This post is more than a year and a half overdue. It’s connected with this one from November 2007, which mentioned the little town, or alleged town, of Sunflower, Alabama. In the other post I noted that “its existence is noted only by one forlorn street sign that stands beside the highway, looking very weary of time.”

Well, here’s the sign. My gracious wife took this picture for me a few weeks after the first post, but, typically, my attention (what there is of it) moved to other things and I didn’t do it.

(Click for larger image, as usual.) The strange thing about this sign is that not only are there are no sunflowers, there doesn’t appear to be any town. (Non-U.S. readers: signs like this normally indicate the name of a place.) There’s something a little sad but also a little brave and hopeful about it. No, there aren’t any sunflowers, but maybe one day there will be.

This post is more than a year and a half overdue. It’s connected with this one from November 2007, which mentioned the little town, or alleged town, of Sunflower, Alabama. In the other post I noted that “its existence is noted only by one forlorn street sign that stands beside the highway, looking very weary of time.”

Well, here’s the sign. My gracious wife took this picture for me a few weeks after the first post, but, typically, my attention (what there is of it) moved to other things and I didn’t do it.

(Click for larger image, as usual.) The strange thing about this sign is that not only are there are no sunflowers, there doesn’t appear to be any town. (Non-U.S. readers: signs like this normally indicate the name of a place.) There’s something a little sad but also a little brave and hopeful about it. No, there aren’t any sunflowers, but maybe one day there will be.

At All Manner of Thing. I meant to link to this a week or so ago when it first appeared, but got busy and forgot about it. Be sure to click on the “Any questions?” link and read CERN’s Q&A about the movie.

At All Manner of Thing. I meant to link to this a week or so ago when it first appeared, but got busy and forgot about it. Be sure to click on the “Any questions?” link and read CERN’s Q&A about the movie.

My diocese is one of those in which what should be Ascension Thursday is celebrated on the following Sunday (which always reminds me of Churchy La Femme saying “Friday the 13^th come on a Monday this month.”). So when my wife and I went to Mass on the evening of Ascension Thursday, we heard not the Ascension reading, but John 16:16-20, of which this is an excerpt:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“A little while and you will no longer see me,
and again a little while later and you will see me.”
So some of his disciples said to one another,
“What does this mean that he is saying to us,
‘A little while and you will not see me,
and again a little while and you will see me,’
and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?”
So they said, “What is this ‘little while’ of which he speaks?
We do not know what he means.”

Indeed we don’t. Two thousand years, and still the “little while” goes on. I can’t help wondering sometimes if we’re out of our minds to believe this stuff. Yet the Faith continues to convince me, day by day, year by year, of its truth, not so much on the evidence of miracles—apart from the one enormous miracle of the Resurrection—or any other specific empirical evidence, but by its general congruence with reality.

I don’t mean that it explains every physical fact, like a scientific theory. But it accommodates all the physical facts we know, and it describes and explains the experience of being human more convincingly than any other religion or philosophy. It seems to me that any genuinely open soul, any person in whom heart and mind are united in desire for the truth, must feel its persuasive power, though I know that this is not in fact the case. (Yet although a particular person at a particular point in his life may not feel it, there is always, up until the moment of death, the possibility that he will; conversion happens at unexpected times in unexpected ways to unexpected people.)

If I suppose, for the sake of argument, that all religions are equally false, I will still say that Christianity is the greatest of them, in the sense of encompassing more of reality more persuasively. I know this in the same way I know that Shakespeare is the greatest poet in English. I can’t prove either assertion, but I’m nevertheless certain of both.

If Christianity is a dream, it is the greatest of dreams. Even if it could somehow be proved to be only something like a great work of art, I would still love it, and in some way attempt to shape my life by it. Presented with the “little while” of two thousand years, I have a choice between believing that the Faith is a delusion, or that the promised time will in fact someday come. And I choose to believe. More precisely, I choose to trust God—that He Is, and that therefore no hope is too great to place in him, even when “we do not know what he means.”

