The Hollow Where You Were

Scientists cannot explain
what has happened
but there is only a crust of earth
eggshell-thick
beneath all the places you have been.

Everything looked the same
after you left
— steel, concrete, soil, grass —
but I know, now, how
it all turns to sand
when I walk
I have to choose my steps
carefully.

I do a lot of back-pedaling
to keep the earth
from swallowing me whole.

—leesberg, va
19 apr 2010

gauche
22 Apr 10

The Violence Shall Rise Again

Members of this country of ours refer to certain events as the War of Northern Aggression. Worth mentioning, and indeed sometimes mentioned, is the fact that during this war of “Northern Agression”, the South, like Han Solo, shot first. Some of this has been in the news lately.

You have to wonder how much of the Southern idea of honor comes out of the way they have to think about these events. The war of Northern Aggression, in which the South resorted to violence first. Let us imagine for a moment that this is not a contradiction; let us imagine that we live in a universe in which the aggressor is not the one who first resorted to violence but the one who drove the other to violence. You have to have something that trumps violence, something that justifies violence as an opening gambit.

You have to have a concept of honor, or of fighting words. Violence in other forms: who I am — my person — is my honor and the honor of my family, which your words can diminish. This justifies raising my fist against you: because you have threatened my person in the form of my honor. Always you are looking for the thing that trumps violence. The thing that you can say is just as bad as violence. Consider here the concept of economic violence, popular on the Left but not unknown as a defense of the South. Consider the threat of extinction of a way of life.

This is where the idea of structural violence breaks down: every thing is a threat against some other sacred and holy thing. Now that we know it is a threat, we know that we can respond with violence if necessary. The same mustachioed madman lies at the foot of every slippery slope, with his tan jacket and red armband: thus, any step in any direction can — nay, must — be met with violence.

We know some things that are probably not true. In the Old West of popular imagination, there is this odd conceit that you could kill a man in self-defense if you could get him to draw first. Drawing the gun is a form of violence that justifies our violence in response. In this way, you could shoot first without being the aggressor. But — again, in the Old West of popular imagination — what this meant is that the fastest (most accurate) draw could kill with impunity in many cases. In the stories, the Fastest Gun in the West can only be one of two things: he can be a bully who rides into town and threatens civilization, or he can be a monk who is somehow not corrupted by the awesome power of life and death that he wields. We know that the latter is a fiction intended for the comfort and inspiration of children.

gauche
12 Apr 10

Two thoughts before breakfast.

What it means to repeatedly exercise one’s authority is to become unworthy of that authority.

Whatever is special about the people of Christ, it is not the people.

gauche
07 Apr 10

Credo Quia

Not because it is the concluding, confounding chapter to the Greatest Story Ever Told, but because the story itself is unsatisfying in detail. It tells like an anecdote hastily recounted; not the things you say at the funeral but the stuff you say at the wake, the stories you tell at the airport bar the next day on your way home.

This is something that happened. Here’s some context. Then my friend, he said this. Then this thing happened. Now it’s over and I don’t know what it was supposed to mean. I have to run.

Joseph of Amimathea. In a proper story, well-told, Joseph of Arimathea would be the Roman Centurian whose daughter was healed, or the Rich Man who turned in sadness, away from the Needle’s Eye. You have to introduce the wealthy benefactor in the first act if you want to shoot him in the third act. Even Fortinbras gets name-checked throughout.

But no. Joseph of Armiathea just shows up. Like you do in real life. He might as well be the kindness of strangers.

This is a thing that happened. I don’t know what it means. It might be important, so listen closely.

In a way, I think we have not moved much from that spot. What we celebrate every Sunday is the mysterium fidei — not the thing we know; not the thing we understand. The thing that confounds us and makes us silent. We do not gather to commemorate the gravitational constant, the laws of supply and demand, the principle of noncontradiction. We understand these things, or if we do not, they are at least within the possibility of our comprehension. We do not need to keep doing them, over and over again for thousands of years.

It went like this: God Himself broke bread with man, and He poured out wine; and a little later, God’s own flesh was broken, and out poured blood. And somehow, those two events are connected. Are you paying attention? It went like this.

I sometimes think that every priest is blind. Every priest is an old man in a darkened room with a single stub of candle. Every supper is the same supper. Every supper is the last supper, the last thing that we will do before the universe ends and our particles are consumed by fire. Every priest is the last priest on a worn-out world, carrying forward in time this thing-we-know-not-what, the wheat and the grape that are the remains of when God became man and died.

gauche
01 Apr 10

Recollected Text: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Series note: There is a list of books to which I am likely to want to refer at parties and in or other social contexts in which I am likely to become conversationally animated (read: have been drinking). (Infer: I am a hit at parties.) These books are at various times tools, or crutches, or lodestones. In any case, they are packed with biographical significance — they mean something, or did, to someone I am, or once was.

Recollected Texts is an ongoing, occasional attempt to review these books as I now recall them, after having told their stories to countless cocktail-hour strangers. I will start with Greene’s The End Of The Affair because it is short, and because this week I went out into the desert and experimented on myself with homeopathic amounts of sleep.

Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair lies to you right from the beginning, because the narrator tells you that this is a story of hate, not of love. It is pretty clear, however, that the narrator knows that the relationship between love and hate is not simple. The horrible choice in the center of the book is this: can you reject love as an act of love? In the context of the story, though, Greene has played enough with our understandings of love and hate that we have to allow for the possibility that a rejection could be an act of love if it were sincere.

The book explores that relationship: love and hate keep coming up as subversions of one another. The two main characters — Bendrix and Sarah — are in a relationship; they cannot bring themselves to hate Sarah’s husband: he is too small-spirited to feel anything for except humor and pity. If they could take him seriously, then they could hate him, but There is an atheist “preacher” who keeps coming up, who rails against religion and against God on Speaker’s Corner in London; at one point, one of the characters confronts him: nobody spends his days railing against the tooth fairy or the square triangle. At another point, the atheist preacher explains how it was the priests that made him a theist, and a character asks whether it could ever work the other way.

The one character, Sarah, has to decide whether she loves Bendrix enough to leave him, to give a mundane end to their tragically romantical love. In return, Bendrix — who in typical Greeneland fashion will brook no suggestion of pathos but suffers a surfeit of it underneath — convinces himself that he needs to understand whether he hated Sarah by re-visiting — to our benefit — the story of their love.

I do not like to spoil the ending, but ultimately the question Greene is asking is this: how little is enough? What is the atomic particle of love, or of sincerity, or of belief — the smallest part beyond which you no longer have love or sincerity or belief at all. How thick can a place get and still be one of the thin places? How small of a mustard seed, exactly, are we talking about here?

gauche
23 Mar 10