War in the Closed World (4): Incidents from the Revolution

Sunday Night Journal — February 22, 2010

I’m discovering a problem with my plan for producing a new piece of this book every week in a blog post. In addition to the basic problems that anyone beginning a book must address—where to begin, what structure to use or at least tentatively aim for—there’s the problem that a blog post of a thousand words or so is a self-contained unit. If it doesn’t tell a more or less complete story, it should at least make some specific point. But the pieces of this narrative that are taking shape in my mind don’t necessarily fit the mold. At the moment I’m floundering, and am offering just a few more anecdotes in the vein of last week’s.

Winter of 1967, in a dormitory room at the University of Alabama. This was my freshman year. I had become friends with one of the guys in the room next door. We had discovered a bond in our alienation from the normal world, and spent hours in conversation. This semester would be our last in the dorm; next fall we would share an apartment off-campus, and would continue to do so until the spring of 1970. I will have more to say about him later. At the moment I’m remembering a single remark, one that remains with me out of many hours of forgotten conversation. We talked a great deal about our sympathy with the radical movements happening in more sophisticated parts of the country; we’d been reading about them for several years in Time and Life and Newsweek, and seeing them on TV, and we felt an instinctive sympathy with them, though as I recall it our sense of kinship had nothing much to do with the specific political and cultural goals of those movements, and a great deal to do with a formless dissatisfaction and impulse to rebel.

We had taken to writing our favorite quotations on the walls of our rooms (an indulgence for which our parents would pay after we moved out). On his wall there was a juxtaposition of two quotations. One was Jefferson’s famous statement about slavery: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Just below that was Voltaire: “Crush the infamous thing.” (It would be twenty years or more before I learned that Voltaire was speaking of the Church, or at least of its authorities—écrasez l'infâme.)  Did he mean that America should be crushed?, I wondered. “Anything would be better than what we have,” he replied.

I think I made some weak sound of agreement, which was dishonest, because I was shocked and didn’t agree at all. Could he really think of nothing worse than living in the United States of America? I could think of a great many things. Certainly there wasn’t much in the way of material goods that we could complain of lacking, especially in comparison with most of the rest of the world. (I hadn’t yet learned that any deficiency in another country, especially a poor one, was at bottom our fault.)

But he was two years older than I, and far more knowledgeable about most things. My failure to grasp that we were actually living in a nightmare must indicate some lack of sophistication on my part, some dullness of perception.

Late 1969 or early 1970. I was sitting in Kwik-Snak, an old-fashioned diner, just off the university campus, with a friend, a former student who had dropped out of school after a year or so and moved to Atlanta. She still maintained contact with a few friends in Tuscaloosa and seemed to enjoy telling us impressive tales from the big city, where the drugs were more powerful, the politics more radical, the hippies more crazy, the police more brutal. I was belittling the hard-core leftists who, in this year of escalating tension, of Kent State and other landmark events of the struggle between left-wing youth and the establishment, seemed to take Communism, or rather some not-very-coherent hodgepodge of Communist slogans, as a serious project, a goal for our revolution. I made some disparaging remark about how miserable it would be to live in the Soviet Union—I was bourgeois enough to believe that the picture we had of it was probably fairly accurate, capitalist bias in the media notwithstanding.

“Yes,” she said, “the Russian revolution didn’t work out too well. But the Chinese revolution, now—that’s a different story.”

I looked at her silently. Did she not believe what was being reported of Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Or did she believe it, and think it was a good thing? In either case, one of us was seriously deluded. I didn’t think it was I, but I wasn’t sure. Perhaps, again, I was just too dull, or too conditioned by my middle-class prejudices, to recognize the truth.

Spring of 1970. The same friend was visiting again (and by the way, “friend” is not a euphemism here—we had no romantic involvement), this time having brought with her several of her Atlanta friends, by way of demonstrating to us just how much more hip and radical they were in comparison to us provincial college-town hippies. They stayed with me, or us—I don’t recall my roommate being there, but perhaps he was. It was a tiny three-room place—front room, kitchen, bedroom. The front room was crammed with the visitors and various local friends and acquaintances who happened to stop by. It was stuffy and smoky and uncomfortable both physically and psychologically; there was a lot of posturing going on. One of the people from Atlanta was a big loud abrasive young woman who spoke in a sort of continuing sneer. She was telling some story that involved the fact that “her old man”—meaning her boyfriend, or, perhaps, husband—was in jail. I don’t remember why, probably drugs.

One of the locals, a kid, fairly new to the scene, an open-faced, enthusiastic, puppy-ish sort, was not up-to-date with the slang. He was appalled. “Your old man? They put your father in jail?”

The woman looked at him with scorn. “My. Old. Man.”

“You mean they put your father in jail? Oh my God, I can’t believe they put your father in jail”

She did not intend to compromise her status by compromising her language. More slowly, and more emphatically, she repeated “My. Old. Man.”

Her tone and her look were withering, and the boy finally understood that he was being put down. He looked embarrassed and fell silent.

Looking back on it now, I think this subculture of liberation was the most rigidly conformist environment I’ve ever experienced. But at the time I was as intimidated as my poor guest, and although I was offended by the woman’s deliberate cruelty, I still felt it was a deficiency in me that made me feel so out of place.

War in the Closed World (3): Incidents from the Revolution

Sunday Night Journal — February 14, 2010

I’m not making any effort at this point to begin at the beginning of my story. The order in which pieces of it appear here may have nothing to do with their order in the final work. For now I’m only rummaging around in my memories, and writing about whichever of them is uppermost in my mind on any Sunday.

I can’t remember exactly when this first incident happened, but it was certainly no earlier than 1968, and probably no later than 1969. I would have been a sophomore or junior in college, at the University of Alabama. Beyond the west end of the campus there was a residential area of many blocks consisting of old houses that had been divided into apartments. I lived in that general area, as did most of my friends and acquaintances. I was at the apartment of some one of these, though I have no idea now whose it was, or why I was there, or  anything else except a vague memory of it being a typically shabby, messy hippie apartment.

All I remember is something said by one of the people there. I’ll call him Roger. I didn’t know him very well. He was an influential person in the fairly small but very visible campus radical community. But unlike most of us, who hurled contempt on the conventional world from outside and were ready to burn our bridges to it (or thought we were), he seemed to want to keep one foot in the mainstream. He was active in campus politics. He dressed neatly and fairly conventionally. His hair was a little longer than was usual but not excessively so—it didn’t hang to his shoulders or puff out in an unkempt frizz. I thought of him when the records of Bill Clinton’s attempts to avoid the draft were published: Clinton, as you may recall, was very concerned with “maintaining his viability within the system.” As, it seemed, was Roger.

I think I recall that he paid only a brief visit to whatever group was assembled in the apartment. Perhaps he was politicking; I recall that we was talkative, in a way that seemed to me a little stagey. I recall him standing at the door, about to leave, and giving a little speech, of which I recall only the last words: we, the radicals, would do this, and we would do that, and the effect would be to “free up this university.”

Addled though I was with the desire to rebel in every way, I still had enough of my wits about me to wonder what he meant. I went home wondering what he meant, and I suppose it’s significant that I still remember the moment. What and where were the chains from which we needed to be freed? What in the university was oppressing us? What was it that he thought we should be able to do that we were being prevented from doing? We were American college students, and by virtue of that fact alone among the most privileged people in the world. Whatever rules the university imposed on us were fairly trivial and easily evaded. True, there were laws forbidding the use of drugs, and they were a threat to us, but the university had nothing to do with those laws and no power to change them. There were still restrictions on the girls who lived in the dormitories, but few in our crowd lived there.

The question recurred to me from time to time: free to do what? Not to do the work assigned in our classes? Perhaps that was it: we should be given good grades and degrees regardless of whether or not we earned them; surely the demand that we do one thing and not another was oppressive in itself.

But of course the most likely thing is that he had nothing in particular in mind. It was only words, the sort of words we used all the time, never troubling ourselves to look closely at what we might mean by them. But yet they were not entirely empty words: they did express a real anger, obscure and incoherent though it was.

Some time after this—and I think I can pin this down to sometime in the winter or spring of 1970—Jerry Rubin, a then-famous radical activist, was invited by some student group to speak on campus. I think there was a controversy about whether the administration would allow him to speak, but in the end he did, in Foster Auditorium. I went to hear him. I remember a crowd mostly standing; if there were seats there must not have been enough. I remember Rubin barking and ranting from the stage, but not a single word he said; I think it’s safe to assume that it was poisonous nonsense.

What I remember is a brief encounter with Roger. He came up to me in the crowd and said the crowd was too quiet; he wanted things to be livelier. He told me to move around in the crowd and clap and cheer and try to get others to do the same. And I  remember feeling that what my ears were telling me was so appalling that I had trouble believing them.