My diocese is one of those in which what should be Ascension Thursday is celebrated on the following Sunday (which always reminds me of Churchy La Femme saying “Friday the 13^th come on a Monday this month.”). So when my wife and I went to Mass on the evening of Ascension Thursday, we heard not the Ascension reading, but John 16:16-20, of which this is an excerpt:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“A little while and you will no longer see me,
and again a little while later and you will see me.”
So some of his disciples said to one another,
“What does this mean that he is saying to us,
‘A little while and you will not see me,
and again a little while and you will see me,’
and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?”
So they said, “What is this ‘little while’ of which he speaks?
We do not know what he means.”

Indeed we don’t. Two thousand years, and still the “little while” goes on. I can’t help wondering sometimes if we’re out of our minds to believe this stuff. Yet the Faith continues to convince me, day by day, year by year, of its truth, not so much on the evidence of miracles—apart from the one enormous miracle of the Resurrection—or any other specific empirical evidence, but by its general congruence with reality.

I don’t mean that it explains every physical fact, like a scientific theory. But it accommodates all the physical facts we know, and it describes and explains the experience of being human more convincingly than any other religion or philosophy. It seems to me that any genuinely open soul, any person in whom heart and mind are united in desire for the truth, must feel its persuasive power, though I know that this is not in fact the case. (Yet although a particular person at a particular point in his life may not feel it, there is always, up until the moment of death, the possibility that he will; conversion happens at unexpected times in unexpected ways to unexpected people.)

If I suppose, for the sake of argument, that all religions are equally false, I will still say that Christianity is the greatest of them, in the sense of encompassing more of reality more persuasively. I know this in the same way I know that Shakespeare is the greatest poet in English. I can’t prove either assertion, but I’m nevertheless certain of both.

If Christianity is a dream, it is the greatest of dreams. Even if it could somehow be proved to be only something like a great work of art, I would still love it, and in some way attempt to shape my life by it. Presented with the “little while” of two thousand years, I have a choice between believing that the Faith is a delusion, or that the promised time will in fact someday come. And I choose to believe. More precisely, I choose to trust God—that He Is, and that therefore no hope is too great to place in him, even when “we do not know what he means.”

I’m about to leave town for a couple of days, and will probably not be online much, if at all. I was working on something about Ascension Day which I had wanted to post before I left, but it kept growing, and I’m out of time. So, just because it bothers me to go that long without posting something—what if everybody gets bored and never reads my blog again and I’m just out here talking into empty cyberspace?—here is a bit of music for the weekend. This is one of those songs by the ISB that haunted me during the dark years of my youth.

And though it doesn’t haunt me in exactly the same way, because I understand more about what, and whom, it points to, I think it moves me even more.

Scattered we were when the long night was breaking
But in bright morning converse again.

I’m about to leave town for a couple of days, and will probably not be online much, if at all. I was working on something about Ascension Day which I had wanted to post before I left, but it kept growing, and I’m out of time. So, just because it bothers me to go that long without posting something—what if everybody gets bored and never reads my blog again and I’m just out here talking into empty cyberspace?—here is a bit of music for the weekend. This is one of those songs by the ISB that haunted me during the dark years of my youth.

And though it doesn’t haunt me in exactly the same way, because I understand more about what, and whom, it points to, I think it moves me even more.

Scattered we were when the long night was breaking
But in bright morning converse again.

Don’t go ridin’ on that long black train.

I heard this song done by a country band a few weeks ago and immediately went looking for it online. Although the performance above seems to be pretty recent, I feel sure it’s an older gospel song.

The video is pretty good, too.

In the June Atlantic. Though he admires O’Connor’s skill, the reviewer strikes me as pretty obtuse; he seems to be one of those who just doesn’t get the essence of what she was doing. And now that I think about it, do many people who don’t already understand—i.e., Catholics and other Christians—really ever get O’Connor’s work? And did she, then, fail in a significant part of her effort to startle the comfortably godless out of their complacency?

Make “teenagers” singular instead of plural, and the title would serve for a memoir of my adolescence. And actually this is a bit of one.

