After the Future

Some Thoughts on 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic?  I would expect it to be, but It sounds eastern European. That's weird. So after watching the movie, I look it up, and it turns out that it is Bulgarian folk song Polegnala e Todora, and the first thing that comes to mind is Yeats great poem of spiritual longing, "Sailing to Byzantium". 

1920s Ireland/Bulgarian folk song/Istanbul/Byzantium/Yeats. Ok, it's a stretch. I have no idea whether this was in McDonagh's thinking, but it's in mine. So while making that connection of the song to Yeats might appear somewhat tendentious, indulge me. It provides an interesting entry point into a film that otherwise seems so bewildering. I've pasted the full text of the poem in Note 1 below. Read it first, and then I'll try to explain how the movie and the poem explain one another. 

This movie has been described as a breakup story between Colm and the younger Padraig, and it is that, but clearly it's working with much more than the psychology of friendship. It's also been analogized to the breakup that defined the sides in the Irish Civil War, and clearly that's there, but more in the background. These folks live on an island that is undisturbed by history. [See Note 2] 

The site for this film is Edenic, and there are three characters that stand out because they don't fit in it: Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic. Everyone else is more or less like Padraig, happy children in paradise. [See Note 6 about the priest and the policeman.] Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic are restless in a way the other islanders are not. All three need to get out of this beautiful but spiritually claustrophobic world into something bigger. Siobhan takes the boat; Colm takes to art; Dominic commits suicide. 

The story begins in that opening scene when Padraig arrives at Colm's little white house to fetch him to go the pub as is their daily ritual. When he knocks, Colm won't answer. Looking through the window, Padraig can see Colm just sitting, staring blankly, unresponsive to his calls to come out with him. Flummoxed, Padraig tells him he's going to the pub, and he'll wait for him there. No response. Padraig arrives at the pub without Colm, orders two pints, and when Colm comes in later he avoids Padraig at the bar and takes a seat by himself. When Padraig asks him what's going on, Colm tells him he no longer wants to be friends because he finds Padraig too boring.

This is a rather blunt, if not cruel, thing to say to an old friend, especially someone as good-natured and likable as Padraig. We take Padraig's side immediately in this dispute. Colm seems to be a grumpy, old curmudgeon, but soon we learn that the older Colm is feeling his mortality, and he wants to do something with his life--he wants to touch eternity.

This sounds at first rather pretentious, and surely that's how it looks to Padraig and others. But Colm is dead serious. When Padraig refuses to take Colm's ending the friendship seriously, Colm threatens to cut off one of his fingers each time Padraig talks to him. This is shocking, and soon enough, because Padraig cannot restrain himself and so peristently tries to restore the friendship on its old terms, Colm cuts off all the fingers of his left hand, first one and then the other four all at once.

What's going on? Is Colm suffering from some borderline personality disorder? I think this is where Yeats' poem might help us to understand Colm better. He's the aged man about whom the poem speaks--

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

We learn that Colm is composing a tune, and he wants to devote all his time to his music, and so the time he spends with Padraig is time wasted. Well, ok. But it still seems unnecessarily cruel for him to be so blunt about it, and we feel for poor Padraig who finds this change in his friend utterly incomprehensible and destabilizing.  He doesn't understand that Colm has set sail for Byzantium, and in doing so he must leave his old friend behind him if he won't come along.

 

Yeats' poem is about old age, but more than that it's a poem of deep spiritual longing, a longing to be transformed by spiritual fire--

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

We don't think of art as performing this function anymore. And so if there is nothing in you that feels the pull of that to which Yeats is pointing, it will probably be difficult to accept my reading of Banshees: But clearly the movie isn't just about two friends breaking up because one has lost interest in the relationship, but about one waking up in a bigger world and the other adamant to remain dreaming in a smaller one. It's about one who longs to soar, and the other who is happy, utterly unrestless and unalienated, and blissfully undisturbed until the events of the movie that turn his life upside down. But rather than adapt and grow in the new situation, he insists to remain only a talking animal, one whose talk is little more than good-natured birdsong, He's Papageno, [See Note 3] --one of the--

The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

In other words embedded in the beautiful, waxing-and-waning cycle of life and death, an eternally closed but repeating cycle the artist and the saint seek in their different ways to break open.

