It appears all too frequently: an account of a child horribly abused, tortured or raped or murdered or all three. There’s one in the news right now. I’m not going to link to it—if you’re in the US, you’ve probably seen it; if not, well, just take my word for it that it’s horrible, and you can probably supply an example of your own. This little girl’s body was found in a plastic storage box washed up on an island off Texas, and the police called her Baby Grace for a while, until investigation established her identity and put her mother and stepfather in jail. But I find it very difficult to find any grace in this story.

I wrote Sunday that “Meaningless and severe suffering is almost intolerable to contemplate....” This is the sort of thing I had in mind. I’m not a saintly person; there are all sorts of crimes I can understand, maybe even imagine myself committing, if I were pushed hard enough: the ones that involve losing one’s temper, and even the really stupid and pointless ones, the sort that seems to happen around here every now and then, when two acquaintances get into a drunken argument and one ends up shooting the other. But I will never, never understand how anyone can deliberately harm a child.

I must believe that there is some meaning in what happened to Baby Grace, but I certainly don’t see it. On the way to work this morning I was listening to the Irish band Solas. Not looking at the song titles, I was surprise to hear them covering the Tom Waits song “Georgia Lee,” which is about a murdered girl.

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there
For Georgia Lee?

I believe God was there, and watching, and listening. I even believe he felt the pain of Baby Grace. We tend to think of him as being above our suffering, but I think rather that he feels every pain in the universe, but can bear it without any diminution of his joy, because while the pain is finite his joy is infinite.

So I’m left with the question “Why didn’t he stop it?” And no answer comes. I, and you, are left with a simple and stark choice: we can either believe there is some meaning here, or that there is not. Neither reason nor evidence can supply an answer for us. It’s as close to a pure choice of the will as we can get—a pure act of faith in the Crucified, whose suffering also appeared meaningless when it happened, if the answer is yes.

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My Head Hurts

I really don’t feel like thinking very hard about anything tonight, so I thought I’d tell you about my headache.

It’s a sort of quasi- or semi-migraine that I get sometimes. It was present when I woke up this morning and nothing I could have done would have made it go away until four or five in the afternoon; this is the way it always works. Now, around nine, the pain is mostly gone, but I still feel vague and shaky. I know of a few things that can bring this on—certain foods eaten late in the evening, for instance—but sometimes the cause is not clear. When I’m going to have one I usually wake up sometime around three or four in the morning knowing that it’s coming. Sometimes taking three aspirin then will quell it, sometimes not: last night, not.

I’ve known people who have real migraines, and this isn’t as bad as some of those. I had a co-worker once who could get them at any time and if he felt one coming on during the work day he had to call his wife to drive him home. I can function with mine, more or less. But I’d much rather not. It’s not just the headache itself—there’s an overall feeling of weakness and sickness and a curious sensation of being somehow out of touch with everything, including my own body. It hurts to use my eyes. It hurts to use my mind (and I wonder what the mechanism of that is? what goes on in the brain that causes thinking to produce physical pain?).

So I puttered around this morning, feeding animals, eating breakfast, reading part of the newspaper (including, masochistically, the account of last night’s wretched Alabama-Auburn game). Then I spent several hours on the couch, occasionally reading a bit until my head hurt too much, attempting to read again when I got too bored, occasionally drifting into a half-sleep.

There was one useful thing I could do, though, one that’s always available in any unpleasant situation as long as at least a little consciousness and will remain: I could offer my bit of pain to God, in reparation for my own sins and on behalf of all those I love.

Although there is plenty of warrant for this form of prayer in the New Testament, it’s very much a Catholic thing that most Protestants don’t go in for (I don’t know about the Orthodox). I suppose it sounds too much like salvation by works for traditional Protestants, and just sort of weird and primitive to liberal Protestants. Which is unfortunate, because even on the most pragmatic grounds it’s a very useful practice: one isn’t generally allowed to see what effect it may have in the lives of those for whom one prays, but it benefits immediately the one who prays.

You have to willfully ignore human psychology in order not to see that the need for purpose, in small things and great, ranks below only the most fundamental requirements of the body in importance. We instinctively despise meaningless activity, even if it isn’t painful. Meaningless and severe suffering is almost intolerable to contemplate, much less to experience. But to make any pain or unhappiness or discomfort something offered to God as a prayer gives it a purpose that instantly makes it much easier to bear.

