Moving On

I think it is time for me to move on from this blog.

I will continue here: http://meinstreit.blogspot.com/

I first returned to Catholicism at age nineteen, after spending a few weeks in Europe. The first thing that had struck me about the sublimity of its churches, the poetic suggestions of the play of light and shadow, candle flame and statue, was that these things were mine. I didn’t have to spend my time looking to India or the East to find a culture thoroughly impressed by the longing of the human spirit for the ethereal Light. The fantastical, the magical, the superstitious, the expressions of anguish and hope that aggregate around the dissatisfactions with this world and the desire for bringing it with us into its source in “the beyond”- all this was here, in the tradition and beneath the culture that I had been born into. I started to see what had long been familiar with new eyes. As an early student of religion, quite taken in awe by the colourfulness and richness of the world’s traditions, the blandness, rationalism and secularity of the Western churches seemed weak and uninspired in comparison. They had abandoned imagination, they had forgone the cosmic longing, it seemed, and hung their tradition on the jousting poles of some political creed or another.

But when I went home and looked at the crucifixes in the houses, or the white bone Pieta statue in the living room, or the Rosary from my Oma, I realized it was not so simple. I remembered my childhood, and how naturally and enthusiastically the feeling of piety arose in me whenever it appeared that we were doing something “holy”, and how that urge to be in the sphere of the sublime characterized my earliest conceptions of myself, and how it remained the fundamental motivation of my seeking even when I first left Christianity, and spilled over into a thirst for art.

Now I can see that this longing has been with me at every stage along the way, and it is this longing that is constantly transfiguring the world inside my mind. It is the desire that makes me stop and pause when passing by the pine trees and grape vines or overlooking the valley. It is the longing that turns those same items of nature into figures or letters of a kind of mysterious language that I feel I am just learning. Like pouring over a complicated German text and recognizing this or that word, making out a piece of the paragraph here or there. Rocks start to appear like the calcification of very great thoughts, tree trunks like old men, bare branches as a vain if confident reaching out towards the sky.


Now summer has passed,
As if it had never been.
It is warm in the sun.
But this isn't enough.

All that might have been,
Like a five-corned leaf
Fell right into my hands,
But this isn't enough.

Neither evil nor good
Had vanished in vain,
It all burnt with white light,
But this isn't enough.

Life took me under its wing,
Preserved and protected,
Indeed I have been lucky.
But this isn't enough.

Not a leaf had been scorched,
Not a branch broken off…
The day wiped clean as clear glass.
But this isn't enough.

Arseny Tarkovsky (Translated by Maria Pearse)

I think this is, for me, “spirituality”. And traditional religion was (among many things) a very sophisticated and shared expression- diffusive and even substantive to culture- of the play between dissatisfaction and impossible aspiration. To the extent that the majority of people appeared to share in this, it was capable of being infused with a great deal of intellectual speculation and providing a type of catharsis for “the many” that was otherwise commensurate with (or not out right hostile to) the ordinary workings and goals of society at large. This no longer appears to be the case and is the central dilemma for the Church today.

What has always attracted me to Catholicism, particularly Catholicism of the old variety, is not its dogmatic or intellectual superstructure. Rather, it is the particular form it has been able to give to the longings of the masses of people. There is nothing quite like climbing the Santa Scala on one’s knees, in my opinion, step by step towards a fresco of the Crucified Lord, or coming together with a group of strangers who all know how to follow the count of Rosary beads, no matter the language being spoken. It was highly interesting to see Tosca last weekend and see a portrayal wherein Catholicism could lends itself to the background of an imaginary shared between the rich and the poor, the passionate, the pure, the wicked, and even those doubtful of the Church. This is now only a memory for many and soon to be only fantasy for most.

I suppose the point of this post is that I’ve never had “faith” in the way the Church and its spokespersons expect it from me, and I may never. This “new phase” for me is probably just an acknowledgement of what has always been the case.

As St. Thomas says, “a heretic with regard to one article has no faith in the other articles, but only a kind of opinion in accordance with his own will."

I readily admit that I don’t know what faith is, nor am I really interested in discussing it any longer. Personally, I see faith all around me in the day to day living of people of every creed and none, in the basic will to live and in every effort to be good and selfless in the face of day’s darkness.

What I do know is that what began as a spirituality built on childhood memory, filial piety and the sacramentality of agrarian nature has, with no little co-operation of the Church’s divisive rhetoric, become a dreadful Thing obsessed with the fear of the loss of meaning in life, and therefore joy. I must therefore remove myself from the terms of this discussion. I, like many, feel a malaise in what is called “modern life”, but when one finds oneself reading articles and blog posts at 3’oclock in the morning trying to figure out whether late Medieval nominalism really is the source of all the epistemological woes that render faith a de facto impossibility for many, I feel there is something wrong. Not wrong in the sense of the intellectual pursuit, but in the sense of hanging the salvation of souls on it and all the anxiety that breeds. If it is true, as Joseph Ratzinger wrote, that “Christianity has a decisive connection to the motivational forces of the modern age”, if it is true, as is becoming fashionable to argue, that modernity is the theological step child (some would say Frankenstein) of the Christian world, it might also be true that modernity is something Christianity has to confront and accept as a kind of inconvenient revelation of itself. Much in the same way a father, though seeing himself in his son, must accept the son fulfills the father’s image precisely in taking his own path in life, with all of its own logic. I don’t know.