To sail to Byzantium does not require that one be an artistic genius. Colm is not one, but the longing for eternity that Yeats's poem so beautifully articulates is working in him. He must hearken to it, and he must resist all the forces that seek to draw him back into dreamy Eden. Chopping his fingers off is his way of saying that he no longer lives in a world where such a gesture is absurd. Absurd because why would he do that if his music is so important to him? It prevents him from playing it. But playing isn't the important thing, creating is, even if what he creates is modest by most standards. 

 

I've been re-reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining, and this morning came across this passage about Moby Dick that explains exactly what is working in Colm and then why he must resist Padraig's friendship--

Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land “seemed scorching to his feet.” And he thinks there is something serious and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.

...

Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville’s view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore’s safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, although they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God, and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.

For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the “damp, drizzly November in the soul” that we shall see is so important to Melville’s central character Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the “slavishness” of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. 

All Things Shining, pp. 50-51

It should be pointed out that D&K think Bulkington is a kind of nihilist because of his inability to live a normal, grateful, down-to earth life where the local gods will shine if you can attune to them. They see the longing for transcendence as a temptation to be resisted and that leads inevitably to suicide. There is something of Bulkington in Yeats and Colm, but maybe more in Yeats--

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

 

And while I'm sympathetic to much Dreyfus and Kelly's argument against the kind of transcendence that seeks to lift humans off the earth and out of nature, there is a place for such ecstasy, and ecstatics need to be part of the mix in a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. [See Note 4] And the phrase "out of nature" could be parsed in ways that mean more a transformation of nature than an escape from it. [See Note 5]

 

So Colm is a Bulkington type who must resist human slavish comforts and vulnerabilities if he is to hearken to eternity's call--he needs neither his fingers nor his house to live in the free air of the spirit. But I think there's an important difference between Bulkington and Colm in that Colm's path is not some Icarian, hubristic flight toward the sun. His path is that of an artist. Artists like him don't seek to leave the immanent world to live in a transcendent one, but to bring the transcendent into the immanent world through their poeisis. And that's the reading that I'd give to Yeats' fourth verse. The artist becomes an agent of spiritual transformation in his act of making. He becomes himself transformed by the power that inspires his making. 

Two scenes illustrate that Colm is not about escaping Nature but about transforming it. The first occurs in the moments after he finishes his tune, in his joy he wants to dance, but not alone--he tries to teach his dog to dance. This is not about living among the animals as Padraig does but lifting the animal into the spiritual. The other is the scene at the pub where the fingerless Colm while spraying his blood all over the table leads his students in the playing of his new tune. It's a Eucharistic image. He can no longer play, but he's fully engaged with the other players as they are bathed in his blood in this participative ritual around an altar. This is no depressed loner. This is not a man who is seeking to be absorbed into infinity, but to bring some small part of the infinite into the world in musical ritual.  

Colm can only befriend Padraig if he’s willing to come with him on his voyage to Byzantium. He has this kind of friendship with his students and the other musicians. But Padraig can only befriend Colm if he returns to his dreamy, embedded, Papageno level of existence. Padraig is as stubborn in his resistance to wake up as Colm seems to be in resisting the old comforts. Padraig is intransigent, and he declares war on the one who would disrupt his paradisal life. But of course, because it is already fatally disrupted, there can be no restoring it. So like those today on the American Right who are stewing in similar resentments about the disruption and loss of their world, they grieve rather than nimbly adapt, and go to war against those who have destroyed their sleep.