This is one of many instances in which Catholic belief, which seems at first glance the most difficult to accept, full of doctrines which seem to fly in the face of everyday practical sense and to be in opposition to much of what we want, is surprisingly well fitted to the deepest structure of the human psyche. It doesn’t offer a simple or easy intellectual resolution of the problem of suffering, or promise to put an end to it in this life. But it gives us a way to turn it into an act of love. I hope that if the time ever comes that I must suffer in earnest, I’ll have the will and the ability to use this gift.

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Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle

When it was released in 1968, I read some reviews that praised Song Cycle as a revolutionary masterpiece and Van Dyke Parks as a genius— this Rolling Stone review appears to have been contemporary, and gives you a good idea of the reception I remember. But it didn’t sell very well, which came as no surprise to anyone who heard it. In fact, considering how much it must have cost to make, it’s amazing that it ever saw the light of day, and, I suppose, a tribute to the adventurousness of some record companies at the time. I seem to recall having to look for a while to find a copy, and after listening to it a few times thought, “Well, that’s interesting,” and as far as I can remember never listened to it again until a few weeks ago, when Parks’s beautiful arrangements on Joanna Newsom’s Ys prompted me to dig out my old LP of Song Cycle, clean it up, and digitize it.

The result is that I’ve heard it as if for the first time. Yet my basic opinion is more or less the same as it was almost forty years ago: interesting. It’s more interesting than I gave it credit for at the time, partly because the recorded sound isn’t that good, at least on this LP, and there’s a lot of important detail that I would have missed in hearing it on my little portable stereo. It’s a sort of brilliant pastiche of American musical styles, and technically on a level far above most pop music, but it leaves me thinking that it’s more brilliant than profound. The lyrics are a problem, consisting of Joycean wordplay that for the most part doesn’t really add up to much:

Cracks in the heat and then caught by the wheel catch the country store feel for the hackamore crew view the crackerbare coterie standing by. One line bred randyrand and too few wretched meals.

Whatever. Ultimately it seems light, much of it merely playful. But really, it’s worth hearing; I can’t think of anything else in its class. I imagine there’s a remastered CD version around that does more justice to its complexity and nuance.

(By the way, here is my review of Ys.)

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My old friend Daniel has an excellent post on Judee Sill over at the Caelum et Terra blog. If you can play YouTube videos, be sure to use the link at the end to see the video he's talking about and hear the song, which is one of Sill's best, and that's saying a lot.

Also, this Sunday Night Journal from a couple of years ago is about her.

You can tell I'm off work because I'm blogging at 12:15AM. (See time stamp on previous post, too.)

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I've been away for Thanksgiving Day—will take up some of the topics in the comments sometime on Friday. Hope all of you in the USA, which I think is the vast majority of people who read this blog, had a good holiday. I find that being congenitally pessimistic actually makes me more thankful—I can so easily imagine things being so much worse, and am very thankful that they are not.

This however does not prevent me from complaining disproportionately about those small irritations that do come my way. I'm working on that, but not very successfully.

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I thought this merited emphasis and a separate discussion. Francesca Murphy brought up this New Criterion article by Mark Steyn in which he describes the omnipresence of pop music in public places as turning our lives into "a movie with a bad sound track."

Steyn is writing in the context of a New Criterion retrospective on the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. I subscribe to the NC but had not yet read any of the six or seven articles in the retrospective. Have been considering them uneasily, in fact, because I haven't read Closing, and frankly don't really want to, but also don't want to read the retrospectives without having read the book. Why don't I want to read the book? From what I know of it, it seems to be a sort of secular conservative attack on the decay of American (and European?) culture. And although I would no doubt agree with a lot of it, it seems to me that an appraisal of this sort is bound to miss much that's important if it isn't made from a Christian persepective, or at least with a deep understanding of that perspective, and of the place of Christianity in shaping our culture.

But anyway: I did read the Steyn piece last night, and am in substantial agreement with it. I take his main point to be the destructive effect of pop music being the only music most people know. This, I think, is an important point about what's gone wrong:

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

And this is just hilarious:

But Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you.... This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar.

I consider myself very fortunate, by the way, that I'm not very often in places where music is forced on me in this way. If I worked in some sort of bullpen where it was impossible to escape the radio, I'd...well, I don't know what I'd do, but it wouldn't be pretty.