If there was any firm and specific conviction that was supposed to characterize our movement, it was that one was always to be authentic—never to pretend to any thought or emotion that was not genuine, never to behave in a way that was not a direct expression of what one really felt or thought. The commercial and political hype that dominated American life was evil, filling the air and the minds of the people with manipulative falsehoods, and we were to deny and defy that spirit in our lives as well as in our politics. And here was someone telling me to engage in just the sort of manipulation we despised.

I reacted as a believing Christian might on being asked to assist in perpetrating a fraudulent miracle: disgusted and angry. Of course I was absurdly naïve; the various radical movements were at least as much interested in imagery and advertising as any corporation. I don’t remember giving Roger any answer, and he moved on through the crowd, trying to get people worked up.

I can’t say this was any sort of turning point for me, but it was one of many moments of disillusionment that didn’t so much turn me against the movement as toward a very dark cynicism (which came naturally to me anyway). It is well to be stripped of destructive illusions, even if it’s painful. I just wish I hadn’t had these particular illusions in the first place.

Conservative and Catholic (2)

Sunday Night Journal — January 31, 2010

The contention that to be a conservative is to be less than fully Catholic has a further implication with which I disagree: that there is another set of socio-economic and political opinions which is fully Catholic, and to which therefore a faithful Catholic ought to subscribe.

I don’t think this is true at any very detailed and specific level. Obviously there are Catholic social principles which have the teaching authority of the Church behind them. And obviously Catholics are obliged to honor and to the best of their ability implement these principles. But there is room for a great many approaches to the implementation, and consequently for a great deal of legitimate disagreement. There is no simple and clear solution to most social problems which represents the only truly Catholic way.

For instance, in the comments on the Caelum et Terra discussion I mentioned last week, Daniel describes hearing Fr. Benedict Groeschel, whom I admire immensely, speak of illegal immigration and deliver

…a fiery denunciation against any hostility to our brothers and sisters who come here seeking work, and quoted the Old Testament on how defrauding the laborer of his wage is a sin which cries to heaven for vengeance. This last in reference to the fact that illegal immigrants pay Social Security payroll taxes, which they will never receive back in retirement.

As a description of the spirit in which this problem ought to be addressed, this is excellent, and one could hardly disagree with it. But it’s pretty useless as a solution to the problem, as it doesn’t even address the numerous conflicting claims of rights and justice involved in the situation. Just to mention one of those, there is the question of the effect of illegal immigrants on the jobs and wages available to citizens. I have seen with my own eyes African-American workers replaced with Mexican ones who are undoubtedly working for lower wages. Which has the stronger claim to justice at the expense of the other? Fr. Groeschel’s “fiery denunciation” can’t tell us. The immigration question represents an odd alliance of capitalists, who want cheap labor and don’t care where it comes from, and leftists who apparently don’t believe that the United States has any right to control its borders, or to treat its citizens differently from non-citizens. The American citizens who might have done many of these jobs don’t seem to matter much to either group. I think it was the younger president Bush who often referred to “jobs Americans won’t do,” neglecting to add the crucial qualifier “for the wages offered.”

Which suggests another example, the question of the just wage or living wage. It’s a clear Catholic teaching that workers should be paid a living wage. But there are many details of the implementation of that principle which have to be worked out in practice, with great attention to the possibility of unintended consequences.. Should, for instance, an employer pay a married man with children more than an unmarried person? If the answer is yes, should it be enforced by law? To do so would create a huge incentive for employers not to hire that married man. And what of the fact that the whole pattern of breadwinner-husband stay-at-home-wife has mostly dissolved here and in Europe? In principle all such vagaries and unintended consequences could be forestalled by more and more laws, but that effort tends toward the placement of most economic activity under state control, and that hasn’t worked out very well where it’s been tried.

Illustrations could be multiplied. My point is not to address either of these problems, immigration or wages, but to insist that the path from principle to policy is often not at all clear.

That a Catholic approach to politics is not fully encompassed in either conventional conservatism or conventional liberalism is obviously true. That a Catholic is compromised by aligning himself with one or the other is not therefore true. Each represents a way of approaching practical solutions, each emphasizes a different set of problems and preferred ways of solving them. However much we may complain about the inadequacies and distortions and inconsistencies present in the broad description of political forces in this country as a contest between “conservative” and “liberal”—I think “progressive” is a better term—the description persists because it is applicable enough to be useful; the forces denoted by the two terms do exist.

For my part—as I said last week—I find that on the whole my views coincide much more with conservatism than progressivism, and so am willing to call myself a conservative. That identification isn’t terribly important to me; it is only important at the moment because I resent the charge that it makes me less than fully Catholic. Others may hold themselves aloof from both sides, and I have no argument with that. And I don’t mind people considering themselves to be right and me wrong when we disagree; that’s life. Nor do I have any argument in principle with those who want to build a political movement which is explicitly Catholic and which would agree with conservatives about some things and progressives about others (though I suspect that any such movement would, in our climate, be treated as “conservative,” which would be very frustrating to its adherents).

But to declare oneself the enemy and superior of those who do associate themselves with one side or the other is only to create another side, a faction. I consider factionalism to be one of the great problems facing the Church, at least in this country. It usually involves the separating or distancing of oneself  from others by going beyond the unity in essentials prescribed by St. Augustine and insisting on unity in matters where legitimate disagreement—Augustine’s liberty—exists.

And yes, I see the danger of starting a faction obsessed with deploring factionalism. My intention is simply to avoid participating in it as much as possible, and so, having made this point once, I don’t plan to harp on it.

Catholic and Conservative (1)

Sunday Night Journal — January 24, 2010

This is another topic I that need to get out of the way before I can focus primarily on the memoir upon which I’ve embarked. It’s a bit of unfinished business from last year, and there will be at least one more installment, possibly two.

Back in April I was one of a group of people who received an email from my friend Daniel Nichols on the use of torture by the American government. A discussion followed, and soon, via attention to the approval of so-called “enhanced interrogation” by many conservatives, became focused on the nature of conservatism. Things became a bit testy, and a bit later the argument spilled over into a post (by Daniel) and comments on the Caelum et Terra blog. That discussion in turn became heated; I lost my temper and withdrew. Since then I’ve intended to revisit the topic at enough length to state my position clearly and then be done with it.

The email discussion of course is not publicly available, but the blog discussion is here. I mention the email only because I want to note that the antagonistic tone of the C&T exchange did not spring up as quickly as it appears to have done, but had already been established in the email discussion. One remark in particular had fired me up: the assertion that the term “conservative” is “an idol of the mind.” A debate with a Catholic man ceases to be friendly when someone suggests that he is in thrall to an idol.

Normally I just allow these teapot-tempests in the blogosphere to slip away and be forgotten. But I want to say more on this subject because, beyond the immediate provocations in those two exchanges, I’ve had a long-simmering resentment of the insinuation, discernible in this debate, that to be a conservative is to be less than fully Catholic.

It is certainly true that conservatism as a socio-political category, and a very broad one, encompasses all sorts of people who are not Catholic and have all sorts of ideas that are not Catholic. Some of these ideas are “not Catholic” only in the sense that the one who holds them arrived at his position by some other means than reasoning from Catholic principles. Some are “not Catholic” in the sense that they are in contradiction to Catholic principles, and of course there’s a danger that a Catholic conservative will be unduly influenced by these. Our political life today operates at a pretty high level of anger—dangerously high, I think—and in the heat of battle people tend to become reactionary and to accept ideas and behavior from their own side which they would condemn from the other. Obviously a Catholic has to be on guard against letting this tendency lead him astray. And there’s nothing wrong with challenging a Catholic conservative on some specific instance of this; in fact if the matter is serious one ought to do it. But the suggestion that merely to classify oneself as a conservative in itself compromises one’s fidelity to the Church is wrong, and rests on a misconception about conservatism.

For a Catholic to participate in any political activity at all involves some risk of absorbing views which are to some degree incompatible with the teachings of the Church, because it involve collaborating with people who hold those views. You have to make common cause with people who don’t share your fundamental principles, and you must be ready to defend your cause on the grounds that it promotes the common good in ways that are at least widely, if not universally, agreed upon, not on the grounds that the Church teaches it. If you aren’t prepared to deal with this, you really aren’t prepared to engage in politics in our society. To refuse the compromises inevitable in politics is a defensible position, though I don’t think the purist necessarily occupies higher moral ground than the participant. The tension between the two is always with us, and each helps keep the other from absurdity.

But I digress. I think the main point of contention here lies not in the matters of participation and contamination, but in a more basic disagreement about the nature of conservatism. What sort of thing is it? I don’t mean “what do conservatives believe?” but rather “to what category does conservatism itself belong?”

My opponents in the disagreement documented above seem to believe that it is, or at least intends to be, a systematic philosophy, which makes it a rival to the Church, which in turn makes a Catholic who is also a conservative less than fully faithful to the Church because, as we all know, a man cannot serve two masters. They also insist that it fails as a system, because it is full of contradictions and inconsistencies; it is not only a rival to the Church, but an incoherent one.