Siobhan's solution is the story told in Brooklyn of those who left the comforts of the familiar to live in a bigger world. But for Siobhan it's more than that because for her it's not just freedom from the old ways, but a freedom that is defined by the life of the mind and the love of learning. For her there’s no neglect of the monuments of unageing intellect. She leaves the island to take a job as a librarian, i.e., to work as a caretaker in a repository of such monuments. [See Note 6] She is happy in her bigger world and wants Padraig to join her, but he cannot. His world is in Eden and his sense of purpose in life derives from his grievance war with Colm. 

I think that it's rather beautiful the way McDonagh celebrates the ways in which this longing for eternity plays out in the lives of ordinary people. It's as if to say great spirits are all around you if you have the eyes to see them. You don't have to be a prodigy to share in some part of this greatness. You have only to recognize it and hearken to it in whatever capacity you have--and be willing to pay a price for not fitting in.   

 

Note 1: 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

 

II

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

 

III

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

 

IV

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

Note 2: It also occurred to me that there's something of the argument between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Yes and No. Andre wants to soar; Wally finds meaning in a more down to earth way. The trick is to live in the tension between the urge to ascend and descend by finding a way to bring what's higher into what's lower, and to raise what's lower into what's higher. Seems to me that's what happens every time a mass is said. What's above lives into our death, so that we below might die into into the life that comes to us from above and so in our dying into life become gradually agents whose task is to renew the face of the earth. 

 

BTW, Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining is a resolute rejection of Andre and endorsement of Wally. They abhor all things post Axial Revolution. They make their case in what is rather a reductive interpretation of David Foster Wallace's suicide--

PERHAPS THE SADDEST PART of Wallace’s story is that the human qualities he aspired to, the capacities of spirit that he revered and coveted, are a mirage. Indeed the entire mode of existence that he castigated himself for not being strong enough to achieve, far from being the saving possibility for our culture, is in fact a human impossibility. Wallace’s inability to achieve it was not a weakness, but the deep and abiding humanness in his spirit. (p. 42).

Well, maybe impossible for an entire culture, but not a mirage and not an impossibility for some individuals.

To be fair to D&K, they are mostly critical of DFW for imagining this reaching out for eternity as a willful, egoistic, Icarian project absent a spirit of gratitude, which I'd agree with if it were true about him. But I doubt that was true for someone for whom  St. Paul and Dostoyevski were his favorite authors. DFW is more complicated than that, and he deserves better treatment from D&K than he gets from them as a straw man who represents the longing for transcendence that they, good Heideggerians that they are, abhor.

Note 3: Whatever. Colm makes an oblique reference to Mozart most noteworthy for his being corrected by Siobhan about getting his dates wrong. Colm doesn't really care about history. But then a little more free association gives us Mozart/Magic Flute/Tamino v Papageno/Freemasons/Order of the Golden Dawn/Yeats. It's also interesting that Colm finds Padraig most interesting and likable when Padraig laces into him in drunken rage in the pub. His talk then is more than birdsong. It's also interesting that at the end, Padraig is awake in a way he was not because that's what conflict does--it wakes you up. Colm must concede that he will have a relationship with Padraig even if now it will be eternally adversarial. They can only be friends if the one or the other surrenders to live on the level of his adversary. 

Note 4: It's unlikely that if you've read this far, you need persuading that this transcendent dimension exists. But it's a territory that doesn't get much explored in mainstream, late-modern high culture or pop culture. I don't know if this is McDonagh's intent. I'm not yet familiar enough with the rest of his work. My Geneaology Series is largely about trying to make the case for the retrieval of that sense of transcendence as essential for the restoration of a vertical dimension in our broader cultural/metaphysical imaginary. I deal specifically with the idea of Platonic and Neoplatonic ascent in Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic . Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism, and Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation. For me Christianity works faithfully with the Greek transcendental ontology when it reverses the Platonic movement from ascent from below to above, to descent from above to below. Big difference. It’s a difference biblicists and fideists like Luther through Barth never seemed to grok in the way the Chirch fathers through the cathedral schools to Aquinas and Bonaventure and later Cusa and Ficino did.