However: with all that said, I make no apologies for my own love of popular music. Obviously I believe there's a lot of really fine art being made in that area, and I agree with Francesca that life would be less rich without the best of it. And I don't suffer from the top-of-the-iceberg syndrome Steyn describes. I even think it's possible—possible, mind you; this is not something of which I feel certain—that some of it will outlast a lot of our serious fiction, poetry, and classical music (using "classical" in the sense of art-music made by composers who see themselves as part of the classical tradition). Our pop music is a sort of half-folk art, and it isn't at the level of, say, Four Quartets. But it's not absurd to compare it to folk ballads composed and modified anonymously hundreds of years ago and still sung today.

(By the way: I'm off work today, in case you're wondering why I have time to write at such length on a Wednesday.)

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I was going to post something by and about Judee Sill as a follow-up to the surprisingly active discussion about female musicians. Sill is one of the major figures in this category, even though she only released two full albums. But Daniel tells me he's going to post something about her on the Caelum et Terra blog soon (I'll link to it here when he does—I'm not sure how many people read both). So I'll await his post, and have thought of something else that rather knocks me out.

If you've watched any football this fall, you've probably heard a bit of this song: it makes a ten or fifteen second appearance in that insurance commercial that features people doing nice things for other people (which of course is the only thing insurance companies are interested in). I noticed it on the second or third hearing of the commercial, and on the fourth or fifth I thought "That's rather nice—I wonder who it is." And then I realized that I was refraining from muting the commercial just so I could hear the ten or fifteen seconds, and at that point I went looking for it.

It's a group called Hem, and the song is "The Part Where You Let Go." I think it's great:

I don't think the group produced the video, so it may not stay around permanently. In my search for information about the song, I think I read somewhere that it was written by one of the male members of the band. But I don't think it would be the same with a male vocal.

I also found out that a lot of people have sought it out because of that commercial, as you can tell from this on eMusic. Here is the band's web site—you can hear more, and buy the cd, there.

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Women, Music, and Modernity

“You’re into girls.”

That was the startling but not inaccurate remark my wife made last Saturday when she walked by as I was browsing YouTube for Patty Griffin songs. Since 90% of my music listening is done when I’m alone in my car going to and from work, and she is constitutionally pretty indifferent to pop music anyway, I was a little surprised that she would notice any sort of trend. I guess it had come to her attention a few Saturdays earlier when I was repeatedly playing that Nightwish video featuring Tarja Turunen that I posted recently.

Anyway, she’s right. I do listen to a lot more music by women, from very American singer-songwriters like Griffin to Nordic metal sirens, than I did fifteen or twenty years ago. For most of the many years, going back to the mid-‘60s, that I’ve been seriously interested in music, my favorite singers have been male. I didn’t give this any thought for a long time, but at some point I became aware that it was a definite preference. Male singers, especially those with really distinctive and unconventional voices, like Van Morrison, were the ones who moved me. Theirs were the voices capable of conveying the emotions I felt. Most women’s voices seemed, in comparison, almost insipid: pastels, where I preferred strong and vivid colors.

I’m not sure exactly when this began to change; it may have been around 1990 or so, when I discovered the Cocteau Twins: I liked Elisabeth Fraser’s voice precisely as a female voice. And I remember thinking something along those lines when listening to Portishead’s Dummy. At any rate, the shift in taste continued steadily. I don’t know that one can expect to have an explanation for a change of this sort, but I can say this much about it: where I once preferred the male voice because it’s more capable of expressing what I feel, I now value (I won’t say “prefer”) the female voice in part because it expresses something else, something that seems mysterious and other. It is, in fact, a bit similar to the sight of a beautiful woman, but sexual only in the very broadest sense: a consciousness of the other sex as a rich and alluring mystery.

The music world has changed, too: there are a lot more women making a lot more good music in a lot more different styles than there were thirty or forty years ago. Back in the ‘60s women were generally present only as singers. In the folk-singing world, there were Joan Baez and Judy Collins and others like them who sang the traditional repertoire and, as time went on, more and more songs written by the emerging mostly male singer-songwriters of the time. In rock, the girl, or girls, in the band worked generally in the “canary” model of the jazz era—they added something different and distinctive to the sound, and of course to the visual presence, but they usually didn’t compose or arrange or play; the musical vision as a whole was at most only partly theirs. I suppose Joni Mitchell was the first, certainly one of the first, women to put the whole singer-writer-instrumentalist package together. More followed, until the present flood. Women like Emmylou Harris and Patty Griffin and Karen Peris (of The Innocence Mission) have recently produced, or had a key role in producing (a role beyond singing, that is) some of the music I love best and think most likely to stand the test of time.