I have to say that the attempt to respond to this complaint reminded me of arguing with objectivists, in that in both cases there is an insistence that certain terms must be defined with absolute precision or be dismissed as meaningless. The statement that the word “conservative” does not have a very precise meaning is taken as an admission that it has no meaning at all.

But life is full of things which don’t lend themselves to precise definition, but yet exist, thereby making meaningful the words by which they are named. There are many such terms in the arts. Terms like “romantic” and “classical” cannot be defined in such a way that as to remove all doubt about whether or not any given work belongs to one of those categories, and there are others that are even more slippery—post-romantic, neo-classical, jazz. There are very few, if any, artists or individual works of art which fit perfectly into any of these categories, or which does not contain elements of both. Yet we continue to use these words because they serve a purpose in describing broad tendencies. If a critic describes one pianist’s playing as more romantic than another’s, everyone knows what he means; no one shouts Define your terms! And if he did, he would be laughed at, and deserve to be.

In answering the question “what sort of thing is conservatism?” these aesthetic terms provide the most useful analogy I’ve been able to come up with. Like them, the word “conservative” is more descriptive than prescriptive (as conservatives often note). Like them, it does not begin with a set of abstract principles. Like them, it is more understandable as a product of temperament and attitudes than as a book of rules. As Russell Kirk insisted, it is not an ideology, but rather the negation of ideology. It is a concrete human phenomenon, not an invented system. It has no necessary metaphysic, and one may be a conservative and an atheist, or a conservative and a Catholic. It is a loose alliance of people with broadly similar views about the management of worldly affairs.

I began to call myself a conservative thirty years or so ago because I kept noticing that my views on socio-political matters were very often in agreement with what people who called themselves conservatives believed. I studied no catechism and assented to no body of doctrine. I certainly never expected to agree with everyone who calls himself a conservative, and in fact did, and do, disagree frequently with many of them. But the areas of agreement were, and are, great enough that the label continues to fit me, more or less. When or if that ceases to be true, I’ll cease to accept the term for myself.

I judge conservative ideas by the light of the Catholic faith, and not vice versa. Certainly there are plenty of examples of people who seem to be doing the opposite, though I think one ought to be careful about drawing that conclusion, as it presumes knowledge of another’s mind and heart which is ordinarily not available to us. And it is important to recognize that no political faction can be identified with the Catholic faith (this seems so obvious to me as to hardly need stating, though I sometimes see evidence that it does). But I reject absolutely the charge that to call myself a conservative constitutes, in itself, a lapse or defect, conscious or unconscious, in my fidelity to the Church.

Sunday Night Journal

I’ve decided to take the suggestion that I repost an old Sunday Night Journal every week while I’m taking a long and possibly permanent break from writing it. Today being Super Bowl Sunday, I picked one occasioned by the 2004 Super Bowl: The Entertainment Industry and the Ratchet Effect.

Speaking of the Super Bowl: I watched it, in the beginning just because I haven’t watched any football since the Sugar Bowl, and having no interest at all in either time and therefore not caring who won. However, I’ve noticed that whenever I watch a game in which I don’t care who wins, I always find myself rooting for one or the other team by the end of the first quarter. In this one my pick was Arizona, maybe just out of sympathy for the underdog. But what with the red jerseys and Arizona’s general performance for most of the game I felt like I was watching the SEC championship game again. Well, congratulations to Pittsburgh, but I have to say that James Harrison’s personal foul which involved him punching a man on the ground left a bad taste in my mouth and took away some of the luster of his amazing 100-yard interception return.

And I hate to say it, because I used to like his music a lot, but Bruce Springsteen’s halftime show was tiresome. That theatrical rock-'n'-roll stuff just doesn’t seem real to me any more. Maybe it works better if you aren’t seeing it close up.

The Last Sunday Night Journal (For A While At Least)

Sunday Night Journal — December 28, 2008

The end of 2008 marks the end of five full years of Sunday night journals. I haven’t checked recently, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss a Sunday between January 4, 2004, and today. That adds up to 260 weekly entries. If they average at least 600 words per entry, which I believe they do—my guess is that it’s more like 700 or 750—the total comes to over 150,000 words. If those numbers mean nothing to you, consider that the low end for a novel is probably 50,000 words or so, the average probably 70-100,000, and the high end (e.g. Moby Dick) over 200,000. So in five years I’ve written enough to make a decent-sized book (not counting non-journal blog posts).

I will now reveal to you the secret purpose of the Sunday Night Journal. In late 2003 I had a dream in which I was told that every week for five years I must write a short commentary on any subject that came to mind and publish it on the web. At the end of that time I was to count all the words I had written, and that number would be one of the terms in a mathematical formula that would solve the dark matter problem and, incidentally, resolve the enigma of the continuing popularity of reality television. I expect to have the dream that will reveal the formula as soon as I’ve finished counting the words.

Ok, sorry. Here is the real sorta-secret purpose. All my life I’ve had a compulsion to write, but have done very little of it. Notice I don’t say I’ve wanted to write. Obviously, as Senator Craig could have told you as he prepared to explain his men’s room misadventures to the nation, to feel compelled to do a thing is not the same as to want to do it. We discussed the silly notion of “wanting to write” in a comment thread here a couple of weeks ago; I think anyone who says he “wants to write” without adding “a book about…” or otherwise specifying what he wants to write is probably fooling himself. I don’t want to write: writing is work, and I don’t much like work. I want to have written, yes, much as one wants to have exercised, but not actually to go to the gym or mount the Nordic Track.

Even when I’ve managed to work up the will to write, my laziness, procrastination, and a lack of concentration that borders on ADD have generally kept me from sticking with anything for very long. I have almost forty years’ worth of fragments to show for my efforts. I’d like to blame someone or something else for this, but, like Faulkner, I’m very skeptical of the “mute inglorious Milton” theory (see Gray’s Elegy, approximately line 60). I’ve engaged in a certain amount of complaining over the years about various obstacles life has put in the way of my writing, but I don’t think they’ve been decisive. If  I’d been really good and really determined, I’d have found a way. I’ve gotten over the idea that possessed me for a while in my early twenties, that I was meant to be a great poet or novelist.

Yet the compulsion persists, and I’m haunted, sometimes tormented, by the parable of the talents (explanation here for folks who don’t know the Bible). It is no pleasant thing to set foot on the threshold of old age with the sense that there was some work which one was supposed to do but has not done.

I discovered years ago that since I don’t like to write, it helps a lot to have some external force pushing me to do it. I noticed that I’m more likely to write if I’ve somehow obligated myself to do so. And that was the origin of the Sunday night journal. I publicly stated that I was going to do it, and at least a few people read that statement, and so the seed of a sense of obligation was planted. As time went on, and especially after I created a blog to make the journals simpler to post and maintain, the number of visits to the site went up, thus increasing the sense of obligation and supplementing it with evidence that people were actually reading and enjoying what I wrote.

In short, the weekly journal has been, in part, a sort of mind game I played with myself, a way almost of tricking myself into writing regularly. I could tell myself that even if I produced nothing else, there would be something after a few years.

And so there is. So why stop it now? Partly because I’ve produced enough that if I died tomorrow I would leave something solid behind for (at a minimum) that small number of people who have read me, and for any descendants who might be interested in knowing what sort of man their grand- or great-grand- or great-great-grand-father was. And partly because I want to pick up some of those fragments and incomplete projects and finish them, if I can (which is by no means certain).

I turned sixty this year. Perhaps I’ll live to be ninety, or perhaps I won’t see another Christmas. But taking the biblical three-score-and-ten as a rough guide to what to expect, I figure that the chances are pretty good that I have ten productive years left, but am taking no bets beyond that. Ten years no longer seems like a very long time to me. The recent removal of a melanoma also serves as a warning that the time ahead of me could well be less than the time between today and, say, the beginning of this century, which seems like yesterday. I wouldn’t say I have a sense of urgency, exactly, but I do have—finally—a sense that procrastination is no longer permissible if I want to get any substantial work done.

The journal, then, along with my other weekly commitment, Music of the Week, is going on hiatus for the next twelve months, and might or might not reappear after that. The two of them together have pretty much consumed my weekend writing time (Music of the Week was usually short, but often required a lot of thought and preparation). I want to work on some other things, including longer essays that require focus lasting more than a day or two. I want to go through several decades’ accumulation of poems and fragments of poems and see what can be preserved or completed.

The blog will continue, and in fact I may find myself posting more often but more briefly. The longer things may well appear on the web site, although one or two of them may find a place in magazines first. The poems certainly will—I have no interest at all in trying, probably without success, to place them in magazines that don’t pay and are mostly read only by poets anyway. I want to redesign and organize the web site, or at least clean it up, the better to post longer pieces in a readable way. And I have some other things in mind that I don’t even want to mention unless or until they show more sign of viability.

If I fall back into my old habits of laziness and procrastination, or if, after a year, I’ve run out of other things to do, I’ll restart the journal. I hope everyone who has enjoyed the blog will continue to read it.