Note 5: This kind of transformation echoes Ariel's mysterious Sea Change song in The Tempest:

 

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

 

Note 6: What about  Dominic, Peader, and the priest? It's interesting that McDonagh chooses not to take the easy punch at the priest by making the policeman the sexual abuser instead. I don't know that there's much to be said about the priest. Nothing special about him except the role he plays that he fills in an uninspired, pro forma way. The church, of course, symbolizes the community's spiritual and moral ideals, but usually in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way. For most people the Church is a community's superego, its proclaimer and custodian of social norms.  And while the church seems to spend most of its energies in the domestication of what remains untamed in its flock, it is also the custodian of a tradition that calls its members to  the highest levels of spiritual aspiration. It's interesting to me that McDonagh seems to respect that about the church in that the island's Church has a home for both the domesticated and those that like Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic who don't comfortably fit. 

 

The policeman is the enforcer of the community's norms, but in Peader we have the perverse transgressor of them. I could go off on a tangent a la St. Paul about the psychodynamic of law and repression, but the main point here is that in his abusing his son Dominic, he has awakened him. He is no longer asleep in Eden as the others are. He is no longer an innocent and can no longer live there. He seems at first rather a feral animal than the others like Padraig who are more domesticated. He has become something raw and wild and uncomfortable. But then there's that tender moment with Siobhan when in his stumbling way he asks if it would be possible for her to love him. Siobhan understands the poignancy of the moment, and is kind in her refusal. But for Dominic it was his last hope, to be loved by someone he recognizes as capable of loving but not loving him. And that's the end for him.

 

 

Civilization and Its Discontents

It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks for the end of the civilizing impulse that animated the West from the time of the Renaissance. World War I was the war that marked the end of the modern era, and World War II was the war that marked the beginning of the postmodern. That's how I have come to think of it, anyway.

Freud's 1929 book was a development of ideas he introduced in his 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion, in which he attacks organized religion as a collective neurosis. Both books have become more or less the background music that plays in most secularist thinking since then. Until recently it has been impossible for any self-respecting modern intellectual to accept that religion is anything but a form of delusional wish-fulfillment born out of the fundamental inability human beings have to accept the real ugliness and horror in the world, not the least of which is the prospect of their own deaths.

Civilization, according to Freud, is essentially the product of the fundamental tradeoff humans make to live in an ordered, secure world. The rule of law is the foundation of any civilization, for without it the law of the jungle prevails instead, and according to that law, the strong dominate the weak. Without the restraint of civilizing laws, the stronger prey on the weaker, the former searching out the latter to satisfy their instinctual drives, which boil down to sex, money, power.

I am inclined to think of Power as primary, and the other two as secondary. Power is aggression. Aggression is about one person or a group of persons seeking to dominate another. As Hegel pointed out way before Nietzsche, Freud, and Adler, this aggression is not economically motivated; it's about prestige. It's about the ego rush one feels in victory. Wealth and sexual satisfaction are a byproduct. They are the trappings of power. You must be powerful if you were able to acquire all that wealth and to obtain all those slaves and wives.

Premoderns understand this seeking after prestige as essential for their "honor." Their value as human beings depended on how much of it they got, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them would be to lose it. The Chinese call it "losing face" which is basically the same thing. You lose your honor, you lose your face, you lose your identity. You're nobody. Your identity is in this sense completely a social construction. There's nobody at home behind the mask.

In its most primitive form obtaining "face" requires prestige battle to the death. The truly noble person is the one who would rather die than submit. This sentiment is echoed in the New Hampshire state slogan and imprinted on all New Hampshire license plates: "Live free or die." The slave is the one who makes the calculation that it would be better to live serving the one who vanquished him than to be slain by him. He chooses submission. Any feudal hierarchy is based on this fundamental transaction. And it's why Roman emperors and medieval kings were always having to put down rebellions by ambitious generals, dukes, and barons who lusted to have more face.