This isn’t surprising, considering the general and steady increase in freedom and opportunity for women that’s happened over the past hundred-plus years, developments made possible by the combination of technical and social changes that we call modernity. As a Catholic with a deep love of the traditional Christian culture of the West, I’m very much aware of the dark side of these changes: the damage to family life, for instance, and all the other things that I don’t need to belabor here. Yet the world is a richer place for the work of these artists, and unfortunately we don’t get a chance to pick which aspects of our culture we would like to preserve and which to change or discard.

I was thinking of this last week after reading a news story about a woman in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail after being gang-raped. It was carefully explained that she wasn’t actually being punished for being raped, but for her behavior leading up to the rape: being present in a car with a male who was not her father, brother, or husband. A few days earlier I had read an account of the practice of stoning in Iran; it’s a legal punishment for adultery. I cannot conceive of the mind of a man who could bury a woman up to her neck and then throw stones at her until she is dead, which must involve battering her head beyond recognition. (The stones can’t be too small, or they won’t do enough damage, but they can’t be too big, or the victim will not suffer enough.) I don’t understand how a man could do such a thing to a woman and still respect himself as a man. Even less do I understand what is probably the case, that these men would not respect themselves if they did not do it.

I don’t agree with those who say that we, as a civilization, are faced with a stark choice between embracing the worst of our own culture and submitting to radical Islam; I don’t see why we can’t try to reform ourselves even as we resist them. But if I am ever somehow forced to choose between modernity and the violent reaction against it, I’ll unhesitatingly take the problems of emancipation over those of oppression.

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Bob Marley & The Wailers: The Complete Upsetter Singles 1970-1972

I’m actually talking about the first volume of this two-disk set here; the second disk seems to be dub versions—mostly-instrumental “remixes,” as they would be called today—of some of the songs on the first disk. (Since eMusic charges per song, I’ve downloaded only the first disk.)

This material pre-dates the Island records heyday of Marley and the Wailers. In fact, as best I can tell from a little bit of reading on AMG and Wikipedia, it was probably originally credited only to The Wailers. It’s simpler and cruder and not as well recorded as the Island stuff, but in some ways I like it better. The Island sound is slicker, thicker, more complex, maybe overall a bit slower, with more varied instrumentation. I’ve read that it was consciously aimed at the rock audience in England and the U.S. But although albums like Natty Dread are indisputable classics, I miss in them a certain lilt and lightness. And besides, I tend to like music that’s a little rough around the edges. These tracks are definitely that. This is reggae of the sort produced by artists who did not, at least at the time, become big stars outside Jamaica; it’s the sound you hear on much of the classic reggae anthology, The Harder They Come. In other words, it’s about as irresistible as pop music gets, if you ask me. Of course it has the weird mixture of hedonism, eccentric religion, and politics that characterized reggae at the time. Watch out—when you listen to the music, it can all begin to seem plausible.

Check out the samples at eMusic. Or this complete song on YouTube (I think this is the same take), “Small Axe.”.

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...about the origin of the universe: in a comment a day or two ago, Jack quoted this from Benedict XVI's Introduction to Christianity. I think it deserves emphasis:

Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, of a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence.

One of many things that occur to me on reading this is that if you really make it your foundational premise for looking at the world, the whole evolution-vs.-creation controversy just sort of disappears. It remains interesting, to be sure, for those with the intellectual urge to look further into how it all developed.

More importantly, I don't see how one can believe this and contemplate it without experiencing a sense of joy. It is inconceivable that the One who brings all else into existence is not more than they in every respect, including goodness, and that he would not will their ultimate good, however long and dark the road might be upon which he has set them. In my end is my beginning says Eliot (I forget where he borrowed it from). And it seems to me that the end, in the sense of ultimate purpose, of all things is implied in this statement about their beginnings. And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

This was written forty years ago when Benedict was just Josef Ratzinger, a theologian. Presumably it was written in German, and that term "being-thought" is probably one of those German compounds that often strike me as faintly comical: "Dasein-gedanke" or something.

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Driving a tractor.