As a retrospective glance, here is the first journal entry, transplanted after the fact to the blog—that, too, is one of the projects I want to finish. Here is how it looked originally—I would be interested in knowing whether you think one is more readable than the other.

Witness

Sunday Night Journal — December 21, 2008

I haven’t quite finished Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, but I’m ready to declare that it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the 20^th century and the spiritual battle being waged in the modern world generally—meaning, by “modern,” roughly “post-Enlightenment.” This will probably not be my only post on the subject, but there’s one aspect of Chambers’ story as seen from the early 21^st century that I want to note especially.

(If you aren’t familiar with Chambers and the controversies in which he was involved ca. 1948-51, this 1961 obituary of him in Time gives an excellent overview and what seems to me a fair assessment of Chambers’ character. A very brief summary is that Chambers was a communist who left the party and actively worked against it, to the extent of exposing communists within the government, which embroiled him in considerable public controversy and legal difficulty.)

At the end of The Lord of the Rings Sauron is defeated and destroyed. But we are given to understand—I can’t remember whether it’s in the book or in some remark of Tolkien’s elsewhere—that his evil does not cease to exist, but rather spreads as a sort of vapor, dispersing itself throughout the world; from this time on, evil will not be so concentrated and easy to identify, but will work subtly and obscurely.

Something like that is the situation we’re in after the fall of the great totalitarian ideologies of the 20^th century, communism and fascism. Of the two, the evil of fascism has generally been easier to recognize, or at any rate more widely recognized, principally because of the Holocaust but also because its mythos is in general less appealing, especially to those who set the terms and tone of opinion in our society. Communism had a deeper and wider appeal, in part because it spoke, superficially at least, to more benevolent motives. But if it’s possible to say that one is worse than the other, I would say that communism takes the prize, in part because it was more successful and thus able to murder more people, and partly because it was more consciously and systematically an assault on God. Communism involved a cold intention to remove from the universe any moral authority external to man, to seize that authority for man—for the handful of men worthy of it, on behalf of all the rest—and to exercise it for the purpose of creating heaven in the only place where it could possibly exist, in this life. (Fascism, in contrast, seems to have been less coherent.)

This is what Chambers makes vividly clear. He did not simply repudiate communism; he also found faith. From my point of view it’s more than a little strange that the mode of Christianity he adopted was Quakerism, because Quakerism as I have encountered it seems as secularized as Unitarianism, but never mind that at the moment: it’s certain that Chambers came to a deep and strong belief in God. And it was this belief that showed him with more clarity than most ex-communists—Solzhenitsyn also comes to mind—that the argument between communism and Christendom was not about economic and social conditions, but about God, and that there could be no permanent compromise between them any more than there can be compromise between those who say that two and two make four and those who believe the sum is five. There are some disagreements on which compromise is intrinsically impossible, because they’re based on mutually exclusive propositions.

Like the cloud that was Sauron, communism as an all-explanatory philosophy and an all-encompassing program of action, both directed against God, has been dispersed. There is no single ideology or mass movement with both its coherence and its popularity at work today. But the basic idea—there is no God, and we’re glad there isn’t, because now we can get on with the business of solving our problems without interference from superstition—is everywhere. The intellectual and spiritual presuppositions of much of our political and social discourse are the same as those of communism.

For many intellectuals, evolution has replaced communism as the all-explanatory philosophy (see Daniel Dennett, et.al.). It hasn’t yet become a program of action for very many, but you can see the impulse at work. Utilitarianism is the program of action: whatever works is right, and in this context “works” means maximizing comfort and pleasure. There is really no need for me to make a list of every moral question in which these views are aggressively at war with Christianity; anyone reading this is likely to know. Some are straightforward and involve specific acts, like euthanasia; some are more subtle and involve a general disposition, like hedonism.

Whittaker Chambers thought communism would win, and probably would have been surprised by the fall of the Soviet Union and the general eclipse of communism as an ideology. He thought what remained of Christian society was too weak and compromised to resist communism. He might have been surprised by the fall of the Soviet Union and the general eclipse of communism as an ideology. But he would not have been at all surprised by the persistence of the drive to destroy the metaphysical restraints on human appetites. And probably would have been just as pessimistic about the prospects of Western society resisting it:

It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and, hence, their conflict is irrepressible.

Though it is no longer a question of “the West” against something external, this passage ought to be noted by Christians who still haven’t grasped the nature of their situation. The visible empire may have been defeated, but the evil lives on.

Versus Hollywood

Sunday Night Journal — December 14, 2008

I said a few days ago that I would try to articulate the reasons why there aren’t very many Hollywood movies that I really care about. I don’t think I can construct an intellectually coherent argument based on the specifics of film-making, because I don’t know much about it, and I have a limited store of examples ready to hand, so all I can really do is describe what works for me and what doesn’t. In the interests of simplicity I’m not going to precede everything I say with “in my opinion,” but you can assume it as a qualification to any dogmatic-sounding pronouncement.

By “Hollywood” I suppose I mean the mainstream film industry. I don’t know any more about it as an industry than I do about the process of film-making, so let’s just say I mean the usual stuff that’s shown in the average multiplex across the U.S.A., and I suppose probably in Europe, too.  And I don’t mean just the movies of our own time but of the American film industry for most of its lifetime.

As I thought about this question in odd moments over the past few days, certain words kept occurring to me: big; loud; crude; cartoonish. Followed by unconvincing; unbelievable; shallow; heavy-handed; sensationalistic. The one that turns up most often is crude—not crude in the sense of being vulgar, but in the sense of being clumsy. Hollywood movies are like comic books to me. I can get very caught up in them while I’m watching them, but the impression usually dissipates quickly and leaves no lasting impression. They rarely touch anything very deep in me. They often leave me impressed with their means but indifferent to their ends.

All this seems obviously applicable to the sort of movie that doesn’t really purport to be anything more than entertainment: Spiderman, for instance, which I like, or the original Star Wars, which I love. But for me it’s also mostly true for the more serious ones. In fact, I tend to prefer the merely entertaining, because Hollywood’s ability to mount an impressive spectacle is unrivaled, but when it tries to get serious it usually fails, because it just doesn’t have a subtle enough touch. Its efforts to be deep and serious are also frequently undermined because it is tainted, or perhaps I should say poisoned, by the same cultural illness that has weakened the other arts: a simple-minded political and social leftism, a quasi-religious devotion to the sexual revolution, a tendency to take mindlessness and violence as proof of authenticity, etc. But even without those I don’t think Hollywood would do much better. If I imagine it dominated by right-wing jingoists I don’t imagine myself liking its products any better.

Thanks to Netflix, I’ve probably watched more movies in the past two years than I had in the previous ten. Almost every one that really moved me, or that at least interested me so much that I wanted to watch it again, was either a foreign and very un-Hollywood-ish film like Bergman’s Winter Light or a low-budget American one like Napoleon Dynamite (which I think I’ve seen three times, and could watch with pleasure right now).

Rarely do I encounter  in Hollywood movies people or situations that seem real; all seems exaggerated and superficial. I know that a lot of the actors in Hollywood movies are very skilled, and yet they generally seem to me to be striking a series of attitudes and poses. I conjecture, then, that the directors want it this way. The apparent need for simple conflict and simple action drives out subtlety and ambiguity and keeps one’s attention on the surface. There’s a lot of excitement, but not much sense of seeing into the real depth of the human situation.

I’ll let my reaction to The Children of Men serve as one instance of the pattern. (SPOILERS follow.)

It’s a story set in a dystopian near-future in which the human race has suddenly become physically unable to reproduce. (It’s “based” on the P.D. James novel, but it really only uses the one idea.) A lot of people whose judgment I respect found it very moving and profound. But for me it was just an action movie—busy, fast, loud, and violent—and pretty good on those terms; I didn’t dislike it, but it failed to move me.

I never felt that the film showed any real sense of what the end of fertility meant; the troubles of the society it depicted seemed to be based more on current politics than on the infertility plague. I never had a strong sense of the inner lives and motivations of the characters. I never felt any sense of engagement with the obvious questions about the significance of human life raised by the central plot device. The miracle pregnancy seemed only a MacGuffin justifying chases and gun battles. Within ten minutes of the end of the movie, I had stopped thinking about it; a few weeks later the only scenes that remained very strongly with me were the poignant and gentle moments between the Michael Caine character and his catatonic wife.

And that pretty much sums up my view of Hollywood: even the movies that are not action movies seem to be a product of the same sensibility. American Beauty comes to mind. Its treatment of suburban-consumerist malaise seemed superficial and clumsy, reaching strenuously for obvious conclusions and crude shocks. As with Children, little of it remained with me for very long; almost the only thing I remember now is the long shot of some lightweight bit of debris—a plastic bag?—being floated about by a breeze.

It occurs to me that my complaint could be summed up in one word: sentimentality. Sentimentality in art is sometimes defined as the effort to extort rather than earn emotion. Present-day Hollywood has changed dramatically since the late ‘60s, and seems to pride itself on its toughness and honesty. But I don’t know that there’s been a fundamental aesthetic change; sentimentality, in the broadest sense, seems a constant.

