Communion

            It’s the unreasoned responses that tell us most about ourselves, and incite us to introspection. 

            I mean “unreasoned” in two senses: first, we do not think before we act, and second, there is, at first blush, no explanation for why we did precisely what we did. 

            And I think those experiences are a window on the soul for manifold reasons: we don’t see them coming, and so we have no chance to grab honesty by the collar and talk loudly over our embarrassing inner child, hushing him with harsh hands all the while.  Reflection really is that surprised parent, not realizing the child’s absence until he’s off making trouble, and when it catches up it has to make sense of things.  And that breathless mix of shame and confusion is where self-knowledge is synthesized.

            I know this because I just had one of the most relieving experiences of my life—at least of this new period of my life, where reason and emotions reel anew each day in the newness of the physical and intellectual space, and where the mind sees as much distance ahead as the eye in this beautiful, haunting, daunting moonscape.  The past few months of my life have been a background of creative starvation punctuated by the dry rancor of loneliness, shot through from all directions with intellectual rigor that demands one’s soul on a platter with near nothing in return.  I am growing though, so let’s not dally on the way to enigma.

            Today I went to church—to a Catholic church, though I’m not Catholic—after a weekend with family and girlfriend, a brief pause in the bleached onslaught of reading after reading.  I think my mind shut off this weekend—just refused to work.  Like the well-published and respected philosopher they found drunk off his ass in his office one night, and toted off to jail, and his disgusted philosopher-wife refused to bail him out, and they got a divorce.  Like the countless intellectuals, burning bright at beginnings, that either check out in time and spend quiet lives washing windows of inner wealth, or burn out into the oblivion of near-mental illness, only to keep inflicting hollow masterpieces on the ever-more-apathetic graduate students of the world. 

(Ah, the grotesque gorging of the self-deceived creative spirit.)

            The end of the service is communion, and as I sat waiting for the Catholics to commune and be done with it, I glanced to my right and saw a professor from my department, a red-blooded Kantian to the core, walking back up the aisle, head slightly bowed, lips straight, hands pressed into prayer at his chest, like a child with a firefly, and then out the doors, skipping out early—the devil—and he was gone. 

            I can’t quite formulate why this had such a stirring effect on me—as it did, as I inwardly cheered, fist-pumping, for nothing, for nothing, for the three-quarters-fabricated feeling of camaraderie I felt sitting alone on a pew.  Was I merely reassured that true devotion is possible in the upper echelons of a discipline sometimes hostile to an ad hoc-delineated definition of irrationality?  That, of course, plays a part.  More, though: anxiety over whether my dream-laden goals can come true—to actually care about my students, to believe that academia can be salvaged from irrelevance, that the university has not found and eradicated the last corner of purity, of the ideal, of true learning and growth—that anxiety has been eating me upwards, spurred on by cynical professors and the malice (laced with despair) of ambition at every turn.

            Yet I get the same feeling when a quiet colleague sneaks a beer into the office, when the error-immune academic admits with a grin that he doesn't know something, when a professor just-too-fondly shows me pictures of his dogs—in short, when the human spirit moves, and I infer life amid death.  Then I know that self-centered ambition and the impersonators of meaning have not crushed that scintillating, sometimes-silent thing that makes us laugh, that makes us laugh and laugh, laugh so hard at the absurdity of life that our cheeks cramp and we fall on the ground or stumble down a maze of streets under the orange glow of streetlamps, not giving a damn for direction.  

Grace

            The authentic religious impulse has just been validated for me, after a month or more of whitewashed inner withering, the soul’s incessant second guessing.  I still never see it coming—vindication of scientific theories and God’s possession of personality. 

            Here’s the deal: I’ve been stoking the compassionate impulse for months now—a new city, beautiful apostasy from the old self’s defaulted accrual, that autumnal feeling of urgency with one’s novelty in the world—and it simply hasn’t worked.  I’ve consistently ended every day feeling as if my mark has been lost on the world—or worse, that the mark was made in someone else’s name.  For there’s a sour side to the urgency of alienation from one’s surroundings, predecessor to the weary relinquishment of one’s presence in the world: discouragement seeps from every smallest crack made in one’s attempt at change, whether of oneself or others. 