Those were the days: driving in circles or stripes for hours at a time, smoking cigarettes, thinking about whatever I wanted to, having baloney and crackers and an RC for lunch, now and then enjoying a summer rain. Yes, it was usually hot and dusty, but my thoughts were my own.

And best of all, there was no possibility whatsoever that I would have to cope with an aggrieved subordinate weeping in my office.

Of course it only paid $6 a day.

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The following is a reasonably accurate transcript of an actual conversation that took place at my house recently:

He: This silly management training thing we're doing at work...it tries to put people into one of four boxes based on a few questions. But of course it's not very accurate. I mean, some of the things in my category apply to me, but not all.

She: ?

He: For instance, my category includes "perfectionist," which I'm really not.

She: Well, I don't know, I can sort of see that. You're not a perfectionist in most ways, but you are about some things.

He: ?

She: You're a perfectionist about what words you use--you always want to be absolutely precise.

He (totally oblivious to the implication of what he's about to say): Mmm....yeah, I guess...but..."perfectionist" is not exactly the right word.

She: [collapses in laughter]

He: ?!...oh....

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Inappropriate Use of the Word “Inappropriate”

Sometime in the past month or two over on the Thursday Night Gumbo blog (see link in sidebar at right), in a thread that I’m too lazy to try to locate now, Francesca Murphy observed that people who use the word “inappropriate” are generally fascists, or at least control freaks. I laughed first, and then applauded, because I think she has a point.

This is one of those small but significant ways in which bad language both reflects and fosters bad thinking. It’s been some years now since I began to notice myself reacting to it with what first seemed to be an unreasonable irritation. I finally realized that it annoyed me because people were using it as a substitute for “wrong.” In a time when the existence of objective moral standards is doubted and denied, and when no one wants to be accused of being judgmental, it’s very bad form to say that anything short of mass murder is just plain wrong; mass murder, and perhaps racism.

But yet: order must be maintained. People in authority (or those who just wish they were) still need and desire to tell other people what to do. How can they justify it, if they can’t appeal to some standard which is eventually rooted in the concept of right and wrong? “Inappropriate” became the solution. There may be no right and wrong, but appropriate and inappropriate remain. This was crystallized for me in something I read some years back, which I would never be able to locate now. A teacher whose subject involved ethics stated with obvious pride that he instructed his students that no one had the right to tell them what is right and what is wrong. The interviewer asked—mischievously, perhaps—whether that approach might make classroom discipline difficult. Replied the teacher, “I tell them that as the teacher I decide what is appropriate and inappropriate.”

In other words, there is no objective standard for behavior in his classroom, merely his personal preference, which is enforceable on others purely because he holds the power. It’s not necessarily wrong to disrupt the class, but it is against his will. The parent’s exasperated “Because I said so” is elevated to metaphysical legitimacy. It really is not so far-fetched to see the ethics of totalitarianism in this. For me it conjures Nurse Ratchet, or a bad schoolteacher: the tight-lipped enforcer of petty rules which are their own justification. Why it should seem less oppressive to submit one’s will to what is “appropriate”—by definition a floating standard, determined only by context—than to an objective standard of right and wrong is a mystery to me.

One place where this term pops up again and again is in the context of the sexual molestation of children: “inappropriate touching,” etc. One wonders: under what conceivable conditions would it be “appropriate” for an adult to touch a child sexually?

Another frequent usage is in relation to racial insults (imagined or real, trivial or serious). One of these occurred in a federal agency a week or two ago. An employee had worn a racially charged costume to a party. The head of the agency was instantly in trouble, and vowed to punish the offender: “We do not tolerate inappropriate behavior at DHS,” she said. (Story here).

A benign interpretation of this use of the word, I suppose, is that the people involved really know that the offense is not truly wrong; it’s only bad manners or poor judgment. But “do not tolerate” is pretty strong. The implication is that the offender could lose his job or be subject to some other fairly serious punishment. For something that is merely “inappropriate”? If it’s only inappropriate, the punishment is grotesquely disproportionate. But if it’s seriously wrong, why not say so?

Using ketchup as the base for barbecue sauce is inappropriate. But as strongly as I might feel about that, I don’t think those who do it should be subject to legal penalties. At least not on the first offense.