I’m quite sure I’m being unfair here to some movies I haven’t seen, but these are some of the reasons why I haven’t seen them. And while writing this I remembered an exception: Tender Mercies.

Coincidentally, just as I was about to post this, Francesca Murphy, commenting in another thread, seems to anticipate and respond to me:

Film is a medium both crude and brilliant. One has got a few seconds to communicate to the thickest dolt a sense of pathos, or of expectation. All the tracking signals in film have to be larger than life, because it's art for everyman.

I think this is true of what I’m calling Hollywood films, and perhaps it has to be this way: expensive films require large audiences. I don’t think it has to be true of film in general as an art form. But Bergman isn’t art for everyman.

The Essence of Sin

Sunday Night Journal — December 7, 2008

This is still another follow-up on the topic of sin and defiance. In email conversation with a friend (two different friends, actually) after last Sunday’s journal, I tried to articulate what I believe to be the essence of sin, and this is what I came up with: it is to see the light, to know that it is the light, and to turn away from it.

I really only have myself as a laboratory specimen for investigating this proposition, but when I think of what happens in my own mind when I sin, that’s what I see. The words I’ve given above are, of course, not entirely adequate. Or perhaps I should say they are too adequate, because they are an analytic statement, a disassembly, of something that is, often, a single mental event. And even if it is a lengthy process in time it is, finally, a single act. I don’t know what responsibility one has if one sees the light without recognizing it. But it is impossible to recognize it without making a decision as to whether to go toward it or away from it.

It’s easy to see this act in a small event. Take detraction, for instance: in a conversation you find you have the opportunity to reveal some minor misdeed or failing of a person which others really have no right or need to know. But you don’t like this person, and you’ll enjoy letting others know of the fault. There’s the sudden tug of the desire to do it, and the simultaneous discomfort of knowing that you shouldn’t, and then either the continued discomfort of suppressing the urge, or the almost physical sensation of shoving your conscience aside, followed by the pleasurable release of telling your tale.

It’s not only in directly and specifically moral acts that this happens. There is a broader and more fundamental decision which orients one’s entire life. One of the friends with whom I was discussing this mentioned the idea that God gives everyone enough reason to believe in him, and I think that’s true; I would even say it must be true, or else God would not be just. But that obviously doesn’t mean that he gives everyone an opportunity to say yes or no to the Nicene Creed. It must mean that everyone, by virtue of being human, can see something of the light that is God, and know, even if he does not use the word “God,” that he is seeing what is good and true and beautiful. And that everyone must make that fundamental decision, either to attempt to follow that light—never mind how often he fails or blunders—or to turn away from it toward something that seems more desirable, something that demands that he turn away from goodness and truth and beauty.

Of course it’s a continuing decision, beginning when one becomes conscious enough to make it and ending when one ceases to be so conscious. And to be damned is to persevere in the decision to turn away.

Why would anyone do that? Surely anyone who (for instance) chooses wealth as his God must discover eventually, even if it’s in the last instant of life, that he is wrong. And why, having made that discovery, would he not repent?

In the end, it seems, the answer to that question must be pride. Pride at the end leads to Hell, obviously. I think there is also a way that pride at the beginning may set one on the path to Hell, and make it very difficult to get off that path. And it’s a form of pride that’s especially characteristic of our time: intellectual pride, the refusal to believe anything that cannot be proved “scientifically,” that is, by physical evidence or a narrow sort of logic very well suited for investigating the behavior of matter but almost useless in questions of the spirit. Surely this pride keeps many a man or woman from acknowledging that the light really exists as something more than a subjective experience.

Some time ago in the comments here we were discussing this question, and the necessity for the believer to move forward even in the absence of quasi-scientific proofs of the faith. And someone (I don’t remember who) said something like “If you see light, why should you not move toward it?”—with the implication being that anything you could say or deduce or prove about the light is secondary to the fact that you know it is the light. I was really struck by this, and it has helped me to fret less about intellectual difficulties. Even if we cannot satisfy our intellects that God is real, we all, every one of us, sense an obligation to follow the light, and if pride keeps us from doing so we will lose our souls.

Voltaire said “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” I’ll go a step further: even if God did not exist it would be necessary to follow him; the obligation to follow the light would retain its force. And I don’t mean simply the obligation to do the right thing; I mean also the obligation to believe the right thing, as far as we are capable of understanding it: to believe that truth and beauty and goodness are real and that they ultimately matter. We sense the obligation to do this even if our intellect tells us otherwise. And that may be a proof of God’s existence, a proof built into our souls.

When Is Disbelief A Sin?

Sunday Night Journal — November 30, 2008

This is something of a follow-up to last week’s journal, and to some of the discussion that followed it. The topic there was the broad one of defiance of God, and the discussion began with the question of when the rejection by a Catholic of some part of the Catholic faith becomes the kind of defiance that leads to a total rejection of God—in other words, to Hell.

I’m thinking this evening of a more specific question: under what conditions is it a sin, and a deadly sin if not repented, to disbelieve in God. The way we look at that question has undergone some changes in recent times. Five hundred years ago the answer would likely have placed much more blame on the unbeliever than we might be inclined to do now; unbelief would have been thought most often an act of the will, a deliberate, conscious, and prideful rejection of the truth.

But the door had always been left open for the possibility that the unbeliever might be so prejudiced and limited by culture or circumstance as to make him incapable of understanding and receiving the faith, and therefore not personally responsible for his rejection of it. The possibility remains that if he could have understood it and seen it as it really was, he would not have rejected it. And the further possibility remains that he may in fact have received as much as he was capable of receiving of God’s truth, and that he may have responded as much as he was capable of responding, and that he might be saved.

Most of us like this idea a lot better, I think. It seems more compatible with God’s love, mercy, and justice. It leaves the door to heaven open to the millions or billions of people who, through no fault of their own, have not heard, or have heard but not understood, the Good News.

But it’s possible to carry that idea too far, to remove all personal responsibility from the decision. One thinks: well, no one who really understands the Good News could refuse it, and therefore anyone who does not receive it has not understood it, and is therefore not culpable for having rejected it. That won’t do, either; if the old harsher view made was too ready to put all the blame on the non, this places him beyond responsibility altogether, and effectively nullifies freedom.

I am certain, however, that there is at least one person for whom disbelief would be a mortal sin: me.

I was struck by this one night a week or two ago when I was feeling rather low. I began to think that the promise of the Christian faith is really too good to be true, and the hope it inspires only an illusion. These thoughts, or more accurately these feelings, come to me from time to time, and usually I don’t give them much attention, knowing that they’ll pass and that my mind is firmly set against the idea of abandoning the faith. This time, though, I had a somewhat different reaction: I was suddenly conscious of these feelings as temptation, an urge to do wrong and a sensation that doing it might be a pleasure. If nothing else, it would be pleasant not to fight, just to allow myself to be swept away by the current. I saw disbelief as a moral act, a deliberate rejection of a gift. It was disconcerting, and even a bit frightening; it was almost like realizing that one has stepped too close to the edge of a cliff.

I don’t think it would be possible for me now to “lose my faith” in the casual sense in which I might say that I had “lost faith” in the President or Congress, meaning that on the basis of some evidence I had lost the trust I had once placed in something or someone.  For me to turn away from the Catholic faith now would, I’m quite certain, be a surrender to temptation and a mortal sin. And I think this must be true for many Christians.

I recently heard someone ask, half-seriously, why one should become a Christian, if losing one’s faith later would result in damnation, while not having faith in the first place leaves open the possibility of salvation. It’s a silly question, and I don’t think anyone seriously contemplating the possibility of conversion would ask it. But it has an answer.

The answer is that heaven begins at the moment you believe it can be your destination. Not that your life will suddenly turn blissful, or even more pleasant; it may well become more difficult and painful in some ways. But it will make sense; it will have a meaning, even when you are suffering. It will have a pattern and a purpose that will and make sense of your past and guide you in the future. Even the misfortunes and sins of the past will be taken up into the pattern: the forgiveness of sins removes much of the pain and puts to rest the lingering guilt and uneasiness. The sins themselves remain sins but become a means of understanding, a little more each day, yourself, your relationship to God, and everything else.

Every pain that comes your way in the future likewise becomes something you can use: for your own growth in discipline and love, as an offering to God for your own salvation and the salvation of those you love. Moments of pure joy become possible, when you are freed of the tyranny of time by the knowledge of eternity. You can love the world and the people you are given to love with all your heart even though you know you will lose them, because you have good hope that nothing good is lost forever. Instead of a tale told by an idiot, life becomes a story that makes sense and will sooner or later end well, unless you choose another ending.

I’ll quote C. S. Lewis again:

But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.

More succinctly, St. Catherine of Siena:

All the way to Heaven is Heaven.

And the same is no doubt true of the way to Hell. To return to my opening thought, it makes sense that one who has once received the gift of understanding this would sin in rejecting it. He is turning from light toward darkness.