The whole point for those in the old aristocracy was "honor", and honor was something that depended on station, and station was something you took by force of arms. The question they would ask themselves was basically: Do I have have the balls or don't I? This is barbarism, of course, but at least these men were men, not alienated, faceless wimps sitting in cubbies in big, anonymous, high-rise cages. It was a barbarism mitigated to a certain extent in the high middle ages by the Christian-inspired chivalric code and the tradition of courtly love.

But it affected not at all the earlier Christian rulers, the Roman emperors and their Germanic successors in the west. The whole underlying prestige-centered honor code was barbaric through and through. Christianity replaces the ideas 'face' and 'honor' with 'dignity' and integrity. The whole movement of Christianity is one away from external identity props and toward the discovery of an interior identity, the 'face' that is created in the image and likeness of God, where we live as citizens of the Kingdom born within, as the gospels describe it. The idea of face and honor are irrelevancies for citizens who abide there.

Christianity transvalues honor into integrity. You can lose face if others take it from you, but having or losing your integrity does not depend on others. Honor is about the value that others give to you; integrity is a self-valuation that follows from an interior achievement. But integrity is not something you can organize a society around, unless you have a critical mass of people who have achieved it. Clearly there was no such critical mass in post-Constantinian Christendom, nor is there one now, or perhaps ever.

Until such a day when a critical mass develops, a true Christianity is more of a leaven in any civilization in which there are true Christians. It's influence is subtle, and it works more on the periphery than at the center. 

Back to Freud: His point was that civilization in suppressing aggression creates alienation. Alienation is what happens to human beings when they are cut off from their instinctual life. It happens when they make a choice for safety and conformity of the group that comes with renouncing one's impulse life. It is the condition of the slave. This, according to Freud, is the source of the discontent that must necessarily come with civilization. Becoming civilized in modern societies (since Hobbes anyway) requires submitting to the law, and submitting is always an act of slavishness.

Most of the "advanced" thought since Freud has been about finding ways to become more instinctual and less civilized, while remaining "nice." In other words, wild and crazy, but loveable--like John Belushi or Jack Black. These are our contemporary models for what it means to be un-alienated. The way this works in practice is while continuing to suppress aggression, give more free rein to the pursuit of sex and money, and to put an American-Dream happy face on both. Consumer capitalism provides the political cultural framework that celebrates this solution to the problem of alienation. And it works insofar as it satisfies what is most vulgar in human desire, but fails in all the truly important ways. And then we fight endless wars to give an outlet for the aggression for those who need to earn a 'face' through mortal combat.

Freud's idea of civilization is the opposite of what I mean by it, but his is understandable because his experience of it was mainly of its collapse. The people he treated were living in cultural forms that had no inner vitality. That was Nietzsche's big idea--there was no there there anymore; there are only the empty forms, like a copse of dead trees. They point to something that once lived but no longer does.

Nevertheless people hang onto those dead forms and because their sense of self is deeply entiwined with them, and this clinging to lifeless forms is the essence of alienation, because in order to be un-alienated you have to be in touch with Life, something green and living. For Freud that meant the suppressed instinctuall life of formalistic Victorians, a suppression of life impulses that arise from below, so to speak. But the late 19th century in its mechanistic materialism created a sytem that also suppressed life that descends from above, so to speak. 

The goal of civilization is not to suppress life but to create forms for its expression in such a way that we are raised up above the barbaric and purlely instinct-driven. But that does not require a suppression of instinct, but rather humanizing it. And the humanization, I'd argue, is only possible by the introduction of something outside the barbaric eat-or-be-eaten system, and that would be the leavening effects of 'grace'. 

Freud and Darwin would have described the human predicament accurately if the world were indeed a closed system. But something enters from outside the system that has this leavening effect. You don't have to be a believer to know what it is. We've all experienced it at one time or another. True advances in the human story occur when grace and human instinct combine to create something new. The instincts are the raw material. Grace is the active principle inspiring our imaginations, and the human will works with both to bring something of value into the world. It can be a small thing; it can be a great thing. But if it is worth anything, all three were essential in its making.