            But today something slipped into place: God is deeply active, and surprisingly so.  The intersection of 1 John and a million of life’s grinning contradictions—I was riding my bike home from school when it hit me: there can be no love without knowledge of love.  (Surely it is best put simply, but the modern in me wants to slap the blunt apostle.)  We cannot convey life if we are not actively experiencing life, for we cannot give what we do not have. 

            And on and on I go, turning the sharp little thing in my mind, ultimately never figuring it out.  But surely this makes sense—surely we would not be calculating the distance between our lover’s lips as our hearts beat blisters for the next brush of skin on skin.   

 

Ramble-Tamble

            The natural response to an environment hostile to one’s creativity is to create—and yet, the creation is strained, limited to bemoaning the wasted remains of one’s subject matter, one’s spirit and drive.  Bad times make us narcissists. 

            And there is a certain tragedy to that; one of the few instances where a call from youth’s cloud kingdoms of idealization seems the only move to make, and a healthy reconciliation with a necessary reality.  Yet the fact seems to be that there is a point of suffering where we are unable to transcend ourselves.   And that is…what?  Sad? 

            Yet there are gems in the jam.  How about this: the fact that suffering impedes transcendence of one’s concrete situation, of one’s very self, implies that if transcendence follows upon normal, healthy conditions, then transcendence is part of the proper functioning of the human being.  And of course this is no necessary conclusion, folks, but as long as I’m preaching to an empty auditorium, I can relinquish academic neuroticism. 

            And here we have Exhibit A versus Exhibit B, optimism versus pessimism: for to many embittered brow-beaters out there, a concentration camp entails the negation of faith, grounds for eternal expulsion of optimism or hope.  That’s a plausible inference—more of an emotional reaction, though.  The problem of evil in this guise means for many that if there is any situation that temporarily precludes faith, then faith can never be.  It’s a delusion, a wet dream, a perfect example of someone who is more clever than himself. 

            But why, the writer begs, is this a necessary conclusion?  What is so wrong with saying that we live in a tragic world, deal with it? 

            Well, perhaps God, if he existed, could have made a non-tragic world.  I have never been fully affected (relative to the normal reaction) by this argument.  And why?  Because hope endures all things, my friends, and after all these considerations the question remains the same: do you choose to believe even still that God is?  Because come on, folks, this little argument from evil couldn’t have been your first bitch-fit with the world—and if it means your fall from faith, I smell a little intellectual pretense. 

            To recognize the human condition at its most basic is to realize that we know almost nothing, and that things are not always as they seem.  If this does not allow faith in the presence of evil, then I’m out of suggestions. 

            And by the very bootstrap act of creativity here performed, I have proved myself wrong.  Thank you.

Meta-Nostalgia

Invasion of a nauseous outpouring of self-expression from the distant past: I pull up the unrecognized document in the folder, only to be lambasted by a quick scribble of a soul-aching creation from years ago. And suddenly I’m back there, realizing where the pain will take me, namely here, where I sit reading this ancient plea for comfort, thankful that empathy implies externality. Thankful that I’m not there; thankful yet again that if I were, I could do it better.

And that is just it—that pain, the release, and yet the irony of cathartic nostalgia! Worry, worry, worry—I worried my time away on that lonely trip, worried moreover and the most that I wouldn’t take hold of the pain, that I wouldn’t use that depth of discomfort diagnostically, self-realization, growth, beauty, creation, art, depth, God. There’s a lately-born release to it now, to look back on that act of creation squeezed from my weeping soul, and to see the dynamic, then-invisible wonder of it all, the predictive glance turned backward to assure that self that I would get…here.

And yet now, as these hands come out of hiding in adultish comfort to renew the tapped-out pact with keys and screen, as these fingers dance to the rhythm of inwardness once more, and I make this absurd little attempt at creativity—which nevertheless is born in another realm as the resplendent experience of meaning—I come to realize, in stuttering non-response, that more legitimate than the fear of not harnessing one’s pain—is not feeling it.

Ivory Tower #2

And here is where philosophy falls: the suppression of truth-intuitions in the interest of keeping one’s coherence. For that matter, this is the downfall of any systematic pursuit of knowledge lodged within a necessarily critical institution: I have just taken a break from a paper I’m writing, stopping in the middle of a thrust toward completion, in the middle of a hasty deletion of a thought because it didn’t fit, and I was afraid of a bad grade on grounds of self-contradiction.

