My Time
A corpse in the road to Judah.
A seated lion and a yawning ass.
The locusts chant one systole a minute
and I thirst. Too long, and trust won’t do;
I need the Holy Ghost.
As men mark time I shouldn’t mark, I’m told,
but martyred souls enjamb the very Throne
with metered stops. The dead do count.
The dead are authorized to count.
The Earth is not warming. It is oscillating.
Global temperatures for the last 10,000 years, graphed.
Syun Akasofu – Natural Causes of 20th Century Warming: Recovery from the Little Ice Age and Oscillatory Change
Charles Murray: “…to make observed human nature compatible with theoretical schemes…”
But what is it that we have learned that is truly new about human nature in the 20th century? I submit that the body of even the best work consists overwhelmingly of commentary on insights first expressed centuries ago. Indeed, if I were to characterize the role of the behavioral sciences in the 20th century—and please take this as a provisional and sweeping statement that needs a lot of work—it would be as follows: The first three-quarters of the 20th century were spent largely trying to make observed human behavior compatible with theoretical schemes that ultimately didn’t work. The last quarter of the 20th century marks the beginning of a painful, slow reconciliation of what modern behavioral science tells us empirically with what the ancients told us, and an even more painful repudiation of the 20th century’s favorite conceits. Where does Freudianism, its intellectual position so commanding fifty years ago, stand today? Remnants are left, but only remnants. I shouldn’t even mention Marxism; it is too easy a target. But the fact remains: For decades, it was the leading intellectual paradigm on the Continent and had huge influence among broad elements of the American intelligentsia. What is left of Marx? Not as a governing ideology, but as a work of social science that still has validity? Virtually nothing.
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.8885/pub_detail.asp
We Know the Garden In the Act Of Drawing It
One proper object of our knowledge is the Creator; the other is The Garden. The World is the garden, seen from exile.
We can observe the world via Reason but we cannot know it. This detached observation — science — is the spectatorship of exile. It yields useful information, through which we master and improve the world.
All knowledge is participatory love. Our knowledge of God is through the agency of love, but is often called “mysticism” when it impinges the cognition. Our knowledge of The Garden is in the artistic act, which is simply an exercise of loving the warm light as it kisses the molecules. Knowledge is useful, but the knower, the lover, is indifferent to its usefulness.
So knowledge is interpenetration; it is cognition of the inner essences of created things. Michelangelo saw the inner essence of the stone when he released the angel from the prison of extraneous marble.
So, art is a mode of friendship.
Conversation Was In the Desert
Of course our talks have gotten shorter. We soon will talk like they do in the desert, where your one sentence plus my one sentence will fill a week with ecstasy. The monastic rule of silence is but a fossil of the fecundity of desert talks.
Sweetness Moves Toward Formality
Conversation in new truth takes on formal voices. The room feels hushed.
Formality is not the mode of distance, but of precious. It is the courtliness of the lord and the lady on the hidden stairs. A man knows his formality is real when his eyes are moist.
Conversation Is Always Sweet
Conversation tends to the unbearably Sweet.
Do you notice how, when you remember our conversation now, it feels sweet? Your heart aches to talk again. It is like the feeling of being in love. But, unlike infatuations, it need never go away.
Don’t spend the sweetness on yourselves. The friends will tend to — consciously or unknowingly — spend the sweetness as internal comfort. Or they can re-invest the sweetness in the talk. As they re-invest the sweetness in the talk they evoke the participation of the Holy Spirit.
I’m trying to grasp the “how” of this reinvestment…I don’t yet have the words. But I know that when the Holy Spirit enters a conversation, there often is a moment of confusion between the two friends. If they do well, they name the third voice and then He is there. If they do not sort out His voice quickly, their talk will fall apart and they’ll end up hoping for His return.
The Presence of the Holy Spirit in a conversation is not the same as His witness in the spirit, or His leading, or comforting, or any of His other operations. All his operations are bright and clear and distinct in their character as well as in their content.
In Conversation No-one Can Be Wrong
Since each pericope advances upon the last, no-one in a conversation can be wrong. This is not to say, of course, that there is no right or wrong. It’s just that when someone must be corrected of a wrong, the verbal exchange of correction, or rebuke, is a rhetorical and metaphysically distinct thing. It is not a conversation; it is a rebuke, followed by a repentance, and these have entirely distinct structures from a conversation, because they are spiritually distinct actions.
But in a conversation, no-one can be wrong. Wrong-ness destroys the forward movement of the conversation immediately. You have the responsibility of never allowing yourself to be wrong, and of never allowing your friend to be wrong.
This is why spiritual direction is more than a matter of reading books.
Conversation Is A Particular Structure In Talking
“Conversation” is not a subjective term. It has as precise a meaning as “tree” or “rock”. In a conversation, each pericope advances upon the last.
What most people call “conversation” is not. Most verbal encounters are just serial monologues, and the connection between the monologues is the flimsiest association, often just a verbal echo. These are non-events.The first person says something about her children and the second person remembers something similar about his children. And so it goes. The talk neither progresses nor finds any new truth. This superficial talk is fine for the polite chatter and information processing that we all have to do to get through a day with casual or business acquaintances…but the talk that most of us spend our days on is not this word “conversation”. A conversation is a beautiful and rare event.
Most people live their lives without one.
Conversations Never Stop
To build a comment fully on my friend’s comment — comment, subsume it and then add to it, requires all discipline and creativity. Nothing is more difficult. We either subsume or we evade.
Tradition is just a long conversation, and a conversation is a microcosmic picture of how tradition works — by a canonical respect for the previous comment of my friend.
Tradition is simply the conversation that was going on before we entered the room, and manners toward tradition is simply the recognition that I didn’t start the conversation.
Traditions convey excellence and are therefore difficult. Defying tradition is usually an evasion of the tradition’s discipline. Impatience with tradition is the ego demanding cheap praise. Such impatience is often dressed up in high-sounding talk about the self, which means it is unable to talk about the art. The “rebel without a cause” is a spoiled child, who poses the false dichotomy of “tradition versus creativity”. Once this false fork in the road is passed, any step is a loss. The culture that glorifies him has the leisure to be self-indulgent, for it is a parasite. Such leisure usually reclines on the blood and tears of the heroic generations now past.
There will always be oppressive traditions, but our culture is so propagandized against tradition our very judgments about oppression should be presumed adolescent until proven otherwise. We spit on health and tout the vile. The modern artist not only rebels, he glorifies rebellion.
Chesterton said tradition was giving your ancestors a vote, but if all we give them is a vote they can be cancelled out in an instant.