There was (still is) a railroad track about a hundred yards behind the house where I grew up, and there were still passenger trains. Though there was no proper station for our little hamlet—Greenbrier, Alabama—you could go stand by the track and flag the train down and ride to Decatur, fifteen miles or so away. When I was in my early teens, or maybe not quite there, two friends and I did this occasionally. On a Saturday afternoon I would catch the train at Greenbrier, and Johnny and Lynn (Lynn was a boy, too) would get on a few miles further at Belle Mina, and we would go to Decatur, walk uptown to the Princess Theater, see a movie, and catch the train home. It was a big thrill for us.

This was one of the movies I remember seeing on one of those trips. I was such a timid kid that it actually frightened me somewhat, which I suppose is why I remember it.

If the movie came out in 1959, I suppose we probably saw it no later than 1960, so I would have been only twelve, maybe only eleven. Or maybe the movies was several years old—I would have thought we were more like thirteen or fourteen. It says something about the different sort of world we lived in that we were allowed to take those little trips on our own.

I see there is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this. Most of it’s on YouTube and it’s also on Netflix, as is the original. Do I really want to see it again, or shall I just leave my nostalgic memory alone?

I’ve sometimes thought of it over the years, since the late ’70s or so, when I became old enough to look back at my adolescence. The title began to seem almost prophetic of the madness that would break out a bit later in the ’60s. There’s something behind this, something we don’t understand.

One of my daughters had a bright idea for a Mother’s Day present: take Mom to the St. Mary’s Knights of Columbus Crawfish and Bluegrass Extravaganza. Dad was invited, too, fortunately, and had a great time.

In case you don’t know, the crawfish (as you can see from the pictures turned up by Google’s image search) is a sort of very small fresh-water lobster, 2-4 inches/5-9cm long. I’ve not been wildly enthusiastic about them in the past. They’re an awful lot of work and mess for a fairly small amount of food. There’s one bite of meat in the tail, and it’s not easy to extract, especially if you’re inexperienced and arthritic like me. And you pile up a lot of shells and guts and slime in the process, not to mention having your hands and arms covered in very fishy-smelling liquid. Doing this in a restaurant is not my idea of fun. But here, it didn’t matter how messy and clumsy your technique was—you could make as big a mess as the job requires, and nobody cared, because they were all doing the same thing, the place was set up for it, and it was all going to be hosed down afterward. You get a big aluminum-foil pan, about the size of a big lasagna dish, containing a couple of pounds of crawfish, and sit down at a long table with a plastic cloth over it, and have at it along with several hundred other people. The crawfish were delicious, the beer was reasonably priced, and the thoughtful Knights had even provided Yuengling for those of us who don’t care for Miller Lite etc.

The bands played under a gigantic live oak, at least four, maybe five, feet (1.5-2m?) in diameter. I only really heard the last two bands, the Jason Boone Band and Fat Man Squeeze. Bluegrass music is not something I sit and listen to very often at home, but I really enjoy hearing it live. Both bands were excellent, though all in all I liked the Jason Boone Band a little better: they were straight-up pure bluegrass, with a good mixture of gospel, which I like. Fat Man Squeeze had a more rock-and-roll approach, taking a style which is already very fast and tight and amping it up even more—a little punk, maybe—which sometimes seemed a bit much. You can hear both bands at their web sites (links via their names above).

I love stuff like this: a festival of music and food, where people of all ages, from babes in arms to old folks in wheelchairs, are at ease, where you can have a few beers and hear some good music and generally enjoy the vibe of people having fun with nothing dark or ugly about it. It’s great that a Catholic organization puts it on, though I guess the presence of alcohol may taint it in the eyes of our Protestant friends.

A few days ago I was involved in an email disagreement, not entirely pleasant, about the meaning of the word “conservative.” One point of contention was my assertion that the word is useful even though its meaning is imprecise. The other party insisted that it must have a very definite, almost scientific or scholastic, meaning, or he would admit it to have none at all.