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Patty Griffin: Impossible Dream

Patty Griffin can do everything. She has one of the best voices in popular music, going with apparent effortlessness from a fully sung whisper to a bluesy croon to a roof-lifting shout to a Dolly Parton warble. If she chose to specialize in blues or country or rock, she’d be in the first rank of the genre; instead she pulls them all into her own style (which generally gets her lumped into the “singer-songwriter” category, but that doesn’t begin to describe her). And she’s not one of those sad songbirds gifted with a tremendous physical talent but little or no artistic sense. She’s a gifted writer, and I’ve deliberately left the prefix “song-“ off that word. Popular music is almost as much a lyrical art as a musical one, and like a good poet or novelist she has a deep and powerful artistic vision, and the judgment to shape it effectively.

This is the fourth of her studio albums. Unusually for me, I’ve heard them in the order they were released, and I think this is the best (there’s one more, Children Running Through, that I haven’t heard yet). I might have to make room for it on my desert island list. Even more than was the case with its predecessor, 1000 Kisses, everything seems important and in its proper place, so that the lesser songs like “The Rowing Song” still seem as if they should be here, and right where they are. I’m not going to say much about the emotional territory the album covers; you really have to hear it. Like the two Emmylou Harris albums I was raving about a few weeks ago, this one reaches way down. I don’t even want to name standout tracks, except to say that if you can listen to “Mother of God” without getting choked up you’re tougher than I am.

I spent a little while looking for a YouTube clip to serve as an introduction for those who haven’t heard her, and didn’t find anything from this album that really shows what her voice can do—all I could find were concert clips with terrible sound. But here’s the opening track. It’s pretty straightforward musically, and unrepresentative in that it’s the most up-tempo song on a generally meditative album, but the sound is decent and the lyrics are a good indication of the album’s general theme: the dream may be impossible, but she isn’t giving up on it.

Samples of all songs available at the album’s eMusic page

Several full songs at MySpace, though none from this album.

By the way, I have trouble believing that she grew up in Maine. This is not what I would expect music from New England to sound like. I would have bet heavily that she was a southerner.

(And thanks to Robert for introducing me to her music.)

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No, not Russell—Rashaan Roland. I seem to be getting into the habit of posting a music video every weekend. One of my offspring sent me this one. As I said to him, I heard a little of Kirk’s music years ago, and I knew he was playing two horns, but it’s another thing to see him do it, as in this 1975 clip (not embeddable, so you’ll have to click on the link). It isn’t just a gimmick, either—I mean, he’s actually playing something worth playing.

Another (wind-instrument-playing) offspring points out that he is also doing circular breathing, meaning that he’s simultaneously taking in and expelling air.

That’s McCoy Tyner on piano. For non-jazz fans: he was the pianist on the John Coltrane’s recordings which are sort of the Beethoven late quartets of jazz.

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I first read Love in the Ruins around 1976 or 1977, and I think I was completely enchanted by the time I reached the second page, where the following paragraph appears. I’ve remembered it ever since as the first of many instances of Percy’s gift for portraying the deep South with a vivid and accurate sweetness very different from the work of the other big Southerners (Faulkner et.al.). In this case it’s the immediate physical sense of a summer afternoon in the damp and luxuriant Gulf Coast region, not the dusty inland a couple of hundred miles north. If you’ve read the book you’ll remember that the narrator is hiding near an interstate highway at 5pm on the fourth of July. Although he doesn’t say so, I feel safe in assuming this to be I-12, north of Lake Ponchartrain, near Covington, where Percy lived.

It is still hot as midafternoon. The sky is a clear rinsed cobalt after the rain. Wet pine growth reflects the sunlight like steel knitting needles. The grove steams and smells of turpentine. Far away the thunderhead, traveling fast, humps over the horizon like a troll. Directly above, a hawk balances on a column of air rising from the concrete geometry of the cloverleaf. Not a breath stirs.

As I was writing this, I remembered that a visit to Covington had been the subject of a Sunday Night Journal a couple of years ago. I looked it up and was amused, but not surprised, to see that I had quoted that same paragraph in it. Click here if you’re interested.

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My son-in-law, Gabe Tynes, a very fine photographer, took this rather chilly-looking picture of a sunflower. You can click on the image for a bigger version at his Flickr site. I think it's a sort of deliberately lo-fi effect (to use an audio term) obtained by using a cheap camera.

When I saw it I immediately thought of Blake's poem:

Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun

I'm not a great admirer of Blake, or even enthusiastic about this poem as a whole, but I love those two lines.

