th day of November, 2021.

Everybody knows, even those of us who have lived most unadventurously what it is to plod on for miles, it seems, eagerly straining your eyes towards the lights that, somehow, mean home. How difficult it is, when you are doing that to judge distances! In pitch darkness, it might be a couple of miles to your destination, it might be a few hundred yards. So it was, I think with the Hebrew prophets, as they looked forward to the redemption of their people. They could not have told you, within a hundred years, within five hundred years, when it was the deliverance would come.

Msgr. Ronald Knox

Sermon on Advent

A TUESDAY RHAPSODY

In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Lotus-Eaters

Man looking into the sea,

taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to yourself,

it is human nature to stand in the middle of things,

but you cannot stand in the middle of this;

the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.

–Marianne Moore

A Grave

Twilight. Quiet. Good. This was yesterday.

I stood in the small yard behind the modular dwelling that has been home now for two years. Not the sea, not a grave. I stand, content more or less, at the top of a gently tilting coarse, small patch of bahia grass where the dogs can probe. It is good. I am fortunate. There are no dogs now, just me. I prefer the soft lawns of the north. But this is Florida, longed for and embraced by thousands monthly; escapees. It has been colonized; it has organized our discontent.

I should be feeling at home by now. But, I’m still a visitor. That’s my choice. Let’s face it. Where to now?

Somewhere.

When?

If?

Why?

Don’t move!

Stand here!

A Tuesday evening, Florida October. Two years. Some peace here, in this quiet moment.

Those two years dissolved rather than passed. The pandemic worked to blunt the rejoining of old human connections and block new ones. It was the same for all.

As for the years, the same with the two before. Gone quickly. In that, the years were like, not the sea, but like standing water in a gutter. Here, then gone. Evaporated.

I think of Sanibel, the beaches. There is wild, coarse beauty here among the steel projectiles and concrete jutting up.

You can stand in the middle of nothing. Make a sea of it.

I have been north recently; cool air, leaves dry and ready to turn. Another world. It’s not better or worse. It just is, like this world. Okay, better while you longed for the return of the moment you chose, for whatever reason, to try Florida again, fearing it was the geographic cure — again. Thinking maybe you’d reconsider.

It’s all — the world.

But it felt better up there. A little more permanent, more real. It felt closer to home, wherever….It felt familiar, but almost too familiar. I realized, with a sinking heart, what it is that made it so easy to flee to the south; to believe it would be different, even better. That it need not be forever.

But forever has drawn closer, like a serpent in the grass.

Here I am.

The air, finally, was once again, as happens eventually this time of year in Florida, cooler. Less humid. Not the scorching and sodden semi-tropical miasma that envelops the peninsula beginning in mid-May. I’d never noticed it so much in the past. But there was more of a future ahead, more time to think this was only temporary. I must still think that. Sorry, but I must. Yet I’m in no hurry…why? Where is it that much better? It could be worse.

Autumn, such as it is, is upon the southern world. With its autumn thoughts. I usually run through these thoughts in September. Late onset this year.

Things, actually, seem to be standing still.

It was the early onset of twilight and the western glow brightened, high up, even the breast of the west-facing mockingbird sitting silent and solitary on the overhead wire that runs the length of the yards behind these vinyl and metal homes. I loved it that that bird was there. Usually, the mockingbirds chorus unceasingly and wildly, talking almost. This one was silent.

Maybe,come to think if it, it was a dove. A young dove,.

The Brazilian pepper, green and full, has risen up and begun once again to push heavily against the tilting , weathered stockade fence. They obscure the chain link fences and the warehouses and garages and blacktop beyond. Yes, they are invasive and unruly but on this evening, they masked those ugly roadside realities, leaving, just beyond them, the sunset gold., just barely visible. Far, far overhead, large mauve-tainted scattered clouds were floating, brushed pink underneath, catching the setting sun. They were beautiful. It were as if rain clouds had broken up.

Gone, at least on this Tuesday, were the mountainous clouds that often bring sudden, violent storms during late Florida summer afternoons. I actually love those clouds, too. It’s just the heat….that heat. And fear of violence.

But it’s going. The year is going.

I was by the grill, cooking chicken. There I was, and here I am.

THE FLIGHT FROM “RELIGIOUS POLITICS” TOWARD “SOURCES OF LIGHT.”