Defiance and Damnation

Sunday Night Journal — November 23, 2008

With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred, and have suppressed all the love within themselves... In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell.

—Benedict XVI

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell choose it.

—C. S. Lewis

I ran across the above passage from Benedict a few weeks ago at the same time I was re-reading, for the first time in twenty years or so, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, from which the second quotation is taken. I expect most readers of this blog have read The Great Divorce or at least know of it, but for those who don’t: it’s an imaginative attempt to understand how the idea of Hell can be reconciled with the idea of an all-loving and all-merciful God. The answer Lewis gives—and of course he’s hardly the only one to have said it—is that God doesn’t so much send people to Hell as allow them to choose it. Or, to put it the other way around, to refuse Heaven.

Lewis’s premise is that the damned are free to visit Heaven and to stay there. All they have to do is give up something in themselves that makes it impossible for them to receive God, some sin to which they are so attached, some illusion so powerful, that it cannot co-exist in their hearts with God. And one after another the characters in The Great Divorce refuse to surrender. There is the cynical man who thinks all the God and Heaven stuff is some kind of trickery which he doesn’t intend to fall for. There’s the unjust man who won’t let go of his insistence that he treated everybody fairly. And so on.

Ultimately all those who choose Hell seem to be driven by pride. To let go of their sins and illusions requires that they accept a certain amount of embarrassment, admit that they were wrong, and submit to looking very foolish in their own eyes—in short, to be humbled.

All of this is familiar to most Christians, I think. But have you ever known anyone who seemed capable of making the sort of refusal described by Lewis? Someone who seemed in real danger of actually making it, of making the choice that will send him to hell? I don’t remember asking myself that question when I first read The Great Divorce many years ago, but I’ve seen a lot more of mankind since then.

Benedict’s formulation (“...people who have lived for hatred...”) seems to suggest a monster who would be easily recognizable as such. We tend to think of Hell as being reserved, if it exists at all, for such monsters, for people who have done some enormous wickedness, like Hitler. But the people I’ve known whom I could imagine making that ultimate refusal, choosing the Hell of their self-made prison over the love and grace offered to them by God, were not wicked in any obvious or dramatic way. (I’m using the past tense because the people who come first to mind are dead, but I can think of one or two among the living who worry me.) They didn’t live for hate, and as far as I know they had not suppressed all love within them.

What they did seem to have done, as far as I could tell—and I stress seem because obviously I didn’t know the real state of their souls—was to have erected a wall of pride between themselves and God, or anything having to do with God. It appeared to me not just that they didn’t believe, but that not believing was a matter of defiance with them. Any mention of God in their presence was met with reflexive anger or contempt. They were like the cynical man in The Great Divorce: nobody was going to trick them. They seemed to feel that anyone who mentioned God to them was only attempting to dominate them or in some way to take something from them, and they were determined not to let that happen.

I hope those were only reactions, probably at least somewhat justified, to bad behavior on the part of Christians, or to clumsy or misguided or even hostile approaches by them. And I know that all the people I’m thinking of here had been hurt by life in some pretty significant way, and I’m sure that those injuries had a role in their defiance. But while everyone has suffered, or will suffer, not everyone reacts in this way; I also know people who have suffered far worse things without becoming embittered. This is the mystery of freedom.

It seems to me that it isn’t so much the entire suppression of love that is the decisive step toward damnation, but the refusal to surrender to love, the determination to hold on to some bitterness, some anger, some resentment, some pleasure, that cannot in the end coexist with love. The total suppression must eventually follow, but the real decision seems to lie in the refusal to submit: in pride, not hate. It’s a frightening thing to look at someone you know and care about and think that you might be watching him or her erect walls that will, if he persists, become an eternal prison. It makes the matter of praying for him seem pretty urgent. And it makes one fearful of doing or saying anything that might further provoke the defiance and the pride.

November in the Tennessee Valley

Sunday Night Journal — November 16, 2008

So we made a quick overnight trip for my uncle Ed’s funeral, leaving here on Friday morning, driving 350 miles (560km) to Athens, Alabama, leaving there on Saturday afternoon and driving the 350 miles back, arriving around 11pm. I’ve gotten so accustomed to the warm and colorless autumn of the Gulf Coast that I sometimes forget how different it is in the Tennessee Valley, a long low stretch of land running alongside the Tennessee River in north Alabama. At a rest stop north of Birmingham I found myself almost hypnotized by the deep red leaves falling from some ornamental tree. It was a sunny morning when we left on Friday, and cold, dark, and raining when we arrived in Athens around 6pm. The weather for the funeral on Saturday afternoon was chilly, windy, and gray. Partway through the graveside service the sun came out, as if providentially; then as soon as the service was over the clouds closed in again and it began to rain, hard. I was grateful for that bit of sun, as I suppose was everyone.

I would be dishonest if I said that I felt a deep personal grief at Ed’s passing. For thirty years or more I had seen him only briefly at holidays. And he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago, and I don’t think we’re obliged to wish many years of Alzheimer’s on anyone. More than an immediate personal loss, I felt the melancholy of seeing another of my parents’ generation leave the world’s stage. At the funeral I saw many of them for the first time in six or seven years, and was struck by how much more frail some of them seemed. For the first twenty years or so of my life they were the adult world, and that’s the way they’ve remained in my mind, even as they disappear one by one, leaving my generation as the eldest. It’s disconcerting.

I have the sense of a world slipping away. Whenever I visit my old home ground I’m vividly aware of how it has shaped me. I suppose people who stay where they were raised and spend their whole lives among the same people are more strongly and continually shaped, but those of us who move away may be more conscious of the influence, and every visit becomes an occasion for examining that influence, for seeing it in a slightly different—and, one hopes, slightly clearer—light. But one never gets quite the clarity one wants, because home has, of course, been changing all along. There’s an unnoticed expectation that the return will be a return in time as well as in space, and an almost unnoticed mild jolt and adjustment when it is not. Little by little, the world into which I was born disappears, and one day I’ll follow it and exist, as far as earthly life can tell, only in the past.

I like seeing people who were a part of my childhood and youth—cousins and friends at this funeral, for instance. Even though we aren’t close—we’re like the branches of a plant that get further apart as they grow—there’s a sense of deep acquaintance among us that comes (on my part, anyway) from that sense of shared roots. We know the world that used to be, and when we mention certain times or people or places we know that the other recognizes them, that they aren’t just meaningless items in a list. Even though we are very different people who don’t necessarily have a lot in common, we do share that history and are parts of that world, the world that impressed itself upon us when we were at our most impressionable.

The natural world plays its part, too, in some ways a stronger part, because it has changed less. The little country crossroads where I grew up is not a beautiful place, or at least not the kind of place that I would seek out for its beauty. It’s flat and open, with not nearly enough trees to suit me; it’s parched and dusty in summer, damp and drab in winter. Yet it has a lonely beauty I often remember, and am always glad to see when I return.

When we were there on Saturday the weather was cloudy and cold. I remember many, many such days, in late autumn or winter: the vast fields, either bare earth or something brown and dead, with pale leafless woods and dark hills on the horizons, the sky a dull grey, crows calling, ducks and geese passing high toward one of the wildlife refuges run by the TVA, the light failing early.

Sometimes I went hunting on such days, or what I called hunting. I never had any desire at all to kill anything (and that’s not self-praise; it’s arguably a sign of decadence). But I sometimes took a gun and went walking in the fields and woods and called it hunting. In that time and place, and perhaps still, once a boy had learned basic gun safety at the age of twelve or so he was free to take a gun and hunt whenever or wherever it was permissible. There were a bolt-action .22 rifle and a single-shot 20-gauge shotgun that I used—I liked them because they were simple and easy to shoot—and I would take one with me, shooting now and then at a crow or a squirrel or, maybe, a rabbit, almost never hitting anything. It was just an excuse to wander alone outdoors.

At the heart of that drab brown and grey season was the color and light of Christmas, and so Christmas has always been to me, a burst of brilliant life in a dead or dying world, which of course it is, whether or not one’s environment emphasizes the contrast. I’m glad mine did.

Another Movie Roundup

Sunday Night Journal — November 9, 2008

In the past I’ve done a few posts in which I gave capsule reviews of the movies I’d seen since the last such post. I think the last one was almost a year ago, but I know I’ve posted about a number of specific movies since then—for instance, in the context of the long-running discussion of Brideshead Revisited (yes, the 1981 BBC version is a masterpiece.) The combination of Netflix and an empty nest has caused my wife and me to see more movies in the past couple of years than we had seen in the previous fifteen or more, and a lot of that viewing has been devoted to classics that I had either never seen at all or had seen once thirty-five or forty years ago. So I’m not going to try to mention everything I’ve seen—a lot of it is old X-Files episodes—but here are the most interesting ones.