An hour or so north of here is a little town called Sunflower. You pass it going up Highway 43, through a somewhat depressed-looking area which is home to a lot of chemical plants, and you can't help thinking of the bright future that must have been envisioned by its founders. Its existence is noted only by one forlorn street sign that stands beside the highway, looking very weary of time. One of these days I'll take the time to have a look at it, hoping that its name is not as ironic as the surrounding area would lead one to expect.

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Sounds like a suicide attack to me. They're testing our defenses. I've always known they couldn't be trusted.

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The relationship of the human will to God’s is a puzzle upon which theologians have expended a great deal of labor. With all due respect for that labor, I’ve never felt very satisfied with the attempt to make it comprehensible to human reason. Among other things, it raises the problem of free will, which I think is humanly insoluble. While browsing in Charles Williams’ All Hallows’ Eve the other day after mentioning it here, I came upon the following sentence, which refers to someone who has just been given a task that is clearly God’s will for her:

The act was to be hardly hers, yet without her it could not be.

I plan to hold on to this. It is as much as I need to know on the subject, and perhaps as much as I can know.

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Fear of Beauty

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure….

What he has to say now is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

—John Berryman, #1 from 77 Dream Songs

Berryman’s reaction is the natural one, the one the natural man must come to in the end. The world will, finally, disappoint you and break your heart. Nothing particularly calamitous is required; the passage of time is sufficient. That image of the sea wearing on the land is particularly significant to me, because the little strip of Mobile Bay beach which is near my house and which I deeply love is continually being eroded.

Attachment to the world is deprecated in both the Christian and Buddhist traditions. As I understand it, the Buddha’s great insight—and I think it’s perfectly accurate from the natural point of view—was that attachment to anything at all is the cause of suffering. Unable to conceive of an individual consciousness which would not experience attachment, he envisioned a condition of perfect non-attachment in which the individual would disappear into the One (I hope I’m not over-simplifying this). And Christian scripture is full of warnings against caring for the things of this world; the world is the phrase used over and over again in reference to everything in earthly life which can hold our attention and devotion and keep us away from God. Sometimes we seem to forget that it refers not only to sinful things but to good things as well, and I think that tendency is especially pronounced among those of us who live in the material comfort of the industrialized world.

And yet there is also John 3:16: “For God so loved the world….” There must be a way to love the world properly, in imitation of God. Natural love for it will be disappointed and can in fact lead to the forgetting of God and the loss of one’s soul. But there is a supernatural love for it, the love demonstrated by God which we can and should echo, as we echo his creative power in our arts. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…” Well, we know what happened to the son when he came into our world. We can love the world, but we must love it with the knowledge that we will be hurt by it, and with the willingness to be hurt. The pain in fact constitutes a proof of the love.

Buddhism is right, as far as it goes, about attachment. It should have no trouble understanding the inevitability of the Crucifixion. But it knows nothing of the Resurrection, not only because it knows no God but because the unaided human mind could hardly be expected even to conceive that God, the God revealed to Jews and Christians who is not a being but Being itself, would enter his own creation and suffer at its hands.

Because of the Resurrection, we can give ourselves to the world in love. We can never possess it; that’s in the nature of things, as the Buddha saw, and the desire to possess it is one aspect of the temptation against which the scriptural warnings about the world are directed. And we must not allow ourselves to be possessed by it; we must not surrender our souls to it; that’s the other aspect of the temptation. But we can open our hearts to it, and offer ourselves to the pain it will inevitably bring us, and hope that this offering will somehow work for its salvation as well as our own.

I came across this passage from Pope John XIII recently, part of a list of things that he intended to do “only for today.”

Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness.

This struck me as mildly surprising, coming from a pope. Why should he consider fear an obstacle to the enjoyment of beauty and the belief in goodness? This suggests to me that he would have understood Berryman, as well as the Buddha, but that he knows something they don’t. His counsel that we should not be ruled by the fear of loss and disappointment is a direct result of hope in the Resurrection; hope engenders courage. I hear that hope is the subject of Benedict XVI’s next encyclical, and I’m looking forward to it.

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I expect that the number of people who read this blog and are also interested in last night's defeat of Alabama by LSU is somewhere between zero and very small. (For you non-USA readers: I'm talking about football--American football--the University of Alabama, and Louisiana State University.) Still, I have to pass on the best description of it I've heard, from my friend Robert: "LSU tried to give away the game, but we weren't quite good enough to take it."