The following are small excerpts from a provocative essay called, “Sources of Life”, by a writer named Greg Jackson, which appeared in the August, 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It originally appeared in the Spring, 2021 issue of another magazine called, The Point.

(Note: for some reason, wordpress working annoyingly in ways I can’t yet figure out, I’ve so far been unable to correct some typos and mistaken elision of words in this copied text. Sorry.)

A false theory of culture is worse than a false theory of the heavens. The planets stick to their orbits no matter what we think, but culture becomes what we believe it to be….It is extremely difficult to make conscious choices amid systems and technologies that tax our forbearance and reward our worst impulses….half an hour on Twitter or YouTube may…reduce us to an exposed nerve, pulsing with rage born of fear, a sense of vagrant and ubiquitous threats….

Today, media and social media organize our conformity. Calculated self-preservation dominates.

(Here, Jackson makes the case for art.)

By awakening people to the legitimacy of their feelings, art gives them confidence that their experience is not an anomalous, lonely event, but something others share in, and that it may be reasonable, therefore, to question the tyranny of public opinion.

Politics’ colonization of culture in contemporary America has greatly damaged this public lifeline to the private psyche….(W)e may each measure for ourselves the toleration of our beliefs by judging how often we wonder in our hearts whether stating them in public is perilous. Where, when public opinion rules, does private truth find an outlet?

The vacant secular despair that sends us searching for a religious politics (emphasis added)…is precisely what culture of this category is meant to address….our emptiness is an emptiness that comes from continuing to consume something that resembles nourishment but consists of nothing but fat-burning calories.

Unless we claw back some sphere of cultural and civic activity from the totalizing force of religious politics (again, emphasis added), we are unlikely to find venues where we can get outside the rigid struggle of political combat to explore and expand who we are, what we want, and how we relate to one another.

END OF EXCERPTS.

BEGINNING OF A BRIEF ANALYSIS:

I don’t know this writer, nor do I know much about the magazine from which his essay was re-published by Harpers. But I regard much or most of his diagnosis of contemporary culture hearteningly accurate.

I emphasized his phrase “religious politics” and must note that he never defines it. One could say that it’s obvious, self-explanatory. But, is it?

I would suggest that the seeming obsession of seemingly millions with modern politics suggests that politics has rushed into the vacuum created by the decline of supernatural religious belief.

I know many will reject this notion.

But it is telling, at least to me, that the last sentence copied above, asserting the need for all of us to move away from this disordered “sphere” created by politics-as-religion is followed by the sentence: “In midieval Europe, there was no such thing as nonreligious art or nonreligious politics. We are backsliding.”

I happen to adhere to the religious faith that dominated medieval Europe, i.e., Catholicism. What the Church taught then, it teaches now. The spirit and letter of that core faith was not obliterated by the Renaissance, but, rather, slipped into it at the tip of Michelangelo’s brush and chisel and grew and developed, as did Catholic religious dogma along with political and economic principles such as “subsidiarity” which calls for solutions to be generated upward from the smallest, most local governmental or political bodies that are also closest to the people they affect. Many of these principles and certainly much of the dogma was destined, in our time, to be largely discarded, ignored or, to the extent that it has survived, vilified — or, in the case of purported Catholics such as power-brokers Joe Biden and Nancy Pilosi, donned as a cultural shroud over their rabidly secular ideology. (It has been said that a person either adjusts their life choices to their principles and inherited dogmatic beliefs, or else adjusts (i.e., bends) their principles and dogma to fit their life choices. The more powerful the person, the more distorted the social outcomes for the rest of their co-religionists.)

True, culture did over time secularized and we should not wish for the return of a theocratic domination of society and culture. But I, for one, believe the product of the medieval scribes and artists were informed by a culturally and spiritually redemptive force superior to the “totalizing” force of contemporary politics –which, again, has become our religion, propagated and zealously imposed by secular media, social and mainstream.

Author Jackson probably has another idea — that art for art sake is where true and self-knowledge lies. I can live with that, if only as an anodyne balm for the “totalizing” effects on our inner lives of modern politics.

I guess we’re talking about for art’s sake, or, more accurately, art as “religion”. If I’m not mistaken, that’s the path James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus is last seen embarking upon at the close of Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, as he flees the intense religiosity of his native Ireland. (He needn’t have worried about contemporary Ireland, which, with the rest of the western nations, has radically secularized. Is this what Stephen meant when he said he was off to forge “in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”?