At this point, then, I succumb to an irrationalist epistemology, because it is clear that we’re just saving face.

From the Ivory Tower

The academic does not long for anyone: he is quite at home taking pleasure in things that are not there.

He truly has an addiction to abstractions, to the not-here—at times to the nowhere—and thus you stand right before him as he closes his eyes to dream of you.

Yet there is a salient difference between academia and romance, though you are to both something which you are not: the romantic loves you via his imaginings; the scholar loves his imaginings via you.

On Priorities

I’ve almost come to understand those pale, staunch Christian denialists who barricade themselves below the world, in defense against any uncomfortable opposition, armed with judicious undertones and that insecure and therefore all-too-self-asserting ignorance. No, not the few who have no treasure to guard—those latently nihilistic ideologues—but those whose blind faith, yes, in its most derogatory sense, is weathered and accepted by those who practice it merely as a means to an end. And here is something I sense any cynical smarty-pants will never catch: the meekly religious will go to great lengths and sacrifice all worldly gain—indeed, in many cases, their objective sanity—to preserve what is many times a deep experience of the Spirit of God. Once you find that treasure in the field, it is indeed truer than many realize that no good is too prized to sell toward its cost.

CPR

Doing philosophy today is like shaking hands with a corpse.

My Ambition

"His Master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things...'" Matthew 25:21

Here is what I want from life: to do well with what I have. The only approachable goal is self-referential--that is, did I do all I had the potential to do? Anything more is an invitation to insanity.

And in humility, stripping the shards of non-self, we come to know ourselves.

Sound familiar?

Terrorism: The unlawful use or threat of violence esp. against the state or the public as a politically motivated means of attack or coercion

"I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

“Officials in and around this White House...[are] routinely praising radical leftists and Communist dictators and the wonders of socialism in spreading the wealth.”

Slow Leak (For You, Larkin)

Stopping to fill my

Tire with air,

My mind sleep-talks:

"Hissing bliss--

Hit and miss--

Of the pneumatic

Kiss."

Then, satisfied

With this versified

Smack of mundanity

(And scribbling shy memory's

Wrinkled receipt),

I drive on.

My Proof of God's Existence

Women rapaciously seek the security marriage affords, but for the whole gulp of human history have been almost completely politically disenfranchised, and hence could not solidify marriage as a cultural-religious institution.

Men flee from commitment, squirm during the ceremony, and consider the ring a hollow button for freedom’s termination—yet they controlled every major cultural and religious institution up until about yesterday.

Now you tell me--who dunnit?

Concision

Here is something I found in a discarded journal, wedged humbly at the bottom of the page in sloppy resignation, after a protracted treatise stippled with the spray of anxiety.

"Meaning is the convergence of all experience on and the eruption of all creativity from a single point in the individual, which is in fact the individual himself, at his deepest point, which alone gives earnest coherence to his otherwise multifarious existence."

If your response is a replayed plea for gender neutrality, I'm afraid you've missed the point.

To Rilke

I.

Though none hold you holy,

I think you are sacred,

Snow.

Stopped in my tracks

(For now they appear),

You are no blanket,

But life's unveiling:

A step entails commitment's crackle,

A sin against silence,
Yet standing still invites

The fate of statues.

Whiteness of life, so

Silently insistent:

A whispered demand for your own

Desecration.

II.

Yet soon you are mended,

And we are forgotten in your fabric.

Then all of that anxiety--

Where to go? What to do?--

Anxiety over how best to imprint ourselves

Is lost in the layers,

And all of our questions are answered

With a billion blind ellipses.

God,

Still we fear

That you will cease

To fall.

Loneliness, def.

If you could choose between the experience of the substance of life and the ability to communicate it, which would you choose?

Me too.

Social Virtue

Here is a man to whom all are drawn as to the source of all laughter, as to the bottom of all slopes, as to the movement to which all words point. Brightest of smiles, glibbest of lips, his whole personality implying answers to all of life’s despairs. Everyone is in love with him, and he likewise is in love…not with them, nor with himself (straight shot through subtleties of vanity)—but with their love for him.

The irony of his character is as sharp as his wit, and the deepest of gazes will send the onlooker into a despair more profound than the happy heights are high to which he escorts his adorers: for it is he who loves the crowd’s attention—who may be not infinitely virtuous but have rather an infinitely sensitive ear for an audience—who is most alone.

New Love

How transcendently beautiful it is to have someone constitute a significant part of your life, rather than a pillaged whole.

(The individual must be partially submerged in silence, to have a piece of life to himself.

Full commitment to any Thing is self’s cheap sale, though they will bargain incessantly for your soul.

You must learn the bully’s bluff: that anything but God has a claim on your time.

One must live for the ideal, the ideal for which one can live and die.)

I have learned to live for little things.

Banishment

Creative people used to grow organically out of their time and place, to the point that the virtue of creativity was trueness to one’s roots. And people affirmed “their” artist to the extent that his words sprang from their spring, that he sang their song with a voice they didn’t have. And that was the criterion for good art as well: trueness to oneself, which translated then to trueness to one’s culture.

Only stratified romantics could still idealize the present world this way. The only good artists left are the suicides—those who are utterly alienated from their surroundings and heritage. Proust barricaded himself in an egg carton-lined room, Kafka couldn’t stand his father, Dostoevsky drank himself to death and Tolstoy ran away. It’s like some damn demented nursery rhyme.

Pan to ancient Greece, where plays were the center of city-wide festivals, where poets and playwrights were lauded for their patriotism and grace. I’m not lamenting the loss of culture (pretense of the elitist), but pointing to a radical difference in art’s place in society—which, art being a compass of culture’s illness, points to something more significant.

Because to be an artist, these days, is to banish oneself from the world—not opprobrium, but something much worse: invisibility. Quite appropriate, too, for the artist toils in the realm of the spirit, melds the mind to beauty—traffics in invisible wares—while society either scrounges for the capitalist’s crumbs or feeds the system with a nihilistic materialism that starves the spirit into ironic submission.

And so alienation is the artist’s self-prescription, choosing solitude and bitter loneliness over a high place among the damned. In that sense, art is still a product of the times, for man is utterly alienated from himself, and thus the artist represents the conscience of humanity, calling out in an eloquent whisper drowned in the hidden howling of despair. He is not alienated, but walked away from.

Hide/Seek

The dead make quiet claims on existence,

Gazes glowing less with dust and distance.

Few can pass passion through fashion's fall, pall

Of past's silence which is breath's death to haul.

Dusk's true danger descends on those who hide

From the night in brighter lives. I tried

And found only pell-mell smells of meaning,

Plus a cold sweat at threat of solitude's weaning.

But behind your eyes the sea's reasons speak

To salt's sharp sparkle on a beach's cheek--

And I am afraid of this foreign tongue,

Lapping clapping language as a sea's song sung.

Your nocturnal churnings, you too light to see,

Your laughter darkly blooming: I will let them be.

Come with me.

Newness

Life is predicated on a paradox—perhaps defined by contradiction. The true, earnest life is lived in the crunch of contradictory concepts, in the space between the ease of ideas, where the gaze of immanence blanks in the blind spot.

And that spot is a skinny slice of the pie, too, for our self-reductive thrust toward simplification is more clever than we. (It has to be, if we are to survive.) The world is a puzzle, and we crave predictability. The drive to interpret our experience within the meager framework of our own knowledge amounts to less than we would expect: the bright epiphany of a conscious click, when the mind bluffs comprehension, amounts to the assimilation of novelty to the past’s easy distinctions, which in their turn were likewise reduced from their dazzling mosaic. That is, most meaning is gleaned by assimilating perception to past patterns. Striking reduction, that. Life makes sense in light of itself, and we proud knowers, who nonetheless so little know ourselves, walk past the circularity in weightless relief.

So what is human nature? Here is a humble suggestion for you: insecurity.

And what occurs if we simply let confusion profuse? We could stand outside the institutions screaming for our allegiance (that noble raping of uniqueness); stop this shameful cowering in the corners of life where we cling to broken toys of distinctions; the individual could recognize himself as irreparably such and stroll into the mystery of his particularity. What if we see the self’s strangeness in relation to a given situation—and, though tempted to pretense of familiarity, as blind men greet this quiet comer with quiet joy?

...Then we might add a new jingle to our pocket full of rhymes: change.