It would have been less painful if we had not come so close to winning. But now that I've finished grieving and LSU is number 2 in the country, I am officially rooting for them to end up as number 1. For I am nothing if not a regional chauvinist.

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Swans: The Burning World

For reasons not known to me this group is called “Swans,” not “The Swans.” I had heard of them here and there, usually described in terms such as “dark,” “scary,” “aggressive,” “noisy,” and so forth: terms which don’t exactly attract me but make me curious. I wouldn’t have gone to much trouble or expense to seek them out, but a few years ago when cassettes were disappearing from the stores I picked this out of a bin of two-dollar items, expecting to discard it after a few listens.

Rather to my surprise, I found not the noise and screaming I expected but a fairly gentle, almost folk-rock sort of sound. Both musically and lyrically this music falls somewhere in the general area of Nick Cave’s more reflective side and Leonard Cohen. Principal singer and mastermind Michael Gira has a deep baritone voice much like Cave’s in its quieter moments. The songs are excellent, with (again) comparisons to Cave and Cohen brought to mind by the combination of melancholy, free-floating mysticism, and a sort of broadly erotic component, in which woman appears as an archetype of the mysterious (e.g. “Mona Lisa, Mother Earth”). The voice of female singer Jarboe on several tracks emphasizes the masculine-feminine dynamic; she sings a really beautiful cover of Steve Winwood’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.” My only real complaint is that the emotional trajectory of the lyrics is downward, from the first (and possibly best) track, “The River That Runs With Love Won’t Run Dry,” to the last, despairing song “God D**n the Sun,” a candidate for the “skip” button if only to prevent that refrain from resonating in one’s head when the album is over.

According to the very negative (1.5 stars!) AMG review, the group was not happy with this album, considering it too toned-down or too polished or something. That review suggests that someone who likes this album might not care for their others, so I don’t know that I’ll seek out anything else by them, but I rather like this one. I would, however, strongly dis-recommend it to anyone who is actually tempted by despair.

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I remember vividly the first time I heard Nick Drake. It was in the mid-’70s, probably ’75 or ’76. I had gone over to visit my friend Robert, whom I had known for two or three years at that point; he had already introduced me to some good music and has continued to do so over the years since. “I’ve got something you should hear,” he said. He gave me a chair that was well-positioned to get the best from his very good stereo system and put on “River Man.” I was transfixed.

Usually if I like something very, very much on first hearing, I get a bit less enthusiastic later on. And it often happens that music which doesn’t particularly grab me at first becomes a lasting favorite. It’s pretty rare for me to be knocked out on the first hearing and just as much so after dozens of hearings and the passage of thirty years. But so it has been with "River Man" and Nick Drake’s other best work.

If you’re new to Drake’s work, or if you know the song but haven’t seen this video, I suggest you not click on this link until you can give it your attention. I generally dislike music videos but this one is very good (at least). YouTube doesn’t allow it to be embedded, so click here.

And here, embeddable, is another of my favorites, “Northern Sky”:

If you’re new to this music, and you like it enough to go and buy one of Drake’s albums, you aren’t going to want to stop there, so you may as well go ahead and purchase the collection Fruit Tree, which contains his three completed albums and some uncollected tracks, several of which are excellent.

You can read the story of his all-too-brief career here at AMG. I notice that this summary emphasizes the depressed quality of his work, but that’s by no means its only dimension, and arguably not, in the end, the most significant.

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I pay more attention to All Souls’ Day than to All Saints’, because I feel a more direct personal involvement in it. We’re forbidden to judge the state of another’s soul, but we (or at least I) can’t help having some kind of opinion. And I’m not entirely at ease about many of my deceased relatives, not because they were wicked people, but because they were either passively or actively estranged from God. I think in particular of one relative who died, as far as I know, still in the great bitterness that had possessed her for some years. I feel a great duty to pray for them, and find the belief that my prayers matter very comforting. I also find it deeply comforting to hope that I’ll be the beneficiary of similar prayers in my time.

That of course doesn’t make the belief true, but it’s another instance of the way that, even from the earthly point of view, so many of the heart’s deepest questions and impulses are answered by the Catholic faith.

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Although it’s a couple of days late, I thought this fellow, my wife’s creation, deserved a little publicity. He got very little attention on Halloween night, since our house is a little out of the way and we don’t get trick-or-treaters or even passers-by.

I think he was just miraculously transformed from a holiday ornament to a vigil light.

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