In the early years, many of the Christians who "got it", the ones who understood that the kingdom was within and that one's identity was not solely determined by social constructions, headed out into the wasteland. In the period in which we live, celebrated by T.S. Eliot's famous poem, people who get it no longer have to flee into the wasteland because the wasteland has come to us. They get that's our life now, and so we must learn to wander in it, in a way analogous to the Israelites of old, but as with ordering from Amazon, no need to go out, it has been delivered to us right at home. Nevertheless we long for the fleshpots of Egypt and find it hard to hope that there might be any landscape physical or psychic, exterior or interior, in our future that is flowing with milk and honey.

[Ed. note: This is a repost from November 2012. It seems relevant for explaining what's going on in Putin's head, and also why it has nothing to do with his perverse understanding of Christianity.]

The Logos

We do not prove the existence of the poem. 
It is something seen and known in lesser poems.
It is the huge, high harmony that sounds
A little and a little, suddenly
By means of a separate sense. It is and it
Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,
The breadth of an accelerando moves,
Captives the being, widens--and was there.

One poem proves another and the whole,
For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: 
The lover, the believer and the poet.
Their words are chosen out of their desire,
The joy of language, when it is themselves.
With these they celebrate the central poem,
The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent,
Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

The central poem is the poem of the whole,
The poem of the composition of the whole,
The composition of blue sea and of green,
Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems,
And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems are brought then:
Not merely into a whole, but a poem of
The whole, the essential that is compact of its parts,
The roundness that pulls tight the final ring

And that which in an altitude would soar,
A vis, a principle or, it may be,
The meditation of a principle,
Or else an inherent order
active to be
Itself, a nature to its natives all
Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose,
The muscles of a magnet aptly felt,
A giant, on the horizon, glistening,

And in bright excellence adorned, crested
With every prodigal, familiar fire,
And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos
And scintillant sizzlings such as children like,
Vested in the serious folds of majesty,
Moving around and behind, a following,
A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye,
A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.
[Wallace Stevens, excerpted from "A Primitive Like an Orb."]

 

Wallace Stevens was not a believer (at least not in the sense that Dickinson, Hopkins, Eliot, or Auden were), but he's close in his intuition here, and in his expression of it, to the basic intuition of the Logos, (aka the Word) affirmed by the Greeks of old and the Romans. Christians identify the Logos with the Christ, and they think of the Logos as both the ground of  being, in which "all things were made, and not one thing was made without him." The Logos is, therefore, the foundational matrix in which everything exists.

So whether one identifies the Logos/Word--"the Central Poem" with Christ or not--Stevens would not--this fundamental intuition that Stevens is trying to articulate marks the difference between people who "get it" and those who don't. By getting it I mean "knowing" that our existence in this world given to us through our senses is embedded in something larger with unfathomable depths of meaning, unspeakable depths the poet makes feeble attempts to fathom and speak. This isn't something you believe; it's something you know in the way that Stevens knows it. And so long as it is recognized, intuited, it's the common ground, the meeting place where we can gather to be refreshed and where there exists already the foundation upon which to build something new.

Because I believe that this 'Central Poem' in which we all subsist is the soil from which all good things grow. I believe in renaissances, springtimes of the spirit, moments in history when the ground softens and brings forth new life. These moments occur when this intuition about the foundation of things becomes more broadly recognized and experienced, and is expressed in a superabundance of ways by a culture's great artists and philosophers. This springtime, this new thing, is a very old thing, but it's the source of everything new, a new that cannot happen unless we humans find an unalienated way to think and speak. And the measure of this unalienation is the measure of our communion with the Logos. It doesn't matter whether we identify if with the Christ; it matters only that we recognize it and seek to live in a deeper communion with it.