FAITH IS, AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME, ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY AND ALTOGETHER IMPOSSIBLE
- Stanislaw Lem

This paradox ultimately sums up where I find myself and perhaps have always been. I am going to continue, with whatever faith it is I do have- a trust in the longing of the soul- and I will push the Church’s rhetoric and every implicit call for battle with the world aside. The battle is, as always, in myself. Christ is still God for me: the icon and image of what life and love must really mean, and the good. Julian of Norwich writes:

".....I saw that he is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. And so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good, as I understand."

My new blog will continue with some of these themes. I will try to be less whiny and less full of angst and anxiety. Most of all, I hope it will just be continued reflections on life, on seeking, on image, symbol, spirit, poetry and art. It is still Christ on my lips when I go to sleep. You can decide what that means for me here or in the hereafter.

hope?

- The Great Dictator

The Purpose of Art?

"The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good"

-Andrei Tarkovsky, "Sculpting in Time".

[Photo from the film "Stalker"]

for Epiphany

In the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away.

And the Lord of armies-
Great, glorious militant Father Sabaoth:
Vanquisher of the alien foe,
Brandished sword of unrelenting
Earthen-sin scouring,
Mind;
Pinnacle of the cascading fire,
Torrential river running in the grime,
Washing mud,
Washing all away.

Sandals stained with the blood of ants,
And the sad strife-streaked creatures that
Move laboriously below.

Insect eater,
Bee hive keeper;
Licking up the golden honey
Of our labours-

Now un-quivers the unseen arrow
Whittled from the tender sapling
Of Jesse's root.
Still green with youth,
Takes stern and steadfast aim.
Suspended breath- the whole world goes silent
And cowers in the unknowing.
Strikes!

But war by weapon is slain,
Death, by instrument of death is under aim,
Violence himself maimed,
Blood of hatred from Man's body drained,
Blood of mercy on judgement's lapel stains,
Emptying the warrior's quiver, peace is gained
(Substance of victory, though war still feigns)
(Man for faults still the other blames)

But in the arrow-head piercing human life,
The grain-
The seed of ever giving Life is plainly
made known- appears this love!
Hidden hitherto in the Father's beard
Where likewise the dove
Had made his nest
(But now spans his wings for earth to bless)

Hush, let God's sweet-tipped arrow rest,
Some distance shy of the philosophers' gleaming star;
Sleeps as a babe beneath his mother's breast,
And here, even you pierces from afar.

The Inwardness of Sleep

The inwardness of sleep.
Sometimes I feel like my mind is a spider,
a high potency in a small frame;
working out of my own inside,
pulling the thread out of the abdomen of brain;
working in circles,
working in wilting symmetries;
solitary.

The inwardness of sleep.
Slowly the mind retracts on the pathway of its singular string,
its solitary obsession,
'til it reaches the web-heart
and abides in nocturnal patience.
Waiting, waiting
and feeding on the thoughtless sense impressions,
making swift work of words,
unstitching them and drawing out the inner incomprehensibility,
mummifying the diverse insects of memory.
There is a cobweb in my mind.

Yet…

Also, a dream catcher, filter, raquet, net,
passing vainly through the fog and steam of days,
light refractions, pale reflections
on liquid ripples, moving.
Passing,
surprised to find all in some mode of water.
Having,
having, never keeping.
Having, only ever at the whims of river currents or
low hung clouds
on way from the mysterious head
to the unseen resting point
and final bed.

Winter 2012

From Advent

Aus Advent

Das ist mein Streit:
Sehnsuchtgeweiht durch alle Tage schweifen...

This is my struggle
dedicated to longing,
to wander the paths of days.

Then sturdied, strong,
with thousand rootlets grasping
deep into the terrain
of life, through pain
to ripen far beyond life and
far beyond time!

Rainer Maria Rilke

A Brief Thought on Capitalism

What makes me most sympathetic to Marxism is what I (and, of course many others) perceive as the violence done to the human person by the "agentless" tyranny of the capitalist system. While we are being educated to keep wary of the next Hitler, Stalin or some otherwise concretely identifiable person or class of oppressors, there is a whole other category of oppression and control that is subtly at work in the very framework of our thought processes, formulations of our life goals, desires and so forth. It is a collective oppression in which we participate and uphold, even while it degrades us and we long for an out. It's lack of tangibility, its diffusiveness, is precisely what makes it the most formidable of foes because our actions are naturally inclined towards the visible and concrete. The phenomenon of scape-goating comes to mind. If we can not see something, it is in human nature to render it visible- even if falsely so. This happens constantly in our political discourse, and that so called law that every debate will devolve into accusations of Nazism is a perfect example. As an historical event, it is an historical artifact. We have trouble being innovative when it comes to identifying the sources of our bondage, I think. We are more comfortable looking to what happened "then" and fantasizing that it is happening now, again, because it has already occurred and we are therefore prepared. It has already taken form and been confronted and so we have a "game book" ready to follow, a pre-formulated course of action which we can adapt to the present situation. But this very idea that "we can do this now because we've done this before" can actually be a tool of distraction.

All these are really just tangential thoughts. I read a quote courtesy of Vox Nova that I think bears repeating. By the [to me unheard of] Jean Baurdillard. I do think there is a dark side to the narrative of sexual and even individual liberation in our times- just as every opportunity for freedom can serve as the moment of a new and more clever oppression under freedom's very guise. The Joanna Newsom fable "The Monkey and the Bear" comes to mind here.

Nowadays, one no longer says: ‘You’ve got a soul and you must save it,’ but: ‘You’ve got a sexual nature, and you must find out how to use it well.’

‘You’ve got an unconscious, and you must learn how to liberate it.’

‘You’ve got a body, and you must know how to enjoy it.’

‘You’ve got a libido, and you must know how to spend it,’ etc., etc. This compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly in every direction. This is the form itself which the current realization of value takes. It is the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies