Let's cleanse the palate, shall we, after that bit of unfortunateness with an excerpt of a poem from Thomas Hardy (via Tenebrae):

  Wintertime nights;
But my bereavement-pain
It cannot bring again:
   Twice no one dies.

   Flower-petals flee;
But, since it once hath been,
No more that severing scene
   Can harrow me.

Writing the Great American Novel
OK I'm tanned, rested and ready. I'm hungry like the wolf. 50 words a day to freedom, just a knife in the jailhouse wall till pretty soon there be a hole the size of Gibraltar. Here's my start... It looks to be an autobiography, a send-up of the whole confessional/memoirist thing. I'm going to lampoon the old Hollywood story - guy makes good, guy does booze & 'phets (slang for aphetamines, if it isn't it should), nearly loses his life, goes to Betty Ford Clinic and writes the memoir. This is going to be: guy makes okay (that's all I got so far).

The Great American Novel
        …by TS O'Rama


Page 1, Paragraph 1:

The great American novel should start out with a catchy phrase or, in lieu of that, the phrase “catchy phrase”.

**
Tis a very American thing, isn't it, to attempt the great American novel?

**
I was born height-disadvantaged. At 19 inches, the other children in the natal armory were 20, some 21 inches. Fortunately I had the vertical leap of ten babies and soon was dunking basketballs in the newly formed “Pediatric Basketball League”.

(Is that 50 yet? You don't think it's serious enough do you?)

One of three children born to aristocratic parents, I was trundled off with the other youths of scions to Eton, a British boarding school of some reknown, where we learned that it was bad form to brag about where we went to school. My hand flew up.

"But then how will others know we went to Eton?"

"You will write about it in your memoir."

(When do I get into Kantian philosophy? This thing is going nowhere fast. I'm embarrassed by it. Can I get a NaMO refund?)

By the fifth grade, as the Americans vulgarly refer to it, I was studying Kant and Hegel and


***** DO OVER ****

I've got writer's block. I wrote myself in the corner there, the 5th grader studying Kant & Hegel - what the heck can I do with that?

****

Page 1, Paragraph 1, Word 1:

My greatest fear (is that I will always write in the first person!! Why can't I plausibly use "he" and not imagine that by using "he" everyone will think I mean me? Well, I could write it from a "she" perspective, though they tell you to write what you know and I'm not a woman, although some of my best friends are (strike that) my best friend is a woman)...

****

Page 1, Paragraph 1, Word 1:

Her greatest fear was that someday she would be alone in a euphemistically named rest home and the thoughts that would come unbidden would not be the poetry of Auden or even the pet names her husband, dead some twenty years, called her. No, it would be thoughts of Jenny McCarthy, J-Lo, or Serena Williams. Some sort of eternal People Magazine taking control of her synapses. This was even worse than her other fear - that she would lose control and begin yelling obscenties. And it would be just her luck not to scream the obligatory "f--K" or "d*amn", which every rest home attendant had heard for years, but given her blasted creativity there would be horrid combinations that made the attendant call the other attendants over to listen. And then they'd call her daughter and have her witness this amazing streak of expletive excess, this superlative shit.

****
well that's enough for day 1. Obviously I'm not happy that already in the first paragraph I've sunk to cheap profanity. Writing is hard, hard work indeed.

Can't Dispute That...
"We celebrate winter when it first arrives -- a thoroughly human response in the face of the inexorable -- but within a week begin to treat it like an out-of-work uncle who has overstayed his welcome." - Disputations

From Mark Shea:
One of Mother Teresa's basic ways of approaching the culture she was in was to urge people toward conformity to Christ in the ways that they understood best. In short, if a person was a Muslim, she tried to urge them to be the best Muslim they could be, confident that this too was a form of pre-evangelization since all that is best in what is authentically human (and Islam is a human tradition, not a divine revelation) could also point to Christ. She got this dangerous and loony notion from Paul on the Areopagus (Acts 17). She did the same with Hindus. I don't know what her "conversion rate" was among her clientele (most of them were, after all, dying). But this was her basic approach. Certainly she did not turn away those who sought baptism, but she was not a "turn or burn" kinda gal.

Didn't mean to imply in that last post that St. Pio (that still sounds odd!) had it easy. The mind reels at the amount of work he did, work for souls. Confession lines queued for seeming ever. And it was done while he was in more or less constant pain. There is a sense in which our Achilles Heel must be exploited for our own gain - i.e. perfection. If one were guessing at C.S. Lewis's Achilles Heel it might be the death of a loved one since he lost his mother as a young child. And so consider the reverberation of losing his young wife - surely the hardest thing he could give up. And what greater loss for a former actor would be to lose the expressiveness of his face? Our pope carries his cross. There are many examples. I think of the ambition of Bishop Sheen. He longed for the television lights and the red hat. He lost the former and never gained the latter. But they all perservered and that is another saintly witness.

Still pondering the Mother Teresa link via All But Dissertations. Interesting that some take cheer from it; I had a different reaction. I felt sympathy for her, sad for her, that she lived with it for so long. It prompted renewed rumination on the variety of saints...They are "witnesses" that God exists.... The Holy Father said in Fides Et Ratio:

"In believing, we entrust ourselves to the knowledge acquired by other people. This suggests an important tension. On the one hand, the knowledge acquired through belief can seem an imperfect form of knowledge, to be perfected gradually through personal accumulation of evidence; on the other had, belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person's capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others..." - Pope JPII

Perhaps this is partly why I like St. Pio so much. First, he was curmugeonly at times. Secondly, the superabundance of supernatural phenomena surrounding him tends to banish doubt. (It must be difficult to disbelieve when you're bleeding from the wrists every day, let alone bi-locating. Of couse some explain it away with science or myth - every party has a pooper.) Perhaps it is easier to entrust oneself to the knowledge acquired by St. Padre Pio, though ease is not the purpose of life. And that some our helped by saints who doubt is something that one can't doubt!

Celebrating and Ignoring Our Differences
Watched Andy Richter Controls the Universe, taped from last night. Funny stuff. His firm hires a black guy, in front of whom Andy makes disparaging racist remarks - about the Irish. Well, turns out the black guy is Irish. The camera pans his desk and sure enough there is enough Irish kitsch to statisfy the Home Shopping Network on St. Patrick's Day. There's a picture of JFK, a "Kiss Me I'm Irish" button, the Irish Blessing, a boatload of bumper stickers...simply hilarious. The new guy is greatly offended, tells Andy's boss, who starts to chew Andy out until the black guy says "it's not about being African-American, it's about my being Irish". The gal says, "what? Get out of here." They take it to her boss, a black women, who says, "and your point is?". They take it to her boss who happens to be Irish. They are all sent to sensitivity training. Marvelous fun. In the end Andy concludes that we have to "celebrate and ignore our differences at the same time" which is pretty much where we are today - a society who thinks it can attain color-blindness by being obsessed with race. Hi-laire.

Thanks to a kind reader, Lisa, who pointed out that Dostoevsky and not Nietsche said "without God, everything is permitted". I've corrected it below. Here's a link from the compulsively readable Tom Wolfe via her.

This story (via All But Dissertations) drives home the possibility that one can be plagued by doubts and still be devout. It's interesting because I always thought that there was a proportionate relationship between faith and behavior - i.e. if I am sure there is a God, I will deny myself pleasure. If I am not so sure, I will be less inclined to deny pleasure. If I am convinced there is no God, then I have a free license (Dostoyevski had one of his characters say "If there is no God, everything is permitted"). Yet Mother Teresa not only avoided sins of omission but also comission by actively loving despite (perhaps) not feeling loved. They say you can't give what you don't have, but with God all things are possible. Old Oligarch surprised me with this: When you feel truly gloomy about the world and almost everything in it -- as I have for the past few weeks -- these kind of articles cheer me up like nothing else can.

The Fascinating Movement of Salvation Ideas
The Jews were the Chosen Ones. Religious exclusivity in the form of "only we are saved" was biblical, was sanctioned. In the New Testament, things became more uncertain. The path went from "only those are saved who are (fill in your denomination)" to "only those are saved who believe in Christ" to "everyone is pretty much saved as long as you don't consciously reject Christ".

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.  -Soren Kierkegaard

Discontinued Items...
Been going thru ol' writings...like the "Elegy for June". Here's something I wrote in '98. Not sure if I feel any differently now.

Religion is surely the most relentless of the head-banging pursuits, especially when you ruthlessly root out any sentimentality in it. I’m not interested in feel-good religion. I can do that with a 12-pack.

It'd only take a 6-pack now. I've cut back.

Elegy for June
ephemeral mistress of my heart
one-twelve of the annum
a nightcap on the verandah of the year
a lilting melodic breath
on a moonful night.

June,
you nostalgic one,
spinning webs I can scarce recall
you remind me of a 40s musical
glamorous and leggy
fresh and naive
month of my birth
day of the summer equinox
you vernal infernal month
pregnant with possibility
setting hopes impossibly high
with hormone-fed memories
of lockers and school hallways
strewn with paper like confetti
the last day of class papers old homeworks and jaundiced notebooks
suddenly wonderfully useless
icons reduced to simpering strawmen
they crinkle and burn in the summer sun
in the June sun so potent
in whose heat
responsibilities melt away
shrinking like tumors without blood
and time expands like a balloon
or the rising of the circus tents.

Sliding on our backs down the paper highway
firing the contents of our lockers
down the hall like bullets
screaming out hot bus windows
screaming to the feckless masses
in transit
singing to them-
“schools out for summer....”
“school’s out forever”
till our eyes want to bust
and the veins pop from our necks.

June, you were meant for kids.

Childhood and youth are nostalgic because they are the purveyors of firsts. First love, first car, first house... I remember my first house...Space that I could change, after ten years of apartments with rules against ...everything. Now I could be as unconventional as I wanna be, and I imagined framed black & white pictures of old writers surrounded by eccentric wallpaper and a dolly of pipes on an antique writing table. And a sunroom that would be a tropical rainforest - a wall of pure color - a lime green or stunning red - with a million plants and ferns and rocks and things. There would be a map room, with a mural of East Mongolia (picked quite at random), at a scale one inch = 20 yards, with old National Geographics framed and hung with care. And of course, the baseball card room, with its green turf rug and a huge stadium mural that made you think you were walking into a stadium. Most of the ideas were never executed due to time, money, money & time mixed with laziness. Some of the stuff I wanted was unavailable at Walmart or Kmart, and so were, metaphysically if not in fact, unavailable.

fictional foray
Daryl thought of prayer as a window, a small opening in the wall of his life. Not that his life was a prison, no it was a gracious, well-appointed space, but one a wee bit shy of air. And freedom. And so prayer was a window which he could open and he always hoped the small opening would present some kind of unexpected grace, maybe a vision, or simply the knowledge of what to do about a certain situation. However, he knew God was not fond of signs, finding them a bit distasteful. God wasn’t ostentatious, he didn’t run up and knock you about the head on things. The devil was all Vegas, he appealed crassly, urgently in need and spectacular feelings like with drugs or sex. So Daryl merely prayed, content with whatever would be provided. But he was never quite sure of where he ended and God began.

So, seated on his bed, he willed his thoughts to the window, and lifted them to God on an imaginary gold chalice and asked the angels bring it to Him. And then something remarkable happened. The window physically opened. The window, which he’d been accustomed to thinking a symbol (as described above), actually opened without any apparent assistance. His senses now told him something that plainly conflicted with science! A mass was moved, which requires energy, and that energy was not seen. He moved closer to the window and breathed the scent of roses - it must’ve been thousands, for it soon overcame his power to smell. He didn’t know what to do but pray. A sign he’d requested, and instantly felt small for having required it. How many holy saints had longed, secretly, for a sign. How many had spent their lives in monasteries, praying unceasingly, while beating down any desire for a sign. And how blest are those that do not see and yet believe. Daryl stayed by the window all day and into the night, and fell asleep, in a heap on the floor, till the next morning when he awoke to a window firmly closed and no lingering scent of roses. Panicked, he wondered - ‘did that really happen? Could I have been dreaming?’ He immediately longed for another sign, a confirming sign, just one more sign....