Take a look at where that’s gotten the Irish –and human — race.

O what a paradise it (only at times) seems.

But the radical politics Jackson identifies in the essay is more of the rightist variety, e.g., extreme nationalism and conspiracy theories as generated by the poisonous likes of QAnon. So be it. It is toxic, I acknowledge, though, I also submit, no less toxic than the “religious politics” of the left, which I also submit, is far more ascendant and dominant in our culture. Either way, Jackson posits this as the basis for his argument that, as a consequence of all this, we find ourselves escaping into the endless diversion of entertainment, narcotics, video games and social media…all that “false nourishment.”

So, Greg Jackson, obviously a thoughtful man but obviously skeptical about the influence of formal religion says, further down in this essay, “Art, unlike religion, does not ask us to be better than we are; it asks instead only that we understand ourselves, and then, from the evidence of this understanding, it points us “toward sources of light” — hence, the title of his essay, and he attributes this phrase –“sources of light” – to Saul Bellow, another very thoughtful fellow.

I guess Jackson does not see religion as a “source of light”. Much religion in our time has given his good cause to feel that way.

But, with Saul Bellow, writing in his novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, I might say, “The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”

Does not thoughts of our ultimate end (i.e. death) often bring us to — religion? It sure as hell shouldn’t bring us to reliance on the transitory banalities of politics.

And, with Saint Augustine – an undeniably religious figure who once heartily attempted to embrace all the lusty emoluments of the world — I would call for self-knowledge amid the storm of contemporary diversions and politics. Bellow’s Mr. Sammler would add that it might bring us to “(t)he terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”

Do we? I hope so. I pray so.

Amen.

SUNDAY,AUGUST 1ST, 2021

THAT SUNDAY NIGHT FEELING, THE HEAT, THE SWEET BROWN, AGED LITTLE DOG WANDERING ROOM TO ROOM. I PET HER. I LOVE HER… I know Summer seems 2/3rds over. The pandemic lingers, and, it seems, is resurging. Anxiety, resignation, regret, restlessness abide, and,perhaps, a failure to count blessings and always realize that His burden is light.

The eternal questions: who am I and what am I doing here? Old Jim Doherty, a lifelong Neponset neighbor impressed that upon me one evening over dinner in an Adams Street restaurant. I miss Jim. I pray for Jim, a beloved oddball, fervid, faithful pilgrim. May he be with God. May he intercede for me, for I am far from “home” and in self-exile from all that could be called “settled.” Went to two masses today– the immemorial Latin mass, so apparently disdained by the Vicar of Christ, which is distressing given that it is so rich, reverent with silences and mystery, and popular in many quarters. He, the Pope, will, many pray, come to see his mistake. I attended the 6 p.m. at St. Catherine’s, which is the “ordinary rite” and there is the usual “pop” stuff but it was fine and quite nice and validly sacred.

That’s it for my “Catholic” talk.

Now, to ease past the beginning of this month where summer ends, random lines from random poems:

AFTER THE FAIR, by Thomas Hardy

The singers are gone from the Cornmarket-place

With their broadsheets of rhymes,

The street rings no longer in treble and bass

With their skits on the times,

And the Cross, lately thronged, is a dim naked space

That echoes the stammering chimes.

I’d do more than that one stanza of that one poem by that one poet except that I don’t understand how to work through the frustrations of trying to do stuff in WordPress. Sorry.

‘Night.

HOME

“To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor.” – Samuel Johnson.

+ + +

“Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom. The night is dark and I am far from home.” – Saint John Henry Newman

+ + +

“Didn’t see her go out?”

There was only a trace of Rivera’s Hispanic accent. He was the youngest officer, new to the island. They stood together in the rain.

“No, sir,” said Clayton. “I was asleep.”

“She ever do this before?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Often?”

“Four or five times, sir. After the snows melted.”

“You’ve known her that long?”

“Yes, sir.”

Rivera paused, glanced back toward the body lying rain-soaked by the farmer’s shed.

“Ever say where she was going?”

Clayton paused as well, reached for words, settled on one word.

“Home, sir.” he said.

Rivera, hands on his hips, dropped his stare to the brown mud coating his polished black boots.

“So she’s the one,” he said, to the mud.

-From “Satin Doll”, a short story by Gregory Wayland