‘Be ye perfect even as your Father who is in heaven’ Love in the same way as the sun gives light. Love has to be brought back to ourselves in order that it may be shed on all things. God alone loves all things and he only loves himself.
To love in God is far more difficult than we think.
[…]
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly’.
— Simone Weil
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This morning I sat in bed and drank fresh coffee from a handmade mug and read a Plough essay on La Tour’s Adoration of the Shepherds. Then, with the empty mug on the (prisoner-crafted) nightstand, I ate scrambled eggs and pancakes while the sun shined warmly on my feet through brand new, argon-insulated windows. And all this with my week-old son sleeping on my lap, as peacefully as any baby in history has slept — and that amazingly no less for the occasional, joyful-but-less-than-peaceful incursions from my two-year-old son.
Also this morning, the two-year-old latched onto the phrase “life is good.”
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I am aware of a shooting in Virginia and an attack on a synagogue in Michigan yesterday. I am aware that my country — Weil again is first to mind whenever I say that — my country among many horrible things of late and not-so-late, made feckless promises to the more than 30,000 murdered Iranian protesters in January, only to itself — ourselves — butcher another 165 Iranians (mostly children) at the very start of our apparent attempt to keep that promise.
(Don’t click this link unless you really want to know what we do.)
It wasn’t just that man, or those people; we did it — we did it.
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Allen Levi:
“I’m so sorry, Ellen, so sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize, Mr. Theo. It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe not. But maybe yes. Ellen, the older I get, the more convinced I am that every hurt the world has ever known is somehow the fault of every person who ever lived. Maybe not directly and never entirely, but somehow, I fear, we own all of the world’s hurts together.”
…
“And then, out of nowhere, we both started sobbing. All of a sudden, I think we both had visions of what we had lived through together. God, it was horrible.” Tony closed his eyes and groaned.…
“And it was like, when we saw each other, we were both think-ing, did we really live through that? Were we really there? And I think we both hurt for each other. Then I grabbed him, and we held on to each other, and I swear it felt like we were begging for forgiveness or something, not just for being soldiers in that war but also for being part of a world that can do such godawful things.”
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Of course, we need not, and should not, cease our fun or recreation and “learning in wartime,” but — at the risk of undesirably and unintentionally offending some close to me — wouldn’t it be wonderful if every last one of us refused to play golf.
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The other day I read Peter Mommsen’s introduction to the same issue of Plough.
The Book of Wisdom urges us to see the world as freighted with meaning. This dawn, this forest, this deer, this dog, this heron: each is a poem about God. […]
As Wordsworth put it in the title of his poem, our experiences of beauty come to us as “intimations of immortality.”
But even the beautiful natural landscape is not all peace and light. Where Peter of Damascus looked at the world and saw “order,” “proportion,” and “harmony,” the modern mind wonders how to reckon with the underlying violence: Darwinian competition for survival, Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.” The maple woods may seem lovely, but any given tree may be in competition against the rest for access to nutrients and sunlight. The noble-looking deer likely harbors hideous parasites and, come winter, faces a one in three chance of death by disease, starvation, or coyote. When the largemouth bass breed next spring, 99.8 percent of their hatchlings will perish before adulthood, many cannibalized by their own siblings. […]
Any beauty that excludes humankind’s imperfection and vulnerability is prone to becoming subhuman. And even the wholesome beauty of nature is only a partial truth in a world where children starve in war zones or are trafficked to abusers.
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Also the other day, I was flipping through Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and landed on a chapter in Macedonia. It is 1937 and she is visiting a monastery outside Tetovo, in a village called the Sorrowing Women. The Abbot of the monastery is described as “one of the most completely created human beings I have ever met.”
I noticed all this through a haze of pleasure caused by the man’s immense animal vigour, and his twinkling charm, which was effective even when it was realized to be voluntary. His disingenuousness failed to repel for the same reason that made it transparently obvious. It was dictated by some active but superficial force in the foreground of his mind; but a fundamental sincerity, of the inflexible though not consciously moral sort found in true artists, watched what he was doing with absolute justice. All his intellectual processes were of a hard ability, beautiful to watch, but it was surprising to find that they were sometimes frustrated by his lack of knowledge. … His life had been spent in a continuous struggle for power, which had given him no time to pursue knowledge that was not of immediate use to him; and indeed such a pursuit would have been enormously difficult in his deprived and harried environment. But his poetic gift of intuitive apprehension, which was great, warned him how much there was to be known, and how intoxicating it would be to experience such contact with reality; and that perhaps accounted for his restlessness, his ambiguity, the perpetual splitting and refusion of his personality.