This started me thinking about the circumstances in which such precision in language is and is not obtainable, and is or is not desirable. Fittingly enough, a day or two later I ran across this remark by Edward Thomas, an English poet of the early 20^th century, in a New Criterion review of a new edition of his work: “[words] never consent to correspond exactly to any object unless, like scientific terms, they are first killed.” (I’m not sure whether I’ve ever read any of Thomas’s poetry. If I have, it would have been only one or two poems in anthologies. On the basis of what’s quoted in the review, I want to read more.)

These two approaches to language, the scientific and the poetic, are not necessarily as mutually exclusive as Thomas makes them out to be, but they are different. I am definitely of Thomas’s party—imprecision is the price of nuance and color and resonance and indeed of another kind of precision, the kind in which words are distinguished by subtle connotations. It also recognizes that the essence of reality will always elude language. Both approaches have their place, obviously, but if one wishes to speak with exact precision, one is always fighting against a living language, which is always changing. As Eliot complains in “Burnt Norton”:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

There’s no way to stop this. The words of a living language are always stretching here and contracting there, dividing, sliding out of the places where they began and into places where they were never meant to be, or disappearing altogether. The word “fascism” is a good example: originally it referred to the specific ideas of a specific political party, but now it’s commonly applied to any violently oppressive political movement, and most people who use it could not give it any more specific definition than that. “Ghost” is an even better example; two hundred years ago it did not sound at all strange to refer to one person of the Trinity as “the Holy Ghost,” but now the term invites silly jokes.

But there are times when one needs to kill a word, to fix it with one meaning for all future time. Theology and philosophy have need of this—not all theology and philosophy, but those applications in which it is important to fix eternal ideas in clear terms that will be understood a thousand years from now. I prefer poetry, and a poetic theology. But a formal and scientific theology is needed, too.

And so I think the Church is making a mistake in letting go of Latin. To say that it is a dead language means that all the words in it have been usefully killed, in Thomas’s sense. And so I suspect that it will be revived, because a Church which holds beliefs that don’t change needs to be able to express them in a language that won’t change. Or at least one that changes much more slowly than does a living one.

Dead words are well suited for stating abstract truth on the one hand, and physical facts, on the other. But to speak in a way that does justice to something organic and alive requires living words. When I put up the first version of this site, I had as an epigraph these words which I long ago read attributed to Eugene Ionesco, although I can’t remember where I read them and haven’t been able to track them down: Not everything is unsayable in words—only the living truth.

Rod Dreher has an interesting post about the death of his grandmother, and a remarkable thing that happened shortly before she died. Excerpt (“Helen” is his grandmother):

My father phoned this afternoon after he and my mother returned from the hospital. He said something extraordinary had happened. Helen was wracked with pain, pain so intense she wept constantly. My father and mother prayed in the room for her, and tried to comfort her. Daddy told me Helen was visibly frightened. At one point, she turned her head toward the door of her hospital room, and said, "God is at the door. Let him in."

She "talked" silently with someone no one else could see for some time. She told my mother, "God tells me he will take care of me, and will take care of y'all." And then: "He wants me to go with him. Tell him I don't want to go yet." My mother told her that it was fine for her to leave, to go in peace. The old lady said no, it's not yet time, and to please let God know. So that's what my mother did. And then Helen's pain went away.

Read the whole thing here; it’s worth it.

Such stories are not unusual. Some years ago a co-worker described to me the death of her father. Lying in his hospital bed, he grew suddenly excited: “Look, there’s...and...” naming people he saw, all of whom had been dead for years. So his daughter said, “Daddy, you go ahead with them if you want to.” And shortly afterwards he died.

Of course these things might be hallucinations, the effects on the mind of a body in its final crisis. But they might not.

This is where my wife found the cartoons from which she extracted the chicken signature: Flannery O’Connor, Cartoonist. The one with the signature is actually down in the comments.

After complaining loudly that it was raining where I work but probably not where I live, twenty or so miles (about 30km) southeast, I came home tonight to see this: over three and a half inches (about 9cm) of rain in the rain gauge.