This is not easy, but we overcome our alienation by sinking into the thisness of the real, by sinking into the foundations, which is the Logos, which is the heart of things. We don't want to go there. We'd rather live in our dreams. But it's the Dream in all its manifestations that is the cause of our alienation. (If there is a "Central Poem", is there also a Central Dream that counterposes it? Is our life task to find our way out of the Dream and into the Poem?) Our means of waking up and staying awake is different for each of us. But the only moral question that really matters is to what degree are we awake, and what in our life draws us back into sleep. It's so easy to fall back to sleep. It's the nature of the Central Dream to present itself as a life of being truly alive and awake.  

We humans can bear only so much 'thisness', and we can none of us deal with the enormity of it. But we know where deep communion beckons to us, and we know when we hearken to it or turn away. And we are inclined turn away because where it beckons too often we see Christ crucified, and we'd rather not deal with that. But that's a subject for another day. 

Much Madness

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.    (Emily Dickinson, "Much Madness") 

Since One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, it's been something of a cliche that the crazy people are sane and the sane crazy-- but I do think there's a truth there that, as cliche as it has become, could be better understood. Because what makes us supposedly sane is a filtering system that blocks out the real, because none of us can bear too much reality. I am quite content to live in a consensus reality in which I, for instance, don't see or hear dead people. But I have no problem believing that some people do. Whether they're sane crazy or not depends on how they handle it.

Sanity has always been in large measure measured by one's capacity to accept and work within the consensus reality of one's time and place. Wisdom among the sane is that Tom Sawyerly ability to understand how the consensus reality works, to accept it for what it is without much thinking about it, and to work it to one's advantage.  Mental illness is measured by one's incapacity to work within the consensus reality.  I'm not here to tell you that there is some virtue in mental illness, but simply to acknowledge that the more ordinary syndromes we call mental illness--compulsive disorders, obsessive thinking, severe levels of anxiety and depression--are a function of breakdowns in the filtering system the consensus reality establishes, the psyche's freaked-out response to the leak, and its struggle to patch it for fear of the flood that will drown it.

Some Thoughts on Christian Liberty

Whatever the nature of my politics, it should be clear that I am by no means a theological liberal. I acknowledge that in order to develop a high level of spiritual maturity, it is necessary to restrain one's open-ended freedom in order to submit to one kind or another of spiritual discipline, just as it is necessary for a musician to submit to the discipline of his or her instrument. You can noodle away on your fiddle, or you can find a teacher and really work at it. It's the same with any kind of spiritual development; most people are noodlers, and it comes down to a fundamental resistance to submit to a basic discipline. But the goal of restricting one's freedom in the short run has the longer term goal to be trained to become more free.  The highly trained, disciplined musician is freer because he can play things that are impossible for the noodler. The goal of submitting to a discipline is to obtain a higher level of freedom and capability--not endless submission.

Now the problem facing any spiritual aspirant in our western consumer culture is that most of the religion that seems to be flourishing today has very little to do with developing spiritual freedom. There are people everywhere who are spiritually starving and all they can find is spiritual junk food, which has an unwholesome, addictive effect. And when the junk food offered identifies itself as Christian, it gives Christianity a bad name.

I don't know for sure what the pope, Joseph Ratzinger, would say about the goal of Christian practice being a deeper level of freedom. I suspect he would agree in theory--his early writings show he understands and has embraced the concept, but his persistent attempts to suppress Liberation Theology in Brazil in the 80s shows he was never very sympathetic to the idea people putting the theory into practice. He would probably argue that the goal of true spiritual freedom is rarely realized, and that too many people who think they are exercising real freedom are in fact deluded and more than likely really in the grip of compulsion, aka, sin. The road is narrow and the path steep toward the attainment of genuine freedom, he might say, and, Liberation Theology is not what it advertises itself to be. Maybe.