Breathless. This is Godard’s most famous (I think) movie. I loved Bande à Part, probably without much real justification, and was really looking forward to this. What a letdown. I didn’t much care for it. It seemed a sort of exercise in pre-hippie bohemian posturing, and consequently rather sad.

8½ and La Dolce Vita. It’s official: I don’t much care for Fellini. I’ve seen Juliet of the Spirits, Intervista, and now the two that are widely considered masterpieces, and found them all more irritating than anything else, despite some excellent moments. I can’t entirely explain this. The apparently aimless talking—high-speed chattering, actually— and wandering around is not fundamentally different from some of Antonioni’s work, which I like very much. But Fellini’s people just annoy me, and I don’t find much imagery that touches me (often Antonioni’s saving grace), or the sense of mystery that some modernist films have. I came closer to liking La Dolce Vita than any of the others; I may see it again sometime.

Double Happiness and Catfish in Black Bean Sauce. These are connected only in that they are small independent films dealing with family problems produced by cultural collisions in the United States. Each is the sort of thing I would never have picked, but which sounds interesting to my wife. They’re both quite enjoyable in a low-key way. Double Happiness deals with the conflict between a young Chinese-American woman who wants to be an actress and her staid family. Catfish is about a Vietnamese brother and sister who were adopted as orphans by an African-American soldier at the end of the Vietnam war and are now as young adults having trouble figuring out exactly where they belong, especially after their mother appears. I think I liked the second of these a little better.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. These are the 1980s BBC productions of John Le Carré’s novels, starring Alec Guiness as George Smiley. I missed them when they were televised, and find now that they’re as good as people said at the time. If you have any taste at all for Le Carré’s work and espionage stories in general, you shouldn’t miss them. Everyone of course has his own mental image of fictional characters, but I find it hard to imagine a better Smiley than Guinness.

Cover Her Face. More BBC from the 1980s, one of several dramatizations of P. D. James mysteries starring Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh. It’s great if you like this sort of thing, which I very much do. I found myself thinking that it and others like it were the last representatives of something in England, though I’m not entirely sure what the something is. It might be worth more thought; all I can say right now is that I’ve seen similar BBC mysteries produced recently—for instance the Inspector Lynley series—and there is a moral courage in the earlier works, and in the society which they depict, which is not there in the more recent ones.

Diary of a Country Priest. This is a faithful 1950 version of one of my favorite novels, and thus I feel bad about saying that it didn’t really affect me, and that I have no real explanation for that fact. Perhaps it’s that so much of the novel is interior. It’s worth seeing; maybe my reaction is idiosyncratic.

Bleak House. And yet more BBC, but recent, 2005. The BBC still does this sort of thing beautifully. I read the novel decades ago and really didn’t remember it very well, so I can’t evaluate the film’s representation of the book. But taken on its own terms it’s great: stupendously good acting and general production which certainly convince you (or me, anyway) that this is really what Victorian England was like. And of course since it’s Dickens it’s a great story.

I did have one major complaint: the claustrophobic cinematography. For far too much of the time you see only one person, in a fairly tight close-up, often around or through some object like the back of a chair or a partially closed door. When two or more people are talking you usually see only one of them at any moment. It feels like you’re watching through a keyhole. It really bothered me for the first hour or so, to the point where I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep going. Eventually I was able to ignore it, but it’s a significant defect.

The Silence, the third in Bergman’s so-called “faith trilogy,” which also includes Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly. I’ve already written about Winter Light—see the last item in this journal, and one sentence on Through a Glass Darkly here, which I stand by, though it was written in the immediate aftermath of the experience. I only recently saw The Silence. I didn’t like it as well as the other two, but have found it lingering in my mind and am wondering if I’ll change my opinion later. The Silence is about two sisters who are headed for opposing disasters: one is sick, cold, cerebral, and isolated; the other is healthy, warm, sensual, and promiscuous. Both are completely miserable. Part of my problem with the film was that the eroticism involving the second sister was so powerful that it almost crowded out everything else. It’s pretty tame by today’s standards—R-Rated, we’d say in the U.S.—and undoubtedly my reaction is partly due to the fact that I find Bergman’s women more compelling than most Hollywood sex symbols. But it’s a good thing Bergman didn’t do pornography. Still, it’s intellectually coherent and often very beautiful. I don’t quite see why it belongs with the other two, although one could say that it describes pretty well a world in which faith is no longer the object of a struggle but has been long since completely extinguished, a world without even the memory of God. And a terrible world it is.

I may write at some length about these, though it might be difficult and tedious to organize my thoughts. For the moment I’ll say that although these films are generally taken to be (and I think were said by Bergman to be) a statement of his final break with Christianity, they are a very, very ambiguous statement. Perhaps he himself did not realize how ambiguous they are. Perhaps he did not realize how much of what he was discarding was only a false conception of God, the product of an overly rigorous upbringing as the son of a Lutheran clergyman. I think he saw something of what God really is, but it didn’t occur to him that such a thing could be real, and so thought he was an atheist when he rejected the false God. Through a Glass Darkly illustrates this perfectly—I mean, consider the title (1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face…”).

The Virgin Spring. Bergman again, and one of his best, a re-telling of a medieval legend. I should warn anyone who hasn’t seen it that the central incident is a violent crime, and although, as with the eroticism of The Silence, its depiction is very tame by contemporary standards, Bergman’s artistic skill makes it very powerful.

It was just a couple of days ago that my wife and I watched this one, and I really have as yet few words for it. I think every adult Catholic should see it—well, every adult Catholic capable of appreciating non-Hollywood movies. After it was over, I had this exchange with my wife, following a long silence in which I think each of us was trying to master his emotions:

He: It’s hard to believe that was the work of an atheist.

She: I don’t understand why he did it.

He: When you get to heaven you can ask him.

Sunday Night Journal — November 2, 2008

Sehnsucht

This is a follow-up to last week’s discussion of C. S. Lewis’s concept of “joy:”  “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Someone mentioned that there is a German word, sehnsucht, for this longing, and I have been looking around a bit on the web for more information about that. There is a very good discussion of it in the Wikipedia article. A few things worth noting:

“…any attempt by the artist to evoke Sehnsucht in the viewer is likely to fail.” I’m sure this is true. No one can predict what will produce the feeling in anyone else. I’ve tried to remember my first experience of it, and I think it was a moment when I was quite young. I can’t be sure how old I was but I think it must have been no more than six, possibly a couple of years younger. I was holding an Easter basket and looking into it. It was filled with that green cellulose stuff that’s supposed to look like grass (and it did to me). Candy eggs and other Easter things lay in this grass, some buried beneath it. I suddenly saw the basket as a sort of little world and felt a strange pleasure which vanished almost as soon as it was felt. I think there was a sort of oscillation where I had the thought, had the pleasure, lost it, had the thought again, and had the pleasure again. I wanted to be in that little world, but I think it was less the desire to be in it than the thought of it as a little world that gave me the feeling. I remember having similar feelings about a Grandma Moses print that hung in our kitchen. The phrase “green pastures” once gave it to me: obviously my paradise tends to be pastoral.

“…it is a starting point for the Argument from Desire.” The argument from desire is, in a nutshell, the idea that this desire must have an object—or, as Emmylou Harris put it, “If there’s no heaven, what’s this hunger for?” I give this argument much more credit now than I would have when I was younger. As the article says, it’s not by any means a proof in any strict sense. But the counter-argument—that people imagine all sorts of things they can’t have or that don’t exist—seems to miss the essence of sehnsucht: it is not a desire for some particular object available in this world, or at least conceptually available, like, say, a spaceship capable of travel to the stars. The whole nature of it is that you know in the instant that you feel it that nothing in this world can satisfy it. Which of course doesn’t stop a lot of people from trying, going in search of ecstacies (drugs, sex, etc.) that can never satisfy the longing but may kill their ability to feel it and possibly lead them to despair. And it seems to be something we are born with, not something that comes as a sort of extension of natural desires for food and other pleasures; anyone who has felt it knows that it is not at all the same thing as, say, a desire for an unlimited supply of Wild Turkey. It’s difficult to articulate, but it seems to me that there is a real philosophical problem in trying to explain how creatures who are purely a product of this world can have developed this very definite desire for another one.

(By the way I don’t think everything that might be included in the hunger mentioned by Emmylou Harris is sehnsucht; there is a less elusive and more definite sort of desire that points heavenward: for instance, the desire for eternal life, or for the preservation or recovery of things lost in the past.)

Someone else mentioned that St. Therese of Lisieux talks about a longing that seems to be the same or very similar. Wikipedia quotes this passage:

Let me suppose that I had been born in a land of thick fogs, and had never seen the beauties of nature, or a single ray of sunshine, although I had heard of these wonders from my early youth, and knew that the country wherein I dwelt was not my real home—there was another land, unto which I should always look forward. ... From the time of my childhood I felt that one day I should be set free from this land of darkness. I believed it, not only because I had been told so by others, but my heart’s most secret and deepest longings assured me that there was in store for me another and more beautiful country.