Beautiful.

Janet, you can keep the rest of the rain now.

My wife is now reading the Flannery O’Connor biography discussed here a week or two ago. Being a visual sort of person, she wanted very much to see the the signature used by (Mary) Flannery O’Connor on the cartoons she published in her college newspaper, a chicken formed of the initials MFOC, which the book describes but does not reproduce. So she spent a while yesterday digging around on the net till she located a cartoon with the signature. Here it is, for anyone else who was similarly intrigued:

I’m not sure I would have realized it was supposed to be a chicken.

Amazon has posted this list. I would expect that the number one pick would be a great surprise to most people; it was to me. I do think it’s a great album, but greatest? Well, not really.

More than that, I was beginning to mutter with outrage that only two albums by John Coltrane are on the list, until I noted the editors’ proviso that they tried to limit themselves to one album per artist, and Coltrane still got two, so I guess that’s okay.

Jazz is not my favorite music—I listen to more rock, classical, and folk—so I’m not familiar with the majority of titles here. I have to think this is a rather strange selection, though. Some of it doesn’t seem to really qualify as jazz—I like Astrud Gilberto and Madeleine Peyroux, but their work included here isn’t jazz. Or, if you’re going to count them as jazz, how could you possibly not include Sinatra? And I wouldn’t have picked “Blue Trane” over “Giant Steps.”

Well, music geeks can’t resist these lists and the pointless arguments that follow, and the list could be useful as a guide to exploration. And, speaking of Ornette Coleman, I wrote about him a while back, here.

Luther Allison, ”Watching You,“ also known as ”Cherry Red Wine“: If you don’t stop drinking that bad wine, baby, even the grass that grows on your grave will be cherry red.

I’m not sending a message to anyone, I just like the song. In fact it’s a good drinking song. It’s a little over ten minutes long.

From “Why I Fired My Broker”, a piece in the May Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg, in which he tries to figure out what the hell happened to his investments a few months ago:

It turns out that my crucial mistake was believing that the brokers and wealth managers and cable-television oracles who make up the financial-services industrial complex actually had my best interests at heart. Or so say the extremely smart—and wealthy—people I asked to help me figure a way out of my paralysis. One of these people was Robert Soros, the deputy chairman of the fund started by his father, George. I went to see him at his office, where he spent two hours performing an autopsy on my assumptions.

“You think a brokerage should be a place you go to pay commissions for fair and unbiased advice, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s not. It never has been.” He then cited another saying of Buffett’s: “‘Wall Street is a place where whatever can be sold will be sold.’ You are the consumer of their dreck. What they can sell to you, they will sell to you.”

“But they told us—”

“They lied.”

He went on: “You should be disheartened and disappointed. But don’t kid yourself. You’re a naive capitalist. They were never your advisers. Do not for a moment think that a brokerage firm is your friend.”

“So who’s my friend?”

“You don’t have one. This is the market.”

Now, I’m a fairly free-market-friendly sort of guy, in this sense: if we draw a line with pure socialism—total state control of economic activity—at one end, and pure capitalism—total absence of state control of economic activity—at the other, I would put myself closer to the capitalist end than the socialist. This is because I think a fair amount of liberty is not only a good thing in itself but also more likely to produce good results than state control.

But there has been a lot of nonsense written about capitalism in the past quarter-century or so in which the market has been construed as a sort of systematized benevolence, in which people engage in buying and selling as a means of creating and spreading wealth and furthering the greater good. It simply isn’t that, and I’ve often wondered if people who speak of it that way have ever been involved in an actual business. It’s people engaged in buying and selling things for the purpose of making a profit. That’s all it is, in itself; the greater good of general prosperity, if it happens, is a side effect, just as entertainment is a side effect of a football game from the point of view of the players. And that’s fine, as long as everyone understands the nature and rules of the game.

When a football team goes up against an opponent, it intends to win. No one expects it to refrain from scoring out of kindness to the other team. On the other hand, though, everyone does expect it to refrain from cheating. And the market is no more self-governing than a football game.