The descriptions of the Abbot that West offers are written with that same ambiguity and splitting — they are both very unsympathetic and very sympathetic. And this seems to be intentional, or at least unavoidable.
Dragutin and I alike would have been amazed if his courage or his cunning had failed, and in time of danger we would run into the palm of his hand. We knew quite well that he cared for nothing but an idea, and that his heart regarded his own ambition without approval. If his ways were tortuous, those of nature are not less so, as the geneticist and the chemist know them. To reject this man was to reject life, though to accept him wholly would have been to doom life to be what it is for ever.
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Leaving the village, West offers this description — a passage about as representative of the book as any you might find:
The valley broadened to wide Biblical plains, stretching to distant mountains that were of no colour and all colours. The ground we looked on was sodden with blood and tears, for we were drawing near the Albanian frontier, and there are few parts of the world that have known more politically induced sorrow. Here the Turks fostered disorder, lest their subjects unite against them, and here after the war Albanians and Bulgarians fought against incorporation in Yugoslavia and had to be subdued by force. There was no help for it, since the Yugoslavs had to hold this district if they were to defend themselves against Italy. But to say that the conflict was inevitable is not to deny that it was hideous. This land, by a familiar irony, is astonishing in its beauty. Not even Greece is lovelier than this corner of Macedonia. Now a violet storm massed low on the far Albanian mountains, and on the green plains at their feet walked light, light that was pouring through a hole in the dark sky, but not as a ray, as a cloud, not bounded yet definite, a formless being which was very present, as like God as anything we may see. It is a land made for the exhibition of mysteries, this Macedonia. Here is made manifest a chief element in human disappointment, the discrepancy between our lives and their framework. The earth is a stage exquisitely set; too often destiny will not let us act on it, or forces us to perform a hideous melodrama. Our amazement is set forth here in Macedonia in these tragically sculptured mountains and forests, in the white village called the Sorrowing Women, in the maintained light that walked as God on the fields where hatreds are like poppies among the corn.
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PERHAPS . . .
for the loneliness of an author
Perhaps these thoughts of ours
will never find an audience
Perhaps the mistaken road
will end in a mistake
Perhaps the lamps we light one at a time
will be blown out, one at a time
Perhaps the candles of our lives will gutter out
without lighting a fire to warm us
Perhaps when all the tears have been shed
the earth will be more fertile
Perhaps when we sing praises to the sun
the sun will praise us in return
Perhaps these heavy burdens
will strengthen our philosophy
Perhaps when we weep for those in misery
we must be silent about miseries of our own
Perhaps
Because of our irresistible mission
We have no choice
— Shu Ting
Translated from the Chinese by Carolyn Kizer
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Today is now almost gone by. I’m taking an hour at the pub, sitting at the bar nursing a beer and a dark mood alongside the largest joys of my entire life.
The air outside that I’ll walk home in is cold again and more snow is just a few hours away.
“What else can be?” my son likes to say when he’s looking for something.
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From Pete McElroy’s “A House of Random Cards”:
And I think: I will fail at this;
I will fail as husband and father
and brother- and son-in-law,
as comforter and counselor, at everything
except perhaps the office of historian, who notes
the silent weeping of a soul
in torment and the hard embrace
and the wordless joyful oblivion.
And now, late at night, alone
by the fire, a book of verse open but
face-down beside it,
and outside the soft white powder
of recent snow and frigid air catching
and holding the diffused light
of a distant cold indifferent winter moon,
I think my heart will crack—
not for death, which is certain
and now imminent, but for life and the living:
for a daughter and a son who today
reminded me there are proximate worlds that are
worlds apart and that for my children’s sakes
and for their mother’s and for others’
and even for my own I must occupy them all
at once forever or fail like a hand of random cards
or like a pair of lungs.
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I do think my heart will crack.
What else can be?
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