I don’t think that in itself is sehnsucht, but it may be evidence that she experienced it.

I’m still unsure as to how widespread this phenomenon is; some people seem to recognize it immediately when it’s described, some don’t. In the comments on last week’s piece one or two people took it as referring to the direct experience of God or of God’s love. I envy them that experience, but I’ve never had it; what I recognize in Lewis’s description, and in the Wikipedia discussion, is very definitely a consciousness of something not here, something I want to see and to feel and to know but which is hopelessly distant. I’m certain that what Lewis describes is the same thing I’ve experienced.

Interestingly, my search for sehnsucht on Google turned up several pop music occurrences, most of them German, the most frequent being a song by the German industrial-metal group Rammstein. The words are a bit more sexual than I want to quote here, so I’ll leave it up to the reader to search out the song and the lyrics (which are in German), but here is the crucial part:

Longing hides
like an insect
while asleep you don't notice
that it stings you
I can't be happy anywhere
…
longing is so cruel

One of the reasons I like a lot of music and other art which is on the immediate level hostile to Christianity is that I see sehnsucht at work in it, or that (perhaps) more definite yearning that Emmylou Harris describes. I’m much more in sympathy with those who feel and express the longing, even if they don’t understand it or have any idea where to go to satisfy it, than with those who don’t seem to feel it at all. One example is my favorite heavy metal group, Tristania. I wrote about them last year, here.

Finally, I was reminded of these lines from W. S. Merwin; unfortunately I can’t remember what poem they’re from:

Tell me what you see vanishing
And I will tell you who you are.

Sehnsucht is almost unbearable, but yet it seems better to have experienced it than not, unless one has been fortunate enough to experience instead that to which it points.

Sunday Night Journal — October 26, 2008

C.S. Lewis’s Idea of Joy

I recently re-read C.S. Lewis’s autobiography Surprised by Joy, partly because I wanted to think again about the experience to which he gave the name Joy and defined as:

…an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.

I never thought joy the right word at all, but have not been able to think of a better one. That first description is exactly right, I think. But since it’s an unsatisfied desire it feels to me more like “a particular kind of unhappiness or grief;” I could almost call it Loss rather than Joy. Most of all it’s a yearning that’s almost unbearably painful, but yet it is, as Lewis says, a kind of pain we want. I’m not a masochist. The reason the pain is desirable is that it implies that the thing I’m yearning for must exist, or at least might exist. It is an effect, and every effect must have a cause. At the moment when I feel it I would give everything to attain whatever it is that the yearning points to. 

It sometimes seems like something remembered, and sometimes like something never known. Certain memories give it to me, so it’s tempting to say that it’s just nostalgia. But when I’m nostalgic I remember the past perfectly well, and remember the way I felt, which was perhaps very happy, but was still ordinary, not the heavenly sweetness which the memories give. Also I find that the memories which produce the feeling are not just any pleasant memories but what Peter DeVries calls somewhere in one of his novels “the most poignant emotion: the memory of expectation.” (I don’t think I’ve quoted that exactly but it’s close.) It’s especially powerful when the memory is of some moment which seemed to hold a promise down a road from which I later turned aside.

In other words, it’s not so much nostalgia, a memory of something once possessed, as the memory of a moment when it felt—or feels now, when I look back at it—as if the yearning could have been fulfilled. Eliot might have been thinking of this when he wrote

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

(“Burn Norton”)

Lewis says, at the end of Surprised by Joy, that after becoming a Christian he did not much dwell on this experience, which was, after all, only a signpost pointing the way, and not the destination. I can’t say that’s true for me. Perhaps my faith is weaker and I need that infusion of yearning, and the sense that it is evidence of something, more often. At any rate it’s a good thing for me that the sensation cannot be produced by a drug.

I’ve often wondered whether it’s a universal experience. Some people seem so dull, so completely fixed on the next immediate physical comfort or pleasure, that I find it hard to imagine that they ever experience it. But that’s certainly a reflection of my own limits and prejudices; my experience in getting to know people is that there’s always much more to everyone than meets the eye.

If it is a universal or at least extremely widespread phenomenon, it’s one of those facts of human experience which is of very high importance and yet is beyond both the reach and the interest of science. And this in turn explains why the sort of atheism that attempts to extrapolate the physical sciences into a total philosophy of everything seems blind and deaf about the things that matter most.

Sunday Night Journal — October 19, 2008

Madonna’s Living Death

No limited object, however beautiful, is able to appease the inner hunger that consumes you, because as soon as you possess it you have exhausted it.

—Fr. Henri-Dominique Lacordaire

I’ve found Madonna an irritating presence on the public scene ever since she appeared there. At the time, the early or mid-‘80s, I didn’t hear much pop music except what my friend Robert taped for me, and I never saw MTV, so I was aware of Madonna’s existence as a video-pop star and sex symbol only because the news media talked about her so much. And I was aware of that media presence before I heard a note of her music. When I eventually did hear “Material Girl” on the radio, I thought That’s it?! That’s what all the fuss is about? It struck me as  very ordinary and uninteresting commercial pop. Since then I suppose I’ve heard at most a few minutes of her music. Maybe some of it’s good; I know some critics take it seriously. I never tried to find out because, as I said, she irritates me.

Why? Mainly the fact that she’s used a title that properly belong to Our Lady and made it synonymous with sleaze, part of the long campaign by a segment of our society—or should I say the ongoing human effort?—to cheapen sex and separate it from love and marriage. Who knows how much damage she did to young women who took seriously her advocacy of casual sex? There was also the fact that her popularity seemed way out of proportion to her talent; even then her antics seemed to have a slightly desperate quality. The one thing that sticks in my mind from her early career, besides “Material Girl,” is a phrase from a newspaper story about her marriage—I guess it was the one to Sean Penn: “The bride, whose nude photos appeared last month in the pages of Playboy and Penthouse…” It was something Waugh might have dreamed up, another example of the self-satirizing bent of our culture.

But of course it’s hard to ignore her completely, because she had then, and still does have, the ability to keep the news media talking about her. Whenever I see a story about her latest tour I think When is she going to go away? For a few weeks or months now I’ve been seeing bizarre-looking photographs of her, and headlines about the state of her current marriage, but not bothering to read the stories—until this morning, when I saw this headline on the Drudge Report, one of a list of several Madonna-related items: Rice milk, no TV and sleeping in plastic suit covered in $1,000 cream...

Well, I couldn’t resist that bit about the plastic suit, so I clicked over and read the story.  It seems that Madonna’s life is becoming one of those spectacles so prized by the press and much of the public: the celebrity train wreck. The picture of her that accompanies this story is just plain scary. That is not a healthy human body, and unless its condition is the result of some disease it’s not the home of a healthy human mind. It made me think of the passage in The Great Divorce where a spectre who had once been an attractive woman is visiting heaven from a suburb of hell, and tries to exercise her old powers:

More than one of the Solid People tried to talk to her, and at first I was quite at a loss to understand her behaviour to them. She appeared to be contorting her all but invisible face and writhing her smokelike body in a quite meaningless fashion. At last I came to the conclusion—incredible as it seemed—that she supposed herself still capable of attracting them and was trying to do so…. In the end she muttered “Stupid creatures,” and turned back to the bus.

I’m not proud to admit that my first reaction to the account of Madonna’s desperate effort to stay young was a certain pleasure. This was partly the schadenfreude that makes us ordinary folk tend to enjoy the sufferings of the rich, famous, and powerful, and partly something more personal having to do with my old resentment of this person in particular. Ah, reality is finally catching up with her, I thought.

But that was quickly replaced by something else that had both pity and horror in it. This woman has everything that the world can offer, and even though she must know by now that it can’t satisfy her or make her happy, her life is dominated by the need to hold on to it. Worse, she’s beginning to understand that she can’t hold on to it forever. I began to sense the terror of time, of death, and ultimately of insignificance that must drive such extreme behavior. I am certainly no stranger to that fear, and I wonder what it might drive me to if I had Madonna’s money and had spent most of my adult life being adored by crowds.

What we see in Madonna is an exaggerated version of the drive that all human beings experience to hold on to a life that must inevitably pass away. The portrait in that story, and I don’t mean only the photo, is of living death. Even from a purely earthly point of view there is a sort of psychological law expressed in “He that finds his life shall lose it.” The more desperately you try to thwart the passing of your life, the less you really possess it. One wonders if Madonna is capable of experiencing a single moment of honest untroubled pleasure.

Surely great wealth and power must only make more desperate the struggle to stop time; you would have more to cling to, and be more accustomed to having things your way, than most people. There’s probably a lesson here for all of us who live in the industrialized world, who have wealth and comfort undreamed of by most of our ancestors. One begins to think that the story about the camel and the needle’s eye is not only a matter of morality but also of something like—pardon the expression—spiritual physics. It’s impossible for you to get there carrying all that. I suppose one reason for old age is to make it ever more difficult for us to hang on—or, to put it positively, easier for us to let go. Although I personally am not finding it in the least easy.