But maybe true spiritual freedom is so rarely realized because the authorities are too fearful of people getting it wrong than hopeful that they'll get it right. It's the old Grand Inquisitor scenario envisioned by Dotooyevski's Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. This idea that the clergy has to keep those in its care in a childlike dependent state to keep them safe from harsh truths that they could not bear to know or cope with. Leave the politics to the grownups who sacrifice themselves to deal with the world's ugly truths so that you children might remain innocent

So the question I would put to him then would be this: Is it really desirable that people should just be well-behaved children? Or is that as much a form of unfreedom as the compulsiveness of, say, the sexual libertine? Is it significantly better to be a prig than it is to be a debauchee. Is it better to be a Pharisee than a tax collector? Is it better to be the older son or the prodigal, younger son? It's not good to be either, but if you had to be one or the other, which would it be?

I'm pretty sure he'd say it's better to be the former in these pairs--the prig. It's safer, less messy. And as a parent I understand where he's coming from. Much less to worry about if your kid (or your priests and nuns) is well-behaved and repressed, if he's a member of the party of the Superego rather than of the party of the Id.

This kind of moral conformism is the bias of the cultural right and leads to spiritual passivity and a defensive, fortress mentality. The Jesus of the Gospels was completely the opposite; if any thing he came to subvert such fortresses of the mind. But the strength of the fortress correlates with the intensity of the fear, and the intensity of the fear correlates with the intensity of violence needed to suppress the threat. And the threat they fear is true, genuine freedom.

I think there are times in everyone's life when he or she must make a sacrifice of his or her freedom, but such a sacrifice has value only if it is freely chosen. Being well behaved little children is not the goal of Obedience. Obedience in the spiritual sense is rather the submission of the will to the logic of grace. And while certainly we have a duty in the parenting of our children to challenge their natural narcissism--they must learn self-restraint and to master their compulsivity--our more important duty to them is to nourish their freedom, and the development of their conscience. Because in the long run having a well-developed conscience is the only thing that matters. It is the cognitive capacity they must  develop if they are to discern the movement of grace in their lives or distinguish truth from illusion.

There's a reason why Jesus got a much warmer reception among those in the party of the Id who had morally scandalous reputations than the morally righteous who were the party of the Superego--the former were less smugly sure of themselves, more vulnerable, more open to the surprising and the new possibility. They were, for sure, in a state of unfreedom, but they were not locked up tight the way the Pharisees were in their whited sepulchers. The unrighteous were disposed toward freedom and recognized true liberation when it came to them. They had a capacity for discernment that the Pharisees did not. The Pharisees had highly developed superegos, but profoundly underdeveloped consciences. Conscience is one of those use-it-or-lose it kind of things. Better to use it and be occasionally wrong than not to use it at all.

We are all of us in our different ways in states of unfreedom. It's a given. It's what Christians mean when they talk about original sin. But in the final analysis it doesn't matter what the particular form our unfreedom takes. The more important issue is how well disposed we are to be free. Will we greet the Liberator if he should come to us, or shall we turn away from him in fear? Pharisees and Inquisitors want nothing to do with Him.

[Ed.: This is a revised version of an essay originally posted in May 2006.  See also a related post, "Christian Liberty."]

More on 'Lost' and Dante's Island Down Under

About a month ago, I wrote a too long post about how Cuse's and Lindelof's Lost was an creative exercise in postmodern religious syncretism and mythopoesis, but leaning perhaps a little more heavily on retrieval themes from Dante and by extension Catholic iconography.  I think after watching the finale last night, that assessment holds up pretty well. I'm off on some things, but I think I caught the spirit of what they were trying to do. You can read the whole post if you want, but I think the most relevant grafs are here:

For Dante, Purgatory was an island in the southern hemisphere, unreachable by ordinary means. It was the antipode to Jerusalem, which was the the center of the northern hemisphere, the top half of the earth, which in Dante's imagination of it stretched east to west, from the Ganges to Gibraltar. Purgatory is a mountain on this island at the center of the bottom half of the earth. So the central axis of the earth is defined by the North Pole at Mt. Calvary, and by Mt. Purgatorio and the South Pole, and the summit of Mt. Purgatorio is Eden, from which Adam and Eve were banned. And between the